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The Women’s Art Collection: Conversation Not Spectacle is a group exhibition that explores the history and development of The Women’s Art Collection.

Beginning with the artist-in-residence scheme that seeded the idea for the Collection, the exhibition takes us through three decades, from the very first acquisition campaign all the way up to the present day.

The exhibition title draws on the words of feminist art historian Professor Griselda Pollock at the Collection’s launch in 1992. Of the artworks and the Collection’s radical potential, she declared: “Hanging here together, they provide not a dumb spectacle but a model of conversation.”

The Collection began in the late 1980s when the American artist Mary Kelly was selected as the first artist-in-residence at New Hall (as the College was known then) and whose work Extase (1986) was subsequently acquired.

Valerie Pearl, the College President during this period, curator Ann Jones, and a group of academics launched an ‘artist appeal’ whereby they wrote to a selection of women artists inviting them to donate a work that could be a source of inspiration to students, researchers, and visitors. This appeal marked the Collection’s foundation in 1991, and within two years the College had received over 70 donated artworks — an extraordinary act of collective generosity.

Since then, the Collection has grown through donations from artists, alumnae and supporters, and now has over 600 art works by over 300 artists. This exhibition brings together a selection of works that are displayed across