Today’s episode is a deeply moving and powerful conversation about love, visibility, and the radical act of painting tenderness into history.

I’m honored to be joined by Joan Cox, a Baltimore-based painter and the second-place winner of the Women United ART PRIZE 2025 in the Painting & Drawing Category. For more than two decades, Joan has been creating vibrant, emotionally rich portraits of lesbian couples—works that reclaim space for queer intimacy, memory, and representation in a canon that has long erased these stories.

Joan’s journey spans opening a gallery in New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina, returning to graduate school to fully embrace her LGBTQ+ identity in her work, and building a practice that blends autobiography, historical references, symbolism, and activism. Her paintings are lush, sensual, and layered with meaning—images she wished she could have seen growing up.

In this conversation, we’ll explore how painting became a form of survival, how she reclaims art history through queer narratives, and why tenderness itself is a powerful political gesture.

JOAN COX

www.joancoxart.com

IG: @joancox.artist

This show is brought to you by Women United ART MOVEMENT, a global platform highlighting women in the arts through a wide range of opportunities such as solo and group exhibits, annual art prize for women artists, and quarterly publication.

www.womenunitedartmovement.com
@womenunited_art_movement
@womenunited_art_magazine