CAA Conference
112th CAA (College Art Association of America) Annual Conference
14–17 FEBRUARY 2024 | CHICAGO, IL, USA
The Women’s Art Register team is proud to be sharing our unique archive and community with the world this month, via the 112th CAA Annual Conference. The CAA advances the highest standards of instruction, knowledge and practice in the visual arts to stimulate intellectual curiosity and advance skills that enrich the individual and society. It’s Annual Conference is the largest convening of art historians, artists, designers, curators, and visual art professionals, with over 275 sessions, workshops, and events programmed this year.
The paper ‘The Women’s Art Register: Archiving feminist community’ was accepted for the session Radical archiving for radical art histories: against a positivist rhetoric of discovery, chaired by Prof. Hilary Robinson. It will be presented virtually by Caroline Phillips on 16 February.
The paper and presentation will be deposited in the WAR archive, and Caroline was successful in receiving a grant to reimburse the $200USD conference registration fee.
ABSTRACT
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.
The full paper will be available on open access online soon. Please check back here after the event.
