The Women's Art Movement (WAM) was an Australian
feminist art movement
The feminist art movement refers to the efforts and accomplishments of feminists internationally to produce feminist art, art that reflects women's lives and experiences, as well as to change the foundation for the production and perception of co ...
, founded in
Sydney in 1974,
Melbourne
Melbourne ( ; Boonwurrung/Woiwurrung: ''Narrm'' or ''Naarm'') is the capital and most populous city of the Australian state of Victoria, and the second-most populous city in both Australia and Oceania. Its name generally refers to a met ...
in 1974, and
Adelaide
Adelaide ( ) is the capital city of South Australia, the state's largest city and the fifth-most populous city in Australia. "Adelaide" may refer to either Greater Adelaide (including the Adelaide Hills) or the Adelaide city centre. The dem ...
in 1976 (as the Women's Art Group, or WAG).
Background
Such movements had already been created in other countries, in which
women artists looked at their position as women in society and their position as artists through a
feminist framework.
[ The visit by US feminist art critic ]Lucy Lippard
Lucy Rowland Lippard (born April 14, 1937) is an American writer, art critic, activist, and curator. Lippard was among the first writers to argue for the " dematerialization" at work in conceptual art and was an early champion of feminist art. S ...
in 1975 provided the immediate impetus for the creation of the new movement in Australia. She spoke to women-only groups in Melbourne and Adelaide about the creation of archives of women artists' work on photographic slide
In photography, reversal film or slide film is a type of photographic film that produces a positive image on a transparent base. Instead of negatives and prints, reversal film is processed to produce transparencies or diapositives (abbreviat ...
s, known as slide registers, by a network of American women artists who called themselves the West-East Bag (WEB); the idea was to counteract their lack of showing in art galleries
An art gallery is a room or a building in which visual art is displayed. In Western cultures from the mid-15th century, a gallery was any long, narrow covered passage along a wall, first used in the sense of a place for art in the 1590s. The lon ...
.
Run as collectives, the groups facilitated consciousness-raising studio and exhibition workshops, aiming to analyse the political implications of personal experiences in visual art
The visual arts are art forms such as painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, photography, video, filmmaking, design, crafts and architecture. Many artistic disciplines such as performing arts, conceptual art, and textile arts ...
. Like their international counterparts, the groups used non-judgemental consciousness-raising (CR) methods which had grown from women's liberation
The women's liberation movement (WLM) was a political alignment of women and feminist intellectualism that emerged in the late 1960s and continued into the 1980s primarily in the industrialized nations of the Western world, which effected great ...
movement. By the mid-1980s, the WAM was a highly respected art movement, both across Australia and worldwide.[
]
Melbourne
The 1974 exhibition ''A Room of One’s Own: Three Women Artists'', co-curated by Kiffy Rubbo, Lynne Cook and Janine Burke, helped initiate the Melbourne WAM. The following year, Rubbo commissioned Burke to curate the national touring exhibition ''Australian Women Artists 1840–1940''. The gallery hosted international feminist art critic, Lucy Lippard
Lucy Rowland Lippard (born April 14, 1937) is an American writer, art critic, activist, and curator. Lippard was among the first writers to argue for the " dematerialization" at work in conceptual art and was an early champion of feminist art. S ...
, who delivered a talk to a women-only audience. Melbourne's Women's Art Forum and Women's Art Register were subsequently established in the gallery.
Sydney
Beginning with its first meeting in April 1974 and inspired by Linda Nochlin
Linda Nochlin (''née'' Weinberg; January 30, 1931 – October 29, 2017) was an American art historian, Lila Acheson Wallace Professor Emerita of Modern Art at New York University Institute of Fine Arts, and writer. As a prominent feminist art ...
’s essay "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" is a 1971 essay by American art historian Linda Nochlin. It was praised for its new slant on feminist art history and theory, and examining the institutional obstacles that prevent women from succeeding ...
", the Sydney WAM, founded in 1975,[ aimed to address discrimination and sexism within the art world through various actions and exhibitions.
Marie McMahon was a founding member,][ ]Vivienne Binns
Vivienne Joyce Binns (born 1940) is an Australian artist known for her contribution to the Women's Art Movement in Australia, her engagement with feminism in her artwork, and her active advocacy within community arts. She works predominantly i ...
