“I could tell you far more about Dora Maar than I could Picasso,” Katy Hessel told the New York Times last year. Championing a fiercely feminist re-reading of art, past and present, is Hessel’s signature. If you’re not familiar with her name, you’re likely familiar with her work. She is behind the Great Women Artists podcast and a runaway-hit Instagram account (@thegreatwomenartists), in addition to having published the best-selling The Story of Art Without Men. Said book—a compendium of women artists from the Renaissance to today in direct response to E.H. Gombrich’s women-absentee The Story of Art—was mostly championed for its corrective historical narrative, shrugging off the occasional dismissive accusations of being “tinged with the boosterism of girlboss feminism.”

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To celebrate Women’s History Month, Katy Hessel launched Museums Without Men, a new but ongoing series of audio guides highlighting women and gender non-conforming artists in the public collections of international museums. The series launched with five participating institutions. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art were first, and the Hepworth Wakefield in England, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. and Tate Britain soon followed.

Observer spoke with Hessel—who was included in our 2023 list of The Most Influential People in the Art World—about making museums accessible, non-binary artists to know, and thinking more carefully about museum captions.

The Met was first—it was only sort of meant to be a one-off thing that I was doing with them. The guides are created for lots of different reasons. One was the fact that when you go into museums, oftentimes you’re overwhelmed by the number of works on display, and what you really want to do is spend time with seven or eight works—as much as it kills you—but really sort of get into it and leave the museum being like I really looked at something properly today. The whole point of my work is to get as many people into the museum as possible.

Whenever I go to museums, obviously I always look at the label and see if it’s a woman, because that’s how I’ve discovered and learned about so many artists. Not only does that bring me into these artists’ lives and work but it also makes me realize how many women artists are being collected by these institutions—and reveals the shocking gender........

© Observer