Photograph of the Women Artists Slide Library at Battersea Arts Centre in 1988
© Althea Greenan
Rejecting ideals of perfection and uniformity, Althea Greenan and Rita Keegan stress that informal archives prioritise access and public ownership, providing artists with the agency to not only document and share their work but also to learn from and build upon each other’s practices. These collections not only held material but provided hospitality, context and support for exhibition making, creative practice and research.
In this conversation, Cheddie, Greenan and Keegan explore how artists mobilised the affordable technology of slides to document, gather and share their work. They describe archives as accessible, public spaces for intergenerational dialogue, where evidence of creative practice, critique and art making is made available for future generations. They discuss what goes into facilitating such an engagement with archives, reflecting on their own approaches as archivists and the responsibilities, challenges and joys of holding and sharing histories of collections. They ask: How might we creatively gather around archives to create and maintain collective memory?
About the Speakers
Dr Althea Greenan works in Special Collections and Archives at Goldsmiths University of London curating the Women’s Art Library collection (WAL). Her work with the collection began in 1989 as a volunteer with the Women Artists Slide Library, the artists’ organisation that became the Women’s Art Library in 1993. She facilitates new projects and original research with artists, students and academics exploring the WAL and positioning the collection in contemporary practices. Greenan has written on the work of women artists since the 1980s. Her doctoral research on the WAL’s collection of 35mm slides features in the anthology Of Other Spaces (2019), in a special issue of the journal Women: A Cultural Review (2019) and in the exhibition Dark Energy: Feminist Organizing, Working Collectively (Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, 2019). She contributed to Salon For a Speculative Future (2019) and Anonymous Was a Woman (2020). Her reflections on the work of Rita Keegan appear in Mirror Reflecting Darkly (2021).
Greenan programmes artistic research through supporting artists, students and academics working with the wide range of materials and archives in the WAL that sustains ways of teaching feminist methodologies. This work is the subject of a film directed by Holly Antrum commissioned by the Art360 Foundation titled Yes to the Work! She co-curates the Animating Archives website and is currently on the advisory board of Feminist Art Making Histories (FAMH, 2021–24) an oral history and digital humanities project funded by the Irish Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Rita Keegan is a leading figure in the Black Arts Movement in the UK. She was born in New York to Caribbean and Canadian parents and moved to London in 1980, having studied fine arts at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1969 to 1972. Her work explores memory, history, dress and adornment, often through the use of her extensive family archive, a photographic record of a Black middle-class Canadian family dating from the 1890s to the present day. In the aftermath of the 1981 Brixton uprisings, Keegan helped establish the Brixton Art Gallery, curating Mirror Reflecting Darkly, the first exhibition by the Black Women Artists Collective. She was the co-founder in 1984 of Copy Art, a resource education space for community groups and artists working within the major technologies of computer scanners and photocopiers. From 1985 to 1990, Keegan was a staff member of the Women Artists Slide Library where she established the Women of Colour Index. In the early 1990s she was Director of the African and Asian Visual Artists Archive. A solo exhibition of her work, Rita Keegan: Somewhere Between There and Here, was presented at the South London Gallery in autumn 2021.
Dr Janice Cheddie FRSA is a London-based writer, researcher and consultant. Janice was born in St Lucia, West Indies, and migrated to London as a child with her mother and older brother. She is a part of the ‘Children of Windrush’ generation, a collective generational experience that has been influential in shaping contemporary Britain. Between the mid-1990s and 2015 she was custodian of the Panchayat Collection, with the artist and curator Shaheen Merali, until its transfer to the Tate Library in 2015. Since 2015 Janice has been a member of ICOMOS-UK’s Intangible Cultural Heritage committee. Between 2020 and 2022 Janice was research consultant for London-based AFFORD, Return of the Icons initiative, funded by the Open Society Foundation. Return of the Icons seeks the restitution of looted African artefacts and human remains held within UK museums and heritage institutions to their communities of origin.