, Barbara Hall, Frances Phoenix, Beverley Garlick, Jude Adams
Jude may refer to:
People Biblical
* Jude, brother of Jesus, who is sometimes identified as being the same person as Jude the Apostle
* Jude the Apostle, an apostle also called Judas Thaddaeus or Lebbaeus, the patron saint of lost causes in the ...
and Toni Robertson, were at the forefront of the development of The Women's Art Movement in Sydney.
Adelaide
In Adelaide, the Women's Art Group was established in 1976 or 1977 (initially in 1976 as the Women's Art Group or WAG, which aimed to set up a slide register as Melbourne WAM had done),[ co-founded by ]Ann Newmarch
Ann Foster Newmarch (9 June 1945 – 13 January 2022) , known as "Annie", was a South Australian painter, printmaker, sculptor and academic, with an international reputation, known for her community service to art, social activism and feminism. ...
(who had also been a founding member of the Adelaide Progressive Art Movement in 1974), in order to support and promote women artists, and to work together to combat sexism
Sexism is prejudice or discrimination based on one's sex or gender. Sexism can affect anyone, but it primarily affects women and girls.There is a clear and broad consensus among academic scholars in multiple fields that sexism refers pri ...
in the arts and society. Fifty women of a wide range of ages attended the first meeting. For the whole month of August 1977, it hosted ''The Women's Show'', which was a national event in both scope and participation. Hosted by the Experimental Art Foundation, it included theatre, music, film, photography, poetry and literature, media, a conference and a visual art exhibition,[ and included over 350 works,] curated by Julie Ewington ( on the board of the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, formerly known as Gallery 4A, 4A Galleries, Asia-Australia Arts Centre and also known simply as 4A, is an Australian independent not-for-profit organisation based in the Haymarket area of Sydney, New South ...
in Sydney), and Helen James. Participating artists included Stephanie Radok, Loene Furler, Bonita Ely
Bonita Ely (born 1946) is an Australian multidisciplinary artist who lives in Sydney, whose work has been internationally exhibited. She established her reputation as an environmental artist in the early 1970s through her works concerning the ...
, Jude Adams
Jude may refer to:
People Biblical
* Jude, brother of Jesus, who is sometimes identified as being the same person as Jude the Apostle
* Jude the Apostle, an apostle also called Judas Thaddaeus or Lebbaeus, the patron saint of lost causes in the ...
, Margaret Dodd, Frances Budden (later Phoenix), Marie McMahon, and many others.
WAM members included Anne Marsh, Frances Phoenix, Jenny Boult, Polly Siems, Jane Kew, Kate Millington, Phil McKillup,[ and Jacky Redgate was actively involved.
Some time after its establishment, the Adelaide group gained some funding from the South Australia Arts Grant Advisory Committee, the Community Arts Board, and the ]Visual Arts Board
The Australia Council for the Arts, commonly known as the Australia Council, is the country's official arts council, serving as an arts funding and advisory body for the Government of Australia. The council was announced in 1967 as the Austra ...
. This funding allowed for the publication of the book ''Women's Art Movement 1978-1979, Adelaide, South Australia'', in 1980.
There was also a strong Aboriginal women's art component, and its constitution was altered to reflect this. Adelaide members exhibited their work in other states, and some went abroad:[ Jane Kent and Anne Marsh went to ]California
California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...
in 1984 to look at performance art
Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be witnessed live or through documentation, spontaneously developed or written, and is traditionally presented to a pu ...
, publishing a book on their findings afterwards.[Marsh, Anne and Jane Kent, Live Art : Australia and America : Performance Art, Reviews, Criticism, Feminist and Political Art Organizations, Art and Politics, Interviews with American Artists, Artist's Pages. (1984)] The group was involved in a diverse range of activities including the Adelaide Festival of Arts and its Adelaide Writers' Week
Adelaide Writers' Week, known locally as Writers' Week or WW, is a large and mostly free literary festival held annually in Adelaide, the capital of South Australia. Considered one of the world's pre-eminent literary events, it forms part of the ...
, and supported artists-in-residence
Artist-in-residence, or artist residencies, encompass a wide spectrum of artistic programs which involve a collaboration between artists and hosting organisations, institutions, or communities. They are programs which provide artists with space a ...
such as Jill Orr and Bettye Saar.[
The State Library of South Australia holds records pertaining to the Adelaide branch between 1974 and 1986 in its collection.]
See also
* George Paton Gallery
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Women's Art Movement
Australian art movements
Contemporary art movements
Feminist theory
Political art
1974 establishments in Australia
Arts organizations established in 1977
Feminist art organizations