Mentor-mentee relationships have nourished generations of artists, especially those who were not provided formal training or welcomed by established gatekeepers — and in male-dominated fields, the support between women has long served as a kind of shadow academy, anointing and ushering in the next wave of talent. The concept of a mentorship, though, as seen in the examples below, is widely variable. Some mentors are also friends, though a close connection is not always necessary. Sometimes, all it takes is a word of encouragement at the right time to alter the course of cultural history.
Judy Chicago (b. 1939) and Anaïs Nin (1903-77)
When Judy Chicago met Anaïs Nin at a party in the summer of 1971, she had just finished reading Nin’s diary, which became a sensation among American women for its frank discussions of sex, psychoanalysis and ambition. Chicago, then 32, had recently published a revealing essay of her own, entitled “My Struggle as a Woman Artist.” “It was the first time I had ever tried to write about it,” she says. She was floored when Nin walked up and told her how much she had enjoyed it. At the time, Chicago was paralyzed by the volume of her own ideas. “Anaïs gave me this incredible piece of advice. She said: ‘You can’t live out all these possibilities. But you can write your way through them. You should write a book.’” That was the push Chicago needed to write her 1975 autobiography, “Through the Flower”; Nin wrote the introduction. According to Chicago, they only disagreed on one thing: the value of anger. “She didn’t think it was appropriate,” Chicago says. “I felt the opposite.”
Misty Copeland (b. 1982) and Raven Wilkinson (1935-2018)
Misty Copeland was already almost a decade into her career at the American Ballet Theater when she first became aware of Raven Wilkinson’s existence. One night in 2010 at home, she was watching the 2005 documentary “Ballets Russes,” half-paying attention, when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw a woman of color auditioning before a row of white men. That woman was Raven Wilkinson, the first Black ballerina in the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. As it turns out, the two lived a block apart in New York City. Wilkinson, who danced with a white ballet company before fleeing the segregated South for Europe in the 1950s, would become Copeland’s mentor until her death in 2018. In her 2022 memoir, “The Wind at My Back,” Copeland writes, “Raven taught me through her example that, as they say, ‘When and where I enter, the whole race enters with me’ is not a burden and a pressure but a promise of possibility.”
Doris Lessing (1919-2013) and Jenny Diski (1947-2016)
Warmth and encouragement did not define the relationship between the writers Doris Lessing and Jenny Diski. The Nobel Prize-winning author invited the then-15-year-old Diski to live with her in London on the suggestion of her son, who was Diski’s boarding-school classmate. Fleeing abusive parents, Diski was immediately seduced by the house’s consistency, stocked fridge and churn of visiting intellectuals. She knew she wanted to be a writer. But during the four years they lived together, Lessing never offered notes or advice; anything Diski learned was through observation and osmosis. The two made a pact never to write about each other — and, fittingly, both broke their word. Diski-like characters appear in Lessing’s novels “Memoirs of a Survivor” (1974) and “The Sweetest Dream” (2001). After Lessing’s death in 2013 and Diski’s own terminal cancer diagnosis, she wrote “In Gratitude” (2016), a brutal memoir about their relationship. “There was no hope of ever being right,” Diski writes, “as Doris was right.”
Kathy Acker (1947-97) and Karen Finley (b. 1956)
The term “mentor” is a bit too clinical and hierarchical to fully encapsulate Karen Finley’s relationship with Kathy Acker. The pathbreaking artists met in the late 1970s, when Acker was a visiting teacher and Finley was a grad student at the San Francisco Art Institute. “Boundaries in the classroom weren’t the same as they are now,” Finley says. On the first day of class, Finley went to Acker’s home; they attended parties, readings and performances together. For Finley, grad school was about being inducted into a vocation — first as a student, then as a colleague and finally as a friend and co-conspirator. Acker offered that. She also encouraged Finley, who is now a professor at N.Y.U.’s Tisch School for the Arts, to pursue experimental, dislocated writing alongside performance. Acker’s “belief that, as a woman at that time, I was expected to be talented, that I would be a contributor, was very meaningful to me,” Finley says, “and I think it’s also a reason I am in education today.”
Pat Parker (1944-89) and Audre Lorde (1934-92)
Parker and Lorde’s relationship was part-mentorship, part-sisterhood. Over the course of 15 years, the pair exchanged letters (Parker lived in Oakland, Calif., and Lorde, New York) about poetry, activism, Black lesbian identity and motherhood. Each paid tribute to the other in her work, including Parker’s poem “For Audre,” in which she wrote: “My muse sang of you— / watch the sky for / an ebony meteorite / that will pierce / into your darkness / illuminate your fears / hurl them at you / laughing.” They also supported each other through treatment for breast cancer, with which they were diagnosed almost 10 years apart (Lorde in 1977, Parker in 1988). Upon learning of Parker’s illness, Lorde wrote: “You are a survivor, Pat, and that battle on a physical level is now braided into our lives, but the war is not alien, now is it? You and me we’ve been fighting all our lives.” Their intimate correspondence is captured in the 2018 book “Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989.”
