Girls at the Tin Sheds celebrates Sydney feminist posters

Girls at the Tin Sheds: Sydney Feminist Posters 1975-90 celebrates the women artists and postermakers of the University of Sydney's Tin Sheds; a space which started as an experiment in alternative art education, and became an important hothouse for social and political debates during the 1970s and 80s.

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of International Women's Year, the University Art Gallery exhibition presents original posters on feminism, the environmental movement as well as Aboriginal and migrant rights. However, according to exhibition curator Katie Yuill, the women's movement was by far the most important.

"The exhibition opens in the heated climate of 1975with its struggles for gender equality galvanised by International Women's Year, outrage at the sacking of the Whitlam Government and building tensions over the environment and Aboriginal land rights," Ms Yuill said.

The women's movement was central to a diverse range of art forms, campaigns, parties and projects instigated at the Tin Sheds, and posters were each movement's public face.

According to Senior Curator of the University Art Gallery, Dr Ann Stephen: "Posters would be plastered along the corrugated fence on City Road that supported things such as the sexual politics of liberation with headings such as 'Why should women always be responsible for contraception?' or promoting a feminist aesthetic with headlines such as 'Women propose a new feminist cinema' or just advertising another 'Frock rock' benefit that showed feminists to be not just overall-clad amazons on the march, but also femme fatales on the dance floor.

"The instigators of the Tin Sheds were 'counter-culture' architects and artists who sought to offer art workshops to architecture and art history students as well as providing 24-hour open access to a wider community. A precarious marginality was part of its edgy sociality, as students rubbed shoulders with a motley bunch of artists, filmmakers, musicians, and a gamut of political activists from the Women Behind Bars group to the local Aboriginal community."

The exhibition will be drawn from the University's extensive Tin Sheds poster holdings spanning the University Art collection and the University's Tin Sheds' archive. It includes work from artists including Marie McMahon, Jan Mackay, Toni Robertson, Jean Clarkson, Pam Debenham, Jan Fieldsend, Angela Gee, Leonie Lane and Avril Quail.

Event details:

What: Girls at the Tin Sheds: Sydney Feminist Posters 1975-90

When: Until 24 April

Link:
Girls at the Tin Sheds celebrates Sydney feminist posters