"If We Don’t Write It Nobody Will!” FAN Magazine & the Women’s Art Movement

How did a grassroots magazine make the women’s art movement in Britain what it was? Forty-five issues of Feminist Arts News (FAN) were published between 1980 and 1993, each tackling a distinct subject and edited by voluntary groups from around the country. Against a backdrop of women’s liberation activism, artists and scholars were organising exhibitions, performances and conferences, forging new ways of making art – and FAN’s communication network kept it all connected. This lunchtime talk will journey through the processes of producing, distributing and reading FAN. Grounded in archival research and interviews with contributors, it aims to vividly bring to life the magazine’s social and cultural world. FAN’s pages provide a dog-eared record of the political campaigns, artworks and administrative labour that powered the women’s art movement. Yet inspecting these pages today reveals how the magazine did not simply record feminism’s emerging cultural politics, it actively and decisively fuelled them. As one typewritten note declared to readers: “We are making our own art history. If we don't write it nobody will!”

Speaker Biography:

Victoria Horne is an Associate Professor (Reader) in Arts at Northumbria University in Newcastle. She writes about women’s cultural history and the intellectual traditions of British art history, most recently focusing on the role that print publications have played in engendering feminist communities and interventions. She was the editor of Counter Print: The Alternative Art Press in Britain after 1970 (MUP, 2025), “Danger! Women Reading” for Women: A Cultural Review (OUP, 2019) and co-editor of Feminism and Art History Now (Bloomsbury 2016/2022). Research for her forthcoming book, Making Our Own Art History: Feminist Arts News, 1978-93, was supported by a Paul Mellon Centre Mid-Career Fellowship and Publication Grant, and a Leverhulme Fellowship.

Event format

13.00: Welcome and talk start

13.40: Talk finishes

13.40-14.00: Q&A

Please note that a light lunch and refreshments are provided at the event.

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✔ Accessible for large power wheelchairs

✔ One accessible toilet on the ground floor

✔ Hearing loop available (please contact [email protected])

✖ Livestreamed

✖ Recorded

✖ BSL

✖ Live captioning

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Image caption: Photograph of Feminist Art News magazines stacked. Photo courtesy of Victoria Horne.