The Women's Art Library: Four Decades of Making Women's Art Visible

Imagine a room in a bishop's palace — ornate plasterwork overhead, a chandelier catching the afternoon light — and in it, not prayer books or vestments, but thousands upon thousands of 35mm colour slides, each one a small window into a woman artist's work. For seventeen years, from 1983 to 2000, the Bishop's Library at Fulham Palace housed one of the most remarkable grassroots archives in British cultural history: the Women's Art Library. It began with a deceptively simple question — where could you actually see what women artists were making? — and grew into the most significant collection of its kind in the United Kingdom.

A Slide Carousel and a Movement

The story begins around 1978, when a loose network of women artists living in London — the Women Artist's Slide Collective — started gathering colour transparencies of their work. The idea was not original to them; they drew inspiration from the Women's Art Registry at New York's A.I.R. Gallery, a concept the critic Lucy Lippard had championed and brought across the Atlantic. But the London collective gave it distinctly British roots, advertising through Spare Rib and Feminist Art News, embedding it in the consciousness-raising culture of the Women's Liberation Movement. Founding members including Pauline Barrie and Felicity Allen operated first from the Women's Research and Resource Centre (now the Feminist Library) and the Women's Art Alliance in West London, before moving to Battersea Arts Centre in 1982.

In 1983, the collection found a more permanent home — the Bishop's Library at Fulham Palace — and became a registered educational charity. That same year, the first issue of the Women Artist's Slide Library Newsletter appeared: a photocopied A3 affair, urgent and unfussy. It was the beginning of a publishing run that would last nearly two decades.

Rita Keegan and the Women of Colour Index

One of the most significant chapters in the library's history began in 1985, when Arts Council funding established a dedicated post to document Black and Asian heritage women artists. Rita Keegan, an American-born Black British artist, was appointed to the role. Working from the Bishop's Library at Fulham Palace, Keegan spent years building the Women of Colour Index — a systematic collection of slides, papers, and records documenting artists of colour from the UK, North America, and beyond. At a time when mainstream art institutions barely acknowledged women artists at all, the WOCI was recognising non-Eurocentric artistic fields and building a record that simply did not exist elsewhere. The index remains one of the most important components of the collection today, and a reading group dedicated to it continues to generate new scholarship.

What the Archive Holds

The Women's Art Library represents thousands of artists from around the world. Its materials span the full breadth of artistic documentation: the original 35mm slides, photographs, artist files and statements, exhibition catalogues and ephemera, press cuttings, posters, audio and videotapes, periodicals, artists' books, performance scripts, costumes, and textiles. Named collections within the archive include the Dame Laura Knight Photographic Archive (1877–1970), the Jo Spence Collection documenting the life of the photographer and cultural activist, a Guerrilla Girls Collection, and the Alexis Hunter Collection — the New Zealand-born feminist artist who donated her archive as an explicitly political act.

Then there are the 92 issues of the magazine itself, from the first stapled newsletter of March 1983 through the Women Artists Slide Library Journal, the Women's Art Magazine, and finally MAKE, which by its final years featured original cover artwork by Royal Academicians and full-colour critical writing that stood alongside anything in the mainstream art press. The complete run is held at Goldsmiths — a twenty-year paper trail of feminist art criticism with no parallel in Britain.

A Living Archive at Goldsmiths

When the collection arrived at Goldsmiths in 2003, it could have become a sealed time capsule — an interesting relic of 1970s and 80s feminism, consulted occasionally by postgraduate researchers. Instead, under the long stewardship of curator Dr Althea Greenan — who has worked with the collection since 1989 — it has remained a living, breathing resource. An advisory board drawn from across Goldsmiths' departments was established in 2004 to guide its development. The archive continues to actively collect, welcoming contributions from women artists documenting their practice.

The WAL/Feminist Review Art in the Archive Bursary, running since 2009, commissions artists to create new work in direct response to the collection's holdings. Past recipients have produced work ranging from video and performance to textile installation. In 2025, a fresh call for proposals was issued — the latest in a tradition that insists this archive is not merely for looking back, but for making something new.

Why It Matters

The Women's Art Library matters because it was built from below. It was not founded by a government ministry or a museum board. It was started by artists who noticed that the record of what they made simply wasn't being kept, and who decided to keep it themselves. The slides were submitted by the artists; the newsletter was photocopied and posted out; the events at Battersea Arts Centre and Fulham Palace were organised on volunteer energy and thin funding. For eighteen years, it received arts council support — and when that ended, the collection survived because people understood that what it contained could not be rebuilt.

Today, the Animating Archives research project, run jointly between Goldsmiths and Birkbeck, takes materials from the collection to universities in Copenhagen and Dundee, exploring experimental approaches to radical archival practice. In 2025, works from the WAL poster collection were exhibited at the Fine Art Academy in Vienna. The reach of this collection — born from a few dozen slides in a flat in London — now extends across Europe and beyond.

Visiting and Contributing

The Women's Art Library is housed in Special Collections and Archives on the ground floor of the Rutherford Building at Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, London. It is open to independent researchers, students, groups, and staff by appointment. The collection can be contacted at 020 7717 2295 or special.collections@gold.ac.uk. The WAL continues to welcome donations from women artists wishing to document their practice — a direct continuation of the principle on which it was founded nearly fifty years ago.

This article was partly inspired by old photographs and recordings that came to light when someone brought their personal memories to be digitised. It made us wonder what else is out there — in attics, shoeboxes, old cupboards — connected to the Women's Art Library and the broader history of women's art in Britain. If anyone holds old media connected to this organisation, services like EachMoment can help preserve them for future generations.