A black and white photocopy of the Women Artist's Slide Library Journal, published 1983

A Brief History of the Women’s Art Library

Photo: The Women Artist’s Slide Library first newsletter, March 1983

The Women Artists Slide Library was founded in the late 1970s by a group of women artists living and working in London. The group, loosely named the Women Artists Slide Collective, envisaged a slide library as a collection that would cultivate a narrative for women’s art and establish a registry for contemporary artists, curators and teachers.

The idea for a slide library ran through the feminist art movement. In 1970, the Ad-Hoc Committee of Women Artists established the Women’s Art Registry, a slide collection which was housed in cooperative galleries including Artists In Residence (A.I.R. Gallery) in New York. Lucy Lippard, then a member of the group,  bought this to the United Kingdom to showcase the array of feminist art practice happening in North America and beyond.

The slide library set up by the Women Artists’ Slide Collective created a picture of the emerging feminist art movement and connected women artists across the United Kingdom. The slide library was advertised across art spaces and publications such as Feminist Art Newsletter (FAN) and Spare Rib. Amongst its first homes was the Women’s Research and Resource centre (now the Feminist Library) and the Womens Art Alliance, a community and education centre in West London.

The library moved to permanent premises at the Battersea Arts Centre in 1982, where it received funding and could use the centre’s facilities to host exhibitions, events and conferences. Along with its move came funding (and subsequently cuts!) from various sources, including public bodies like the Greater London Council and the Arts Council. The collection moved to Fulham Palace in 1983 where it remained until 2000.

In 1985 with Arts Council funding, a paid position for a women of colour was established to trace artists of Black and Asian heritage working within the United Kingdom and North America, as well as those in the Global South. Rita Keegan, an American artist living and working in England, established the Women of Colour Index, a collection of resources, profiles and exhibitions on women artists of colour. This collection has been widely drawn on by collectives since, such as the Women of Colour Index Reading Group and X Marks the Spot.

The Women Artist’s Slide Library Newsletter was started in March 1983 to keep the network of library users and depositors informed of the library’s activities. The newsletter format transformed into the Women Artists Slide Journal in 1987 as it started to include exhibition write ups and book reviews. It then became the Women’s Art Magazine in 1990 and finally MAKE Magazine in 1996, where the publication included articles, essays and artists profiles. The publication chronicles the growing interest in feminist art and the changing landscape of feminist art scholarship.

The library had a brief stint at Central St Martins before being gifted to Goldsmiths in 2003, where it is curated by Dr. Althea Greenan. It remains an active and popular collection for students, researchers and artists, with a busy exhibition and events programme. It is now called the Women’s Art Library to account for its wide collection of books, pamphlets, archival material, artworks and exhibition ephemera that accompany the slides.

Lily Evans-Hill

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