The Artist’s Mind What it feels like for female artists to wrestle with ambition, ego, ambivalence and inheritance. That isolation has, historically, been especially true for women artists, some of the most celebrated of whom have seen “writer” or “painter” or “filmmaker” treated as a secondary part of their identity. For this issue, we asked legendary female artists to tell us about a younger woman whose work excites them and gives them hope. But for the current generation of women artists, who have come of age with models who more closely resemble them, identity seems more like a source of community than a trap. Women artists, born into a Babylon of exclusion and possibility, reveal that creative inheritance is as promiscuous as legal inheritance is strict.

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