Women at Work: 1900 to Now:
In conversation with Jennifer Higgie, Flavia Frigeri and Alice Rawsthorn
Past event archive
20 October 2023, 19.00-20.00
The Ondaatje Wing Theatre
£15 (£12 Members / concessions)
Join us as we host a special in conversation event to celebrate the publication of Women at Work: 1900 to Now, the National Portrait Gallery's first book to spotlight female professional achievement in the 20th and 21st centuries.
To mark the launch of the publication, authors Dr Flavia Frigeri, CHANEL Curator for the Collection at the National Portrait Gallery, and award-winning design historian, Alice Rawsthorn, will be in conversation with renowned writer, Jennifer Higgie. They will discuss the making of the book, as well as its wider themes.
This new publication is currently available for pre-order from our online shop, and features the fascinating and sometimes untold stories of over 100 influential and inspiring women who have paved the way for those working across the fields of art, science, design, literature and activism, amongst others.
Jennifer Higgie is an Australian writer who lives in London. She was previously the editor of Frieze magazine, and writer of books such as The Mirror & The Palette: Rebellion, Resilience and Resistance: 500 Years of Women’s Self Portraits (2021) and The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit (2023.)
Alice Rawsthorn is an award-winning design critic and author, whose books include Design as an Attitude, Hello World: Where Design Meets Life and, most recently, Design Emergency: Building a Better Future, co-written with Paola Antonelli, senior curator of design at MoMA, New York. Alice’s weekly design column for The New York Times was syndicated worldwide for over a decade. In all her work, Alice champions design’s potential as a social, political and ecological tool that can help to foster positive change. Born in Manchester and based in London, she is a founding member of the Writers for Liberty campaign for human rights and of the advisory board of the DemocracyNext research and action institute. Alice and Paola are co-founders of Design Emergency, a podcast and research platform that investigates design’s role in forging a fairer future
Dr Flavia Frigeri is an art historian, lecturer, and Chanel Curator for the Collection at the National Portrait Gallery, London. Previously she was Curator, International Art at Tate Modern, where she co-curated The World Goes Pop (2015), and was responsible for Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs (2014), Paul Klee: Making Visible (2013) and Ruins in Reverse (2013). She is the author of Pop Art and Women Artists both in Thames & Hudson’s Art Essentials series and the co-editor of a volume of collected essays, New Histories of Art in the Global Postwar Era: Multiple Modernisms (Routledge, 2021). She is currently curating exhibitions for Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy.