Kiki Smith says she didn’t really start making drawings of people until she was 40. Once she had aged a little, she looked in the mirror and saw lines— something “to hang onto” as an artist. At 70, she says it’s the hags and witches who attract her most.

In this episode, Kim speaks with Kiki about portraying older women’s bodies and how aging has influenced her work. Kiki’s female subjects sometimes evoke biblical figures or characters from fairy tales, and they’re often connected to nature— to wolves and birds and stars. “Society is always trying to shrink people’s sense of self or possibilities,” she says. “How they experience the world is much larger.”

This episode was inspired by a self-portrait of Alice Neel, who painted herself at her easel, naked, when she was 80 years old.

See the portraits we discussed:

Alice Neel self-portrait

Cradling Dead Cat (1999-2000), by Kiki Smith

Poisoned Witch (2012), by Kiki Smith

Free Fall, by Kiki Smith

We didn’t want to let Women’s History Month pass without a tip of the hat to one of the towering figures we’ve featured here on PORTRAITS.

Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu was a rockstar experimental physicist who worked with Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project. She also met the pope, and inspired a Chinese opera. But here in the United States, she didn’t always get the recognition she deserved. At least not until her granddaughter, Jada Yuan, took up her story. This episode originally aired in 2022.

See the portraits we discuss:

Dr. Wu in the lab

Tsung-Dao Lee, Nobel Laureate

Chen-Ning Yang, Nobel Laureate

Dr. Wu on the forever stamp

Also, check out Jada Yuan’s article about her grandmother here!

Paris in the early 1900s was a magnet for convention-defying American women. It offered a delicious taste of freedom, which they used to explode the gender norms of their day, and to explore new kinds of art, literature, dance and design. In the process, they became arbiters of modernism.

This episode, we raise the curtain on the National Portrait Gallery’s “Brilliant Exiles” exhibition with curator Robyn Asleson. It features 60 trailblazing women, including the dancer, singer and spy Josephine Baker, and the bookshop owner Sylvia Beach, who took a chance on James Joyce. Also in the lineup: Ada ‘Bricktop’ Smith, whose bustling nightclub became a hub for American jazz musicians, and Romaine Brooks, the painter who reinvented herself, and then reinvented herself again.

The exhibition runs from April 26, 2024, to February 23, 2025.

See the portraits we discussed:

Ada “Bricktop” Smith, by Carl Van Vechten

Josephine Baker, by Stanislaus Julian Walery

Gertrude Stein, by Pablo Picasso

Sylvia Beach, by Paul-Émile Bécat

Romaine Brooks, self-portrait