The Women’s Art Register: Archiving feminist community

The Women’s Art Register is Australia’s living archive of women’s art practice. Our collection policy is guided by a framework of non-hierarchical self-identification, ensuring the past and future can shift or collide with each situated encounter.

Through our projects, programming and active outreach we have built inclusive models of engagement and participation to broaden, challenge and evolve our community’s narratives and collections for use and reuse into the future, sustaining a thriving and accessible living archive. This paper outlines three case studies that articulate the radical nature of this grass-roots, feminist archive.

It Comes in Waves is an intergenerational conversation series featuring discussions between early-career artists and longstanding members of the Women’s Art Register. Developed in response to the recent pandemic, women and non-binary artists and professionals address themes including trauma, care, community and identity, as an opportunity for knowledge sharing, critical discussion and intergenerational support.

This Is W.A.R! Is a digital map containing stories from our archive and beyond, generated from community contributions and volunteer research. By quite literally putting women artists on the map, their art practices are situated and contextualised across sites, and decades, through diverse stories that connect communities, ideas, bodies, practices and legacies.

Leaving Your Legacy: A Guide for Australian Artists was designed as a professional practice forum, advice hub and workbook, outlining the complexities of estate planning. Not only assisting us to build our archive, this project unpacks the barriers faced by women artists, and empowers them to shape their own legacy.