Joni Mitchell (b. 1943) and Brandi Carlile (b. 1981)
Brandi Carlile first heard Joni Mitchell’s music when she was in her 20s. She didn’t love it. Still coming to terms with her queerness, she felt Mitchell’s songs were too feminine to resonate with her. But when Carlile’s wife, Catherine Shepherd, reintroduced her to the music a few years later, it hit differently. Mitchell’s songs helped her realize “I had spent too long equating vulnerability and weakness with femininity,” Carlile wrote in the Times of London. In 2018, three years after Mitchell suffered a life-threatening brain aneurysm, Carlile performed at her 75th birthday concert. After Mitchell mentioned how much she missed hearing her own instruments played, Carlile began organizing Joni Jams, monthly jam sessions at Mitchell’s Bel Air home. It was these freewheeling gatherings that encouraged the 79-year-old icon to return to the stage. She surprised the world (and her own band) when she took the mic alongside Carlile at the Newport Folk Festival last summer. What started out as a star-studded tribute set transitioned — at first tentatively, then enthusiastically, with grins, tears and a roaring audience — into Mitchell’s first full-blown live performance in 20 years.
Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) and Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986)
“If she had not so kindly answered my clumsy and reckless letter to her, I am not sure I would ever have made it to America,” the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama told the Tate of the painter Georgia O’Keeffe. “I knew that only in New York could I become a star.” The two artists, born 42 years apart, met only once in person. But as a young artist in Matsumoto, Kusama came across O’Keeffe’s work in a book and boldly wrote to ask her advice. Intrigued by the Japanese return address, O’Keeffe replied — and encouraged Kusama to move to New York and show her work to “anyone” who might be interested. Over the years, the elder artist repeatedly invited Kusama to visit her in New Mexico. Kusama always declined.
Frida Kahlo (1907-54) and Fanny Rabel (1922-2008)
Frida Kahlo did not teach people how to paint. Instead, as her student Fanny Rabel told Kahlo’s biographer Hayden Herrera, she taught them how to live and how to look. Rabel was the only female member of Los Fridos, a group of four artists who studied with Kahlo until her death at the age of 47. (The others were Arturo Garcia Bustos, Guillermo Monroy and Arturo Estrada.) Kahlo sought out opportunities for her protégés, like a commission to paint the exterior of La Rosita, a tavern down the street from her Mexico City home and studio, Casa Azul. Rabel — a Polish Jewish artist who moved to the capital as a teenager — also assisted Kahlo’s husband, Diego Rivera, on his famed murals for the National Palace. With a particular interest in depicting Indigenous women and families, Rabel became the most prominent woman in the otherwise macho Mexican Muralist movement.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-61) and Mary Russell Mitford (1787-1855)
Sometimes the mentee’s legacy eclipses that of the mentor. This was the case with the Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Mary Russell Mitford, a then-established chronicler of rural English life almost 20 years Browning’s senior. Mitford served as a maternal figure to Browning, coaching her through the publication of her book “The Seraphim, and Other Poems” (1838) and supporting her as she grieved the deaths of two of her brothers in close succession. (In addition to arranging flower deliveries, Mitford reportedly gave Browning one of her own spaniel’s puppies.) Their relationship wasn’t without disputes — Mitford wasn’t an immediate fan of Elizabeth’s husband, the poet Robert Browning, and Elizabeth was scandalized that, after her brother died, Mitford wrote about his accidental drowning in the book “Recollections of a Literary Life” (1852). But they remained close until Mitford’s death in 1855.
Rosalba Carriera (1673-1757) and Felicità Sartori (circa 1714-60)
It was unusual to be a female artist in the 18th century; it was even more unusual to be a wildly successful one. But Rosalba Carriera, nicknamed the Queen of Pastel, was sought after by kings and aristocrats across Europe. Raised in Venice, she never married and developed a flourishing, all-female studio that specialized in selling miniatures (which sometimes bordered on erotica) to Grand Tour travelers. She was also famously generous with other female artists, offering support, training and encouragement. One of her favorite apprentices was Felicità Sartori, who executed both pastels and miniatures, frequently making copies of Carriera’s work for sale. Sartori also posed for her mentor; a circa 1740 portrait in which she dons a Turkish-inspired robe and a flirty smirk is now in the collection of the Uffizi.
