
Despite progress in recent years, women artists continue to be underrepresented in galleries, museums, and the art market. A 2019 study found that just 11% of artwork acquired by major U.S. museums over the past decade was by women. Similarly, a 2022 report showed that works by women artists account for less than 5% of major permanent collections worldwide. Even in the commercial art world, disparities persist—between 2008 and 2019, just 2% of total auction sales were attributed to work by women.
Yet, women have shaped art history just as much as men, pushing creative boundaries and redefining artistic movements. In this post, we share the stories of some of our favorite women artists who have made a lasting impact, bringing much-needed attention to their powerful contributions:
Leonora Carrington (1917-2011)
Leonora Carrington was an English-born Mexican Surrealist artist and writer, known for her haunting, autobiographical paintings infused with sorcery, metamorphosis, alchemy, and the occult.
Raised in a wealthy Roman Catholic family in Lancashire, England, she rebelled early, being expelled from multiple convent schools before attending a boarding school in Florence at 14, where she began studying painting. She later moved to London to train at Amedée Ozenfant’s academy and was introduced to surrealism.

In 1937, she met German painter and Surrealist pioneer Max Ernst. They fell in love and moved to Paris, leading to her father disowning her. Encouraged by Ernst, Leonora entered the Surrealist circle, meeting figures like Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso and exhibiting internationally. However, after Ernst was arrested and sent to a Nazi concentration camp, Leonora fled to Spain, where she suffered a mental breakdown in 1940.
Through a marriage of convenience to Mexican diplomat Renato Leduc, she secured passage to New York in 1941, staying for about a year before moving to Mexico in 1942. She became a Mexican citizen, divorced Leduc, and settled in Mexico City, where she flourished and remained for the rest of her life.
Leonora’s work is dreamlike and fantastical (“I’ve always had access to other worlds. We all do because we dream”), filled with mythical creatures, anthropomorphic animals, and ethereal landscapes, rich in symbolism and magic. She made history in 2005 when her painting Juggler (1954) sold at auction for $713K - the highest price for a work by a living Surrealist artist at the time. In 2024, Les Distractions de Dagobert sold for $28.5M, making her the 4th highest-selling Surrealist artist and 5th highest-selling woman artist of all time. She died at 94 in Mexico, a ‘national treasure’ of the country she made her home.
Lourdes Grobet (1940-2022)
Born in Mexico City in 1940, Lourdes Grobet was one of Mexico’s most prolific artists, with a career spanning more than six decades. Though her work was wide-ranging, she is best known for her photography, which pushed boundaries with its intimacy and depth.
Her most iconic body of work centers on Lucha Libre, a lifelong fascination. Over more than 20 years, she captured over 11,000 images of luchadores like Blue Demon and El Santo, both in the ring and in private moments.
As a child in the 1940s and ’50s, Lourdes saw Lucha Libre captivate both the working and middle classes. By the 1970s, however, wealthier Mexicans had largely dismissed it as populcho culture. Her photographs sought to challenge these cultural shifts, restoring luchadores as national icons and highlighting Mexico’s deep-rooted tradition of masks—from pre-Columbian times to the Zapatistas.
Brave and uncompromising, she lived on her own terms. She famously said her marriage ended partly because she decided to go skydiving—fulfilling a childhood dream mattered more than her husband's objections. “You feel freed, freed from time and in complete silence,” she said of the experience. It later inspired her to apply for a spot on the rocket that launched the Morelos Satellite. Though unsuccessful, she enjoyed the anticipation: “All my life, I’ve loved to fly—in every sense of the word.”
She passed away at home in Mexico City in 2022. Tributes hailed her as “one of the greatest representatives of photographic art in Mexico.”
Nahui Olin (1893-1978)
Born María del Carmen Mondragón Valseca in Mexico City in 1893, Nahui Olin was the daughter of a diplomat and spent much of her youth in France, where she began writing poetry and prose as early as four years old. At 20, she married painter Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, but their open marriage ended in 1922.
In the 1920s and ’30s, she became known for her painting but even more so as a model in Mexico’s avant-garde circles. Her decision to pose nude—unheard of at the time—was a deliberate act of defiance against the patriarchal norms restricting women. She was reportedly the first woman in Mexico to wear a miniskirt.
Her magnetic personality attracted the cultural elite, including Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. During this time, she began an intense relationship with painter and activist Dr. Atl (Gerardo Murillo), who gave her the name Nahui Olin—a Nahuatl reference to the sun’s force and cycles of renewal. Their passionate, tumultuous relationship, marked by jealousy and infidelity, was the subject of much scandal.
By the 1940s, Nahui withdrew from public life, though she continued painting until her death in 1978. Her art, filled with vibrant colors and raw emotion, celebrated the female form and womanhood without apology.
Rosa Rolanda (1895-1970)
Born in Azusa, California, in 1895 to Scottish and Mexican parents, Rosa Rolanda first gained fame as a dancer. In 1916, she was one of six dancers chosen from 300 applicants to join the elite Marion Morgan Dancers, which took her to Broadway.
She later toured Europe with the Ziegfeld Follies before returning to New York, where she met Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias. In 1925, they traveled to Mexico City together, eventually settling there and immersing themselves in the Mexican Modernist movement, alongside Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.
Rosa first took up photography while traveling with Miguel and later, encouraged by him and her artist friends, began painting. Her colorful, folkloric canvases often depicted festivals, children, and portraits of film stars like Dolores del Río and María Félix. Her style, influenced by post-revolutionary Mexican painting and surrealism, incorporated oil, watercolor, and crayon.
She remained an active figure in Mexico’s art scene until her death in Mexico City in 1970.
Remedios Varo (1908-1963)

Remedios Varo was a Spanish-born painter known for her intricate, dreamlike works. Born in Anglès, Spain, in 1908, she was deeply influenced by her father, a hydraulic engineer who trained her in mechanical draftsmanship, and by her strict Catholic education, which she resisted.
She studied art at Madrid’s School of Arts and Crafts, where she met her first husband, Gerardo Lizarraga. Fleeing war in Spain and later France, she secured passage to Mexico in 1941 (through a divorce and marriage to Surrealist poet Benjamin Péret).
In Mexico, she found a community of like-minded women, particularly Leonora Carrington and Kati Horna—sometimes called ‘the three witches’—who explored alchemy, the occult, and themes of female identity. Unlike male Surrealists, who often dismissed women, they believed in a shared ancestral feminine consciousness. Themes of isolation, cages, and towers in Varo’s paintings reflected the marginalization of women in art.
Her work also embraced mystical imagery, magic, and utopian vehicles, blending meticulous technique with surreal storytelling. Out of her 140 known works, 110 were created in Mexico. Her 1955 solo show in Mexico City, backed by Diego Rivera, marked her breakthrough.
She died suddenly of a heart attack in 1963 at just 54. A 1971 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City attracted the largest crowds in the institution’s history.