10 Women Artists You Need to Know for International Women’s Day
From the secret pioneer of abstraction to the modern stars of portraiture. Discover 10 essential women artists curated by The Art Girl and Cool Stories About Art.
For International Women’s Day, The Art Girl and Cool Stories About Art joined forces.
Between us, we each picked five women artists worth knowing. Some reshaped art history without ever getting the credit they deserved. Some are building it right now.
Ten names. One list.
The Art Girl is Tahlia Sisney, a New York based art advisor and writer who works with collectors, galleries, and artists. She’s drawn to the whimsical, the mysterious, the slightly surreal. Artists who build entire worlds in their work.
Julien is the voice behind Cool Stories About Art, a Substack dedicated to learning art the fun way. The anecdotes, the hidden details, the stories that make you see a painting completely differently.
Ready?
1 | Hilma af Klint (1862–1944)
Curated by Cool Stories About Art
In 1906, a Swedish artist painted radically abstract work. Five years before Kandinsky, the man history would call the “father of abstraction.” And she hid every single painting.
Hilma af Klint believed spirits guided her hand during séances. They allegedly instructed her to create nearly 200 paintings for a mysterious temple. She did. Then in her will, she set one condition: the work could not be shown until twenty years after her death. The world wasn’t ready, she wrote.
What fascinates me is that she was right on both counts. That no one would understand. And that one day, everyone would.
When the Guggenheim dedicated a retrospective to her in 2018, it became the most attended exhibition in the museum’s history.
2 | Leonora Carrington (1917 – 2011)
Curated by Tahlia Sisney
If you love surrealism, you have to know Leonora Carrington.
She’s often described as a surrealist painter and writer, but that almost feels too small for what she actually was. Carrington built an entire universe through her art. It’s filled with mythological creatures, strange rituals, animal spirits, and dreamlike landscapes that feel both ancient… yet futuristic at the same time?
Born in England in 1917, Carrington rejected the life that was expected of her very early on. She left a wealthy and traditional family background behind and ran toward the surrealist circle in Europe, where she became deeply connected to artists like Max Ernst. But Carrington was never just a muse within the movement, she was one of its most imaginative architects.
Her life itself reads like surrealist fiction. During World War II she fled Europe, survived a traumatic institutionalization in Spain, and eventually settled in Mexico. Mexico became the place where her vision fully expanded. There she found a community of artists, writers, and thinkers who encouraged the mystical and the magical qualities that were already present in her work.
Her paintings feel like secret stories unfolding. Figures transform into animals. Women appear as alchemists, witches, and creators of entire worlds. There’s an intelligence and humor in her work that makes it endlessly fascinating.
Surrealism is my favorite art movement and honestly one that has shaped how I think about creativity and life itself. The surrealists believed in intuition, dreams, imagination, and the idea that reality is far stranger than we usually allow ourselves to see. Carrington embodies that philosophy perfectly.
If you’re just discovering her work, prepare to fall into a rabbit hole.
3 | Anna Ancher (1859–1935)
Curated by Cool Stories About Art
Denmark’s most celebrated woman painter grew up in a fishing village where her parents ran the only inn. Every summer, male artists would arrive and head straight to the coast to paint dramatic seascapes. Anna stayed inside. She was obsessed with something quieter: the way sunlight moved through a room, the way it landed on a woman’s shoulders while she sewed.
There’s something quietly radical about that choice. When everyone around you is painting the spectacular, deciding that the ordinary is enough, actually more than enough, takes a kind of confidence that’s rare.
Her husband was a painter too, and unlike most men of his era, he actively supported her career after they had a child. In the 1880s, that alone was nearly unheard of.
Denmark eventually put her face on their currency. Which feels right. She spent her life looking carefully at the world everyone else walked past without noticing.
4 | Karyn Lyons (b. 1981)
Curated by Tahlia Sisney
Switching gears completely, I want to talk about an artist who is incredibly important right now.
Karyn Lyons is a contemporary painter whose work centers around portraiture, but the emotional intensity of her figures pushes far beyond traditional portrait painting. Her work is raw, psychological, and deeply human.
I had the opportunity to show one of her paintings, The Straight C Student, in my 2024 exhibition Persona. That painting stuck with people in a powerful way. There is something about Lyons’ figures that feels instantly recognizable but also slightly unsettling. You feel like you’re looking at someone’s inner world, not just their face.
Lyons often paints young people navigating identity, vulnerability, and the awkwardness of existing in the world. Her brushwork is expressive and visceral. Faces are layered with emotion. The colors can feel heavy and atmospheric, like the painting itself is holding a complicated memory. Everytime I look at one of her paintings, I feel like I’m experiencing deja-vu, or like I’m seeing something I’ve experienced before in 4K. It’s amazing, she has such a special way of painting real life.
What I love most about her work is how honest it feels. There’s no performance in it. The figures she paints seem to exist in moments of reflection or quiet intensity. It’s portraiture that feels psychologically alive. She’s one of my favorite female artists working right now and someone whose career I’m very excited to watch unfold.
5 | Lee Krasner (1908 – 1984)
Curated by Tahlia Sisney
Here’s something that has always bothered me.
Almost everyone knows the name Jackson Pollock. But far fewer people know Lee Krasner.
And that’s a problem.
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