Nasty Women Tour

03/07/2025

03/07/2025

Zaha Hadid’s story begins in Baghdad, a city alive with history, where ancient rivers and modern ambition flowed together. She was born in 1950 into a family that valued education, creativity, and forward thinking—her father, a wealthy industrialist and politician, and her mother, an artist who nurtured her curiosity. Baghdad in those days was a place of intellectual energy, where artists, writers, and thinkers gathered, and where the past and future seemed to exist at once. The city’s grand Islamic architecture, with its sweeping arches and intricate , left a deep impression on her. Even as a child, she was fascinated by the way buildings could shape experience, how spaces could feel alive.

Her education took her to Beirut, where she studied mathematics, and then to London, where she enrolled at the Architectural Association—a place that would become the launchpad for her radical ideas. It was the 1970s, a time of experimentation in art and design, and she absorbed the energy of the avant-garde. Her professors, including the famed Rem Koolhaas, recognized her brilliance immediately. She didn’t just draw buildings; she imagined entire landscapes, structures that seemed to explode from the page in dynamic, almost impossible forms.

But being a woman—an Arab woman at that—in a field dominated by Western men meant she faced doubt at every turn. Early in her career, clients dismissed her designs as too daring, too unconventional. For years, she was known as the "paper architect," because so few of her projects were actually built. Yet she never softened her vision to please others. She drew inspiration from her roots—the organic patterns of Islamic art, the undulating dunes of the Iraqi desert, the fluidity of Arabic calligraphy—and fused them with cutting-edge technology.

When her first major project, the Vitra Fire Station in Germany, was completed in 1993, it was a revelation. Sharp angles and dramatic lines made it look like a frozen moment of movement, a building caught mid-explosion. Critics couldn’t ignore her anymore. From there, her career soared—the Rosenthal Center in Cincinnati, the London Aquatics Centre for the 2012 Olympics, the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku—each one a masterpiece that challenged what architecture could be.

Zaha never forgot where she came from. She spoke openly about how her Iraqi heritage shaped her, how the deserts and rivers of her childhood flowed into her designs. Even as she became a global icon, she carried with her—not as nostalgia, but as a living force, a reminder that the future could be as bold and boundless as she dared to make it.

02/07/2025

28/06/2025

Pauline Bonaparte, the younger sister of Napoleon, lived as if decorum were a costume she’d never agreed to wear. Where others in her family wielded power through politics or war, Pauline commanded attention through sheer magnetism, defiance, and unapologetic sensuality.

In an age when women were expected to embody modesty and restraint, Pauline flaunted her body, her lovers, and her independence with a recklessness that scandalized even the Bonaparte dynasty. She posed nearly n**e for the famed sculptor Antonio Canova, reclining as Venus Victrix, draped in marble like a Roman goddess. To her, it wasn’t shameful—it was natural. When asked if she minded posing n**e, she supposedly shrugged, “Oh no, the studio was quite warm.”

Her beauty was legendary, but it was her refusal to behave that made her unforgettable. She married a French general, divorced him, then married into Italian nobility—all while carrying on a string of affairs across Europe. Men adored her. Women envied and feared her. Gossip followed her like a perfume cloud, yet she seemed to thrive on it.

While her brother sought to impose control over the continent, Pauline embodied a different kind of revolution—one of feminine power expressed through desire, agency, and self-possession. She was not just beautiful; she weaponized her beauty. She lived her own myth, and she did it without apology.

Her life was full of contradictions: an imperial princess who mingled with artists and dancers, a duchess who paraded like a courtesan, a woman molded by empire but living entirely on her own terms. Even today, her story feels electric—a reminder that some women don’t break the rules to rebel. They break them because the rules were never made for them in the first place.

28/06/2025

23/06/2025

Marisa Roësset Velasco (Spanish painter) 1904 - 1976
Reposo (Rest (self portrait)), 1928
oi on canvas
179 x 131 cm. (70.47 x 51.57 in.)
signed and dated low right
The Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, Barcelona
© photo The Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya

Marisa Roësset Velasco (née Marisa Luisa Roësset y Velasco; March 6, 1904 – November 18, 1976) was a Spanish figurative painter, and teacher. She worked on portraits, genre scenes, and religious scenes; and founded a painting school in Madrid that operated for 30 years.

