These British Feminist Artists of the 1970s Are Getting Their Due at the Tate
Chila Kumari Singh Burman, Solidarity with Sisters, 1981. © Chila Kumari Burman. Photo by Varda Agarwal. Courtesy of Tate.
In her 1987 sculpture Art History, British artist Marlene Smith placed four framed postcards depicting Black women artists she admired next to a bouquet of plastic flowers arranged in a crocheted vase made by her mother. Smith’s work speaks to feminine networks of creative influences, as well as an overlooked history of art made by women, for women.
Art History neatly captures the ethos of Tate Britain’s new exhibition, where it is currently on view. “Women in Revolt!,” which runs through April 7, 2024, explores the relationship between art and the women’s movement in the United Kingdom, touching on themes such as sexuality, domesticity, and socioeconomic change. It is—incredibly—the first institutional exhibition dedicated to feminist art made in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s. With over 600 works by 100 women working alone and in collectives, it is by some metrics the most ambitious Tate Britain exhibition to date.
Linder, Untitled, 1976. Courtesy of Tate.
Helen Chadwick, In the Kitchen (Stove), 1977. © Estate of the artist. Courtesy of Richard Saltoun Gallery, London and Rome.
While the exhibition includes works by notable artists such as Linder, Helen Chadwick, Susan Hiller, and recent Turner Prize winner Lubaina Himid, most of the display is dedicated to artists and collectives who have received little to no institutional recognition, creating a platform for many artists who are only now getting their due. Several artworks in the show have not been exhibited since they were made. Others were pulled from basements and beneath beds, and restored specially for the occasion.
The exhibition presents mainly two-dimensional art, such as paintings and photographs, as well as a handful of sculptures. Organized chronologically, “Women in Revolt!” gives us a sense of sociopolitical issues as they arose, and how women responded to them, with historical context in the form of magazines, pamphlets, banners, and videos displayed alongside the artworks.
The exhibition begins in the early 1970s—before legislation like the equal pay act of 1975. If women attended art schools during this time, they were often condescended to. As the artist and musician Gina Birch said, in a quote included in the exhibition’s wall text: “The boys could drink and talk with the tutors, and the girls got talked to, judged and often fucked.” In 1977, she made a film as an art student and a new mother, in which she screams for three minutes straight, an expression of her rage at the system in which she found herself working. Other women made work at home with cheap and readily available materials, which sometimes involved their own body or clothes. In her sculpture Bear it in Mind (1976), for instance, Su Richardson presented a pair of dungarees laden with domestic objects mothers use in their different roles, from cook and handyman to seamstress and referee. The dungarees droop from the weight of all they carry.
During that period, women artists found ways to operate outside of the network of art schools, museums, and galleries. They created collectives, made their own magazines and newsletters, and exhibited in homes, cafes, libraries, and community centers. In Who’s Holding the Baby (1978), the photography collective Hackney Flashers combined statistics, cartoons, and photography in laminated posters to highlight the impact of community childcare and the government’s lack of support. And in a 1979 poster by the See Red Women’s Workshop, recently elected prime minister Margaret Thatcher is depicted with her face framed by a banderole outlining the effects of public spending cuts. Many of the issues addressed in these posters (such as increasing prices and closing public services) are still relevant today.
Su Richardson, Bear it in Mind, 1976. © Su Richardson, All Rights Reserved, DACS. Photo by Tate. Courtesy of Tate.
See Red Women’s Workshop, Tough! My Message to the Women of Our Nation…, 1979. Courtesy of See Red Women’s Workshop.
With Thatcher leading the country, women were a growing presence in the workplace by the early 1980s and, thanks to new legislation, entitled to equal pay and a lack of discrimination. And yet, traditional gender roles persisted as feminist artists continued to respond to gender and class barriers. The art they made in the 1980s engaged with the politics of the Thatcher period: mining strikes, nuclear proliferation, the AIDS crisis, police brutality, and Section 28 (a law that prohibited the promotion of homosexuality, especially in schools, by local authorities).
Jill Posener’s 1987 photo series “A Dirty Girls Guide to London” shows lesbians kissing all over the capital—at the British Museum, in Hyde Park, on Westminster Bridge, in front of the Royal Albert Hall—sometimes with their tops off, at a time when same-sex public displays of affection were often met by police harassment.
Installation view of “Women in Revolt!” at Tate Britain, 2023. © Tate. Photo by Larina Fernandes. Courtesy of Tate.
Women’s voices became particularly prominent in politics following the establishment of the women-only Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp at a Royal Air Force base in Berkshire, protesting the storage of 96 nuclear weapons on site. Despite the lack of running water, regular arrests, and the struggles of communal living, the camp persisted for 19 years. Women there made colorful banners, collages, sculptures, and newsletters with a DIY aesthetic, blurring the boundary between art and activism. In the largest work in the exhibition, Greenham Common (Common Reflections) (1989–2013), Margaret Harrison recreated a section of the fence and barbed wire surrounding the base. Everyday objects such as shoes, clothes, mirrors, and plastic bags cover the structure, giving a sense of the daily life led in the shadow of this barrier, and memorializing women’s efforts to reduce nuclear weapon usage.
In the 1980s, Black and Asian British artists began rising in prominence as they established networks and exhibition venues of their own. Lubaina Himid was central to these efforts, as she organized a series of exhibitions on work by Black and Asian women such as Ingrid Pollard, Sonia Boyce, Sutapa Biswas, and Chila Kumari Singh Burman (all featured in “Women in Revolt!”). A 1988 quote from Biswas and Marlene Smith in the exhibition’s wall text makes this clear: “We have to work simultaneously on many different fronts. We must make our images, organize exhibitions, be art critics, historians, administrators, and speakers.” Many of the works on show note the challenges of being both a woman and a minority, structural inequality, and colonial legacies. For example, in her photo series “Our Asian Lesbian Gay Black Bodies, Our Tea, Our Chintz” (1989), Poulomi Desai depicts herself and her then girlfriend enjoying an afternoon of tea and sex at home: a reference to the way the consumer products like tea and chintz became quintessentially British, even though they originated from South Asia.
Lubaina Himid, The Carrot Piece, 1985. © Lubaina Himid. Courtesy of the artist and Hollybush Gardens, London.
Lesley Sanderson, Time for a Change, 1988. Photo by Neil Conroy. Courtesy of Tate.
“Women in Revolt!” ends on neither a mournful nor a celebratory note, as it balances recognition of women’s creativity alongside the struggles they faced. Most of all, the exhibition recognizes the role that museums such as Tate itself played in obscuring this art history it now seeks to highlight. One of the last pieces in the exhibition is a wall-based sculpture by Himid titled The Carrot Piece (1985), which the artist intended as a metaphor for institutions that seek to woo minorities into their program purely for the optics of diversity. In this life-sized work, a rosy-cheeked man balances on a unicycle, dangling a single carrot at the end of a stick for a Black woman walking ahead of him. Holding a pot full of food in her arms, she casts a look over her shoulder that wavers between irritation and distrust. Her hands are already full. And she has other things to do.