To Celebrate The Unity of All Life: WAL items on show this autumn

The Women’s Art Library collection has contributed to three outstanding exhibitions in London this autumn, lending materials to the Barbican, Four Corners Gallery and Tate Britain.

 

Firstly the Barbican show Re/Sisters: A Lens on Gender and Ecology https://www.barbican.org.uk/ReSisters which features women engaging with eco-politics. Curator Hannah Wood researched materials relating to the Greenham Common Peace Camp held in the WAL collection and selected one of the most affective posters in the WAL collection to display titled ‘To Celebrate the Unity of All Life’. Her research also identified an original artwork titled Embrace the Base, discovered in the slidefile featuring Kim Valdez who deposited slides of her ceramic sculpture in the late 1980s,

Tate Britain has been transformed by curator Linsey Young and her team presenting the Women in Revolt exhibition which celebrates the UK-based intersectional activism of women’s art practices from 1970-90. https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/women-in-revolt The WAL collection was heavily consulted and amongst the items lent to the show there is the Equal Pay NOW poster that kicks off the show alongside Chandan Fraser’s photographs of marches and the first Women’s Liberation Conference in England.

Chandan Fraser’s photos were made available by Four Corners who are about to open an exhibition at their gallery featuring the critical laminated photography shows that toured through the 1970s into the mid 1980s. https://www.fourcornersfilm.co.uk/whats-on/photography-on-the-move-the-half-moon-touring-shows-1976-1984. WAL is lending a sample of panels from the feminist exhibition Gaining Momentum featuring 8 women photographers and organized by Shirley Read who kindly donated the extant version of the original exhibition to the Women’s Art Library.