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Making our own art history

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This book traces how Feminist Arts News shaped the women’s art movement by documenting and producing feminist cultural politics, drawing on archival research to explore its role as a decentralised network for artistic, political and...
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  • February 16, 2027
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FAN: Feminist Arts News (1978-93) was a newsletter and magazine produced ‘by and for women artists’. Edited by voluntary editorial collectives across the UK, its forty-five thematic issues pioneered feminist approaches to art education, photography, painting, craft, textiles, and design, while theorising multiple axes of identity in issues focussed on disability arts, working-class artists, black women’s creativity, lesbian artists, and more. Hundreds of women artists, critics, and historians contributed to, corresponded with, or read FAN – and yet the magazine has remained a footnote in the history of British art. This book is the first to unearth a history of this pioneering periodical and its vibrant cultural network. Grounded in archival research and extensive interviews with contributors, it shows how an alternative feminist press of newsletters, magazines, bulletins and journals reshaped the field of art and art history in the UK. As co-founder Kate Walker declared to FAN’s readers in 1979: ‘WE are the Women’s Art Movement. We are making our own art history. If we don’t write it nobody will!’
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Price: $130.00
Pages: 304
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Publication Date: February 16, 2027
ISBN: 9781526189912
Format: Hardcover
BISACs: ART / History / Contemporary (1945-), History of art, HISTORY / Women, LITERARY CRITICISM / Feminist, Feminism and feminist theory, Serials, periodicals, abstracts, indexes
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‘Victoria Horne’s work provides an invaluable blueprint for how to do periodical studies in close detail; much like the kit that the FAN collective circulated to prospective editors of the magazine, this important book will give its readers the tools needed to make their own histories of feminist art publishing.’
—Samuel Bibby, Association for Art History

‘Making our own art history is an effort to understand what happened to the women’s art movement. A remarkable example of expansive and original art historical research, the book examines how feminists built an infrastructure for social transformation in the 1970s that encompassed the independent art press. With Feminist Art News as its focus, the book reclaims the dialectic between then and today, capturing the historical materiality and challenges of the feminist struggle and its insurgent literacy.’
—Angela Dimitrakaki, University of Edinburgh

Victoria Horne is an Assistant Professor in the Arts Department at Northumbria University, Newcastle

Part I Contexts
1 Periodicals
2 FAN

Part II Production
3 DIY
4 Labour
5 Collage

Part III Circulation
6 Readers
7 Education
8 Networks

Conclusion
FAN print run
Further reading
Acknowledgements