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Feminist group-work: The emergence of the Women Artists Slide Library, 1970-1982

Supervised by Dr Catherine Grant and Dr Althea Greenan (Goldsmiths)

Funded by CHASE/AHRC

Lily Evans-Hill is a doctoral researcher and Associate Lecturer specialising in visual culture informed by feminist politics in Britain in the long 1970s.

Her thesis looks at the mobilisation of collectives, co-operatives and collaboration in art informed by the Women’s Liberation Movement in the UK. It explores the various iterations of group work and organising methods used in the Movement and how they manifested in art practices informed by feminism throughout the seventies and eighties, and in particular, as the Women Artist’s Slide Library (now the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths). The slide registry, as a resource for artistic, curatorial and history work, envelops key concerns of the feminist art project by raising consciousness about women’s art, facilitating writing women’s art history and creating networks of contemporary practicing artists-all through a collaborative, crowd-sourced process. To frame the desire for a feminist slide registry, the thesis looks towards groups, periodicals, exhibitions, community centres, registries and education programs to consider the landscape of collective work informed by feminism in the UK and US. I consider the slide registry in the context of several strategies that looked to document and communicate artistic practices of women.

A large component of this research is considering the ways in which these organising structures, learnt from the Women’s Liberation Movement, shaped the ways women artists worked. There are many examples of art co-operatives, collective run gallery and exhibition spaces and collaborative art works and exhibitions that evidence this. What I am interested in here are the deviations from the traditional modes of feminist organising to account for new activities that were important to artists. Artists combined critical and creative dialogic practices with political work. These activities, which included slide shows, conversations about women artists in history, discussing each others work, as well as action groups to organise exhibitions, publications and lobby art institutions, are examples of the organising that made up the intense activity of the feminist art movement.Ìý The slide library is an example of both the study and action group—a place to gather knowledge and produce a history of women’s creative practice in the UK, and to provide a resource on which future histories and practices could be built.