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How images are the making of the Women’s Art Library/Make

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 June 2016

Althea Greenan
Althea Greenan*
Affiliation:
Women’s Art Library/Make, Special Collections, Goldsmiths, University of London, Lewisham Way, London SE14 6NW, UK
*
Email: a.greenan@gold.ac.uk
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Extract

When a group of women artists decided to organise their slides to inspire others to document themselves and raise the visibility of women’s art, they could not have known that several decades later those slides would still be together, forming the core of an internationally significant research resource. How did this idea of gathering together images transform a women’s art group – in the 1980s these were almost as common as book groups are today – into the Women’s Art Library/Make collection? Historically rooted in gender politics and the subsequent emergence of a radicalised women’s art practice and feminist art criticism, WAL/Make is an exciting ‘work in progress’. Now based in Goldsmiths, University of London it is being developed as a key special collection by the Library.

Type
Research Article
Information
Art Libraries Journal , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , 2007 , pp. 5 - 10
Copyright
Copyright © The Art Libraries Society 2007

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References

1. The film was broadcast in 1987 by Central Television and was instigated by the artists Pam Skelton and Anne Lydiat; it featured interviews with leading feminist art academic Griselda Pollock and with Pauline Barrie, whose early involvement with the Women Artists Slide Library established it as an indispensable arts organisation with a political agenda.Google Scholar
2. The Women’s Art Slide Pack included information sheets on individual artists, and included topic headings to facilitate its use by teachers. Artists included in the original selection were Margaret Benyon, Zarina Bhimji, Sutapa Biswas, Barbara Bodichon, Louise Bourgeois, Sonia Boyce, Miriam Cahn, Constance Marie Charpentier, Eileen Cooper, Audrey Flack, Elisabeth Frink, Artemisia Gentileschi, Fay Godwin, Leslie Hakim-Dowek, Margaret Harrison, Hannah Hoch, Tess Jaray, Angelica Kauffmann, Mary Kelly, Käthe Kollwitz, Barbara Kruger, Loraine Leeson, Judith Leyster, Ana Mendieta, Annette Messager, Jacqueline Morreau, Ana Maria Pacheco, Deanna Petherbridge, Adrian Piper, Paula Rego, Faith Ringgold, Rachel Ruysch, Miriam Schapiro, Jo Spence, Nancy Spero, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Suzanne Valadon, Barbara Vijayakumar, Kate Walker and of course Frida Kahlo.Google Scholar
3. First published in 1983 as a newsletter for the Women Artists Slide Library, the publication was developed throughout the 1980s and early 1990s as the Women Artists Slide Library journal and then as Women’s art magazine. See http://make.gold.ac.uk/magazine.php.Google Scholar
4. Grace Brockington, ‘Women’s art clubs and their internationalist aspirations at the fin de siècle’, paper delivered at the conference Internationalism and the arts: Anglo-European cultural exchange at the fin de siècle, 3 July 2006.Google Scholar
5. The Women’s Art Library still has two books in print which are distributed through IB Tauris (http://www.ibtauris.com). They are Lloyd, Fran, Contemporary Arab women’s art - dialogues of the present (London: The Women’s Art Library, 1999),Google Scholar
Dimitrakaki, Angela, Skelton, Pam and Tralla, Mare, Private views: spaces and gender in contemporary art from Britain and Estonia (London: The Women’s Art Library, 2000).Google Scholar
6. National Museum of Women in the Arts, http://www.nmwa.org/.Google Scholar
7. http://www.make.gold.ac.uk/.Google Scholar
8. See http://waand.rutgers.edu/ and Ferris Olin’s article in this issue of the Art libraries journal. Google Scholar
9. ‘Democratising the image: creating a global learning community’, CHArt Round-table Discussion held on 10 November 2005 at the Institute for Contemporary Arts, London. This point was made in relation to the idea that the users of images are shaping creative commons resources like Flickr (http://www.flickr.com), where individuals put their own images on the web and manage their access with personal tags.Google Scholar
10. The slide show: a pleasurable encounter with the collection, http://make.gold.ac.uk/pdfs/Softslides.pdf.Google Scholar