New exhibition celebrates the Women’s Art Library

Unique art holdings from the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths, University of London are on display at an exhibition to celebrate the pioneering magazine Make.

The show Can Do: Photographs and other material from the Women’s Art Library Magazine Archive is made up of mainly black and white images which have been stored in Special Collections at Goldsmiths.

The exhibition is curated by Maria Walsh, a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art Theory at Chelsea College of Arts and Mo Throp, Associate Researcher at Chelsea College of Arts, who recently published the book Twenty Years of MAKE Magazine: Back to the Future of Women’s Art (I.B. Taurus: 2015).

The photographs are one of the material remains of a dynamic independent art publication dedicated to the debates and documentation of women’s art from 1983 to 2002.

The magazine began life in 1983 as the Women Artists Slide Library Newsletter, acquiring, over the course of its 20-year run, the titles: Women Artists Slide Library Journal (1986); Women's Art Magazine (1990); and make: the magazine of women’s art (1996).

Artists submitted photographs of their work for publication – and this became the Women’s Art Library photographic collection held at Goldsmiths. The curators were connected with these archived images by Althea Greenan, curator of the Women’s Art Library in Special Collections, as they carried out research for their book.

Taking this photographic h(er)story out of the archive, this exhibition speaks to a present fascination with women’s art of the recent past. What future can be intimated from these photographic traces?

The photographs have been organised into thematic sections entitled: Performance, Portraits, Body, Installation, Protest, alongside other materials from the archive, including original artwork for the magazine covers commissioned from artists – from Sandra Blow RA to Jennie Saville - and samples of pre-digital layouts.

Althea Greenan was invited to fill a vitrine with objects from the collection to accompany her piece in the exhibition’s publication titled “Dear Editors” which describes what artists sent through the post to gain the attention of the magazines’ editors.

This cabinet of curiosities includes a pizza box full of hay, a pair of candy fried eggs and a mind-map printed on a balloon among other things. Like the rest of the exhibition, this display not only celebrates the launch of the anthology, it demonstrates how archives can keep up a lively conversation started decades ago.

Althea said: “The book and the exhibition unpack the makings of an art magazine that from the start to finish promoted - and crucially debated - women’s art.

“Its end also signalled the end of the arts organisation that published it, and at that point the Women’s Art Library collection was gifted to Goldsmiths.

“Today it not only supports historical research, the Women’s Art Library welcomes practitioners to develop new work using it as a base for new ideas and a secure space to see themselves represented in the future.”