Marisa Roësset Velasco was born on March 6, 1904, in Madrid, to father Eugenio Julio Roësset Mosquera. She was born into a wealthy Madrid family of artists and writers.

Her aunt was painter María Roësset Mosquera, whom she studied painting under in early life.[4] Roësset Velasco attended Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, and studied under teachers Daniel Vázquez Díaz, Fernando Álvarez de Sotomayor, and José María López Mezquita. She attended art school classes alongside Salvador Dalí, and Victorina Durán.

She became known as a painter through her exhibitions at the Lyceum Club Femenino, despite not holding a membership. In the 1930s, Roësset Velasco opened a painting school in Madrid, that was active for 30 years. Menchu Gal had been one of her students.

Roësset Velasco discreetly had a le***an relationship with the teacher at the Madrid Singing School, Lola Rodríguez Aragón, with whom she lived and to whom she left her pictorial work upon her death.

Roësset Velasco died of cancer on November 18, 1976, in Madrid.

Source: Wikipedia

23/06/2025

Bravo ladies 👏

She stepped onto the street not just with purpose—but with protection. In the early 1900s, as more women entered the workforce and demanded space in public life, they found themselves constantly subjected to harassment. Men who felt entitled to their time and bodies—known then as “mashers”—followed them, grabbed them, leered, whispered, blocked their path. But some women didn’t shrink or stay silent. They sharpened their resistance—literally.

The hatpin, often over seven inches long and made of metal, was meant to secure wide-brimmed hats to voluminous hairstyles. But in the hands of a woman under threat, it became something else entirely: a weapon. When mashers got too close, many women didn’t hesitate to jab their would-be assailants with these pins. The press quickly dubbed it the “Hatpin Peril,” warning of women “going too far,” even as the real danger went largely unchallenged.

This so-called peril wasn’t about sharp pins. It was about sharp shifts in power. For the first time in modern urban history, women were asserting not only their right to exist in public spaces, but their right to defend that existence. And the men who had long expected submission didn’t like it. Politicians proposed laws limiting the length of . Some cities demanded permits. But women pushed back. Suffragists spoke out. Working-class women formed networks of mutual protection. The hatpin became a symbol of rebellion—quiet but pointed.

She didn’t need a chaperone. She didn’t need a protector. She had herself, her stride, and something sharp in her hat.

22/06/2025

19/06/2025

Afia Zecharia’s life unfolded in silence and resistance—quiet, steady acts of expression against the forces that tried to contain her. Born in 1905 in Southern Yemen, her childhood was cut short by marriage at the age of ten. This was not unusual in her community, where parents sought to protect their daughters by marrying them off early, sometimes out of fear that they might be taken and wed outside the faith. But even then, while fulfilling expectations placed on her as a daughter, wife, and mother, Afia found her own language—through paint.

As a young girl, she used to decorate the walls of the wealthy with vibrant designs. Her artistry was not signed or celebrated in public, but it lived in the shadows, embedded in the homes of others. Paint became her way of taking up space. Years later, when she and her jeweler husband immigrated to Israel in 1950 with their six children, they settled in a house built on the ruins of al-Bassa, a depopulated Palestinian village. It was a place layered with histories of loss, displacement, and erasure—echoes that mirrored her own.

Afia wanted to bring color to her new walls. She longed to paint again, but her husband forbade it. For decades, she kept that part of herself hidden, dormant. Her hands, once guided by imagination and tradition, were now tasked with more practical labors. And yet, when he died and she found herself once again displaced—this time by bureaucratic decree, relocated to a housing project with stark, impersonal walls—something in her refused to stay buried.

She couldn’t read the papers she was asked to sign, so she marked them with a fingerprint. It was this fingerprint that unknowingly signed away her previous home and thrust her into another form of confinement. But this time, she resisted. Quietly. Fiercely. She bought pigments and began painting again—not during the day, when eyes might judge, but at night, when she could pour her life onto the walls without interruption. In secret, she turned her small apartment into a living canvas. Her motifs were drawn from Yemenite embroidery, rich with coded meanings. These patterns were not just decorative; they spoke in the visual language of social belonging, emotional survival, longing, and memory. Each brushstroke stitched together fragments of identity and imagination.

Her apartment became a place of quiet defiance, a sanctuary where she could reclaim her voice. She didn’t need a formal education or permission to create. Her work was not made for galleries or fame—it was made because she *had* to make it, because some truths live only through the act of creation.

When she passed away in 2002, her once-hidden artwork emerged into the light. People began to visit her apartment, drawn by its beauty and mystery. They came to see what had once been painted in secrecy. In a world that so often silences older women, immigrant women, and women who never learned to read or write, Afia’s story speaks louder with every passing year. Not because she demanded recognition, but because she built a world in color when the world gave her white walls.

16/06/2025

Louise Bourgeois didn’t create art to please. She created it to understand. Born in Paris in 1911 and raised in a household steeped in both beauty and betrayal, Bourgeois’s childhood shaped everything she made. Her father’s infidelities—particularly with her English governess—left emotional scars that never quite healed. These tensions spilled into her work, which confronted the body, memory, womanhood, and pain with an unflinching honesty that was decades ahead of its time.

She trained in Paris, studying mathematics before turning to art—an early sign of the precision that would define her sculptures. By the late 1930s she had moved to New York, where she married art historian Robert Goldwater and began raising a family. For years, she was overshadowed by the male-dominated art world, but she never stopped working. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she resisted being defined by a single movement or aesthetic. Her pieces range from organic forms and totemic structures to unsettling, surreal environments.

Bourgeois often drew on her own psychological experiences, using art as a form of exorcism. In her hands, fabric, stone, metal, and wood became repositories of feeling. Her famous spider sculptures—most notably Maman—represent not just maternal protection and strength, but also a web of contradictions. The spider is both fierce and nurturing, threatening and comforting. It was her mother, whom Bourgeois remembered as a weaver and a restorer of tapestries—meticulous, strong, and quietly enduring.

She didn’t shy away from sexuality, trauma, or the grotesque. Her Cells series, immersive sculptural installations built from found objects, personal items, and evocative architectural forms, are physical embodiments of memory and emotional confinement. They invite you to witness the interior life of a woman—fragmented, vulnerable, sometimes raw—but always deeply intentional.

Bourgeois was nearly 80 years old when the art world finally embraced her as a towering figure in contemporary sculpture. The late-career acclaim—culminating in retrospectives at the MoMA and the Tate—never diluted her intensity. She kept working into her 90s, her studio a laboratory of emotion, insight, and fierce intellect.

16/06/2025

Julia Morgan was a woman of quiet determination and extraordinary talent, a pioneer who carved her own path in a world that often doubted her. Born in 1872 in San Francisco, she grew up in a time when women were expected to confine their ambitions to the domestic sphere. But Julia had other plans. From an early age, she displayed a keen interest in and , subjects considered unsuitable for girls at the time. Undeterred, she pursued her education with relentless focus, becoming the first woman admitted to the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, a monumental achievement that set the stage for her groundbreaking career.

Her work was defined by both precision and artistry. She didn’t just design buildings—she crafted spaces that felt alive, blending classical elegance with structural innovation. Perhaps her most famous project, Hearst Castle, stands as a testament to her vision. Over nearly three decades, she worked closely with William Randolph Hearst to bring his extravagant dream to life, all while navigating the challenges of being a woman in a male-dominated profession. She never sought the spotlight, letting her work speak for itself.

Beyond her architectural genius, Julia Morgan was a trailblazer for women in the workforce. She opened her own firm in 1904, a rarity for women at the time, and employed female draftsmen and engineers, creating opportunities where few existed. She believed in the power of women supporting women, mentoring young female architects and proving that competence had no gender.

Her legacy is not just in the buildings she left behind—though many still stand as landmarks—but in the doors she opened.

15/06/2025

Maurice Milliere (1871-1946) 'Josephine Baker at Cartier'