As Tate Britain holds its first major exhibition devoted to more than 100 women artists working in the UK from 1970 to 1990, curator Linsey Young tells Bella Evennett-Watts how a generation turned pen, paint and paper into political weapons and protest
How many prominent women artists can you think of off the top of your head? Perhaps fewer than the male artists you can name, who have more frequently lined the walls of galleries and spilled out of our history books. It’s no secret that women artists have long been in the shadows. Now, Tate Britain is attempting to redress the balance.
Fittingly, the gallery’s first exhibition devoted to more than 100 women artists will focus on the pocket of time between 1970 and 1990 – drenched in Thatcherism, miners’ strikes and masculinity – and those largely left out of the artistic narrative during this tumultuous period.
Six years in the making, Women In Revolt! has been pieced together by Linsey Young, curator of contemporary British art at Tate. Born out of Young’s own curiosity, the show is part ‘gift’ to her late mother, Gael, and part exploration of the experiences of women like her, who saw extraordinary shifts in political and social focus as they grew up in postwar Britain.
‘She was a single mum, she was a nurse, she was working class,’ says Young of her mother. ‘Women like her lived through the first women’s liberation conferences, the Miss World protest, the miners’ strikes, the AIDS epidemic, Section 28 and the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp.’ Seeing how stories like her mother’s have traditionally been hidden from museums and galleries, Young felt compelled to discover more. ‘I’ve found untold riches,’ she smiles.
As for timing, Young believes the treasure trove of women’s artwork she found is just as pertinent now, decades after it was created: ‘We’re still fighting many of these same fights today: abortion access, the higher mortality rates among women of colour during childbirth, the climate emergency… these are just as relevant to modern audiences now as they were in the 1970s.’ Here, she discusses eight artworks from the exhibition…
THE MARXIST’S WIFE (STILL DOES THE HOUSEWORK), ALEXIS HUNTER, 1978/2005
‘Men in Marxist and socialist groups would often talk about changing the world, then return home to women doing the housework. By cleaning an image of Karl Marx, Hunter is laying into the claims men had for their feminism within those groups. Hunter was quite humorous – agitating the way that we think about women’s roles.’
UNTITLED, LINDER, 1976 (FACING PAGE)
