Lily Evans-Hill

Feminist group-work: The emergence of the Women Artists Slide Library, 1970-1982

Supervised by Dr Catherine Grant and Dr Althea Greenan (Goldsmiths)

Funded by CHASE/AHRC

Lily Evans-Hill is a doctoral researcher and Associate Lecturer specialising in visual culture informed by feminist politics in Britain in the long 1970s.

Her thesis looks at women artists and their group work informed by women’s liberation across the 1970-1980s. It explores organising methods used by artists, and how they manifested in artists groups, publications and print cultures, centres and libraries, and in particular, the Women Artists Slide Library (now the Women’s Art Library). The slide registry, as a resource for artistic, curatorial and history work, enveloped key concerns of artists informed by feminism by creating networks of contemporary practicing artists, raising consciousness about women’s art and facilitating the writing of women’s art history and art histories informed by feminist politics.

This research proposes that women’s liberation shaped the ways women artists worked. There are many examples of artist’s co-operatives and groups, collectively run gallery, exhibition and learning spaces, collaborative art works and exhibitions that evidence this. What I am interested in here are the deviations from the traditional modes of feminist organising to account for new activities that were important to artists. These activities, which included resource making, self-organised exhibitions and critical platforms to conduct critical and historical writing, as well as action groups to organise exhibitions, publications and lobby art institutions, are examples of the organising that made up the intense activity of the feminist influenced artists.

Lily has published on moving image, print and visual cultures informed by feminism. She has presented papers at the University of Cambridge, Paul Mellon Centre and Tate. In 2022, she was fellow at the Archives of American Art, where she researched women’s slide registries in the US. She currently teaches on the BA History of Art program at the Courtauld.