Making our own art history

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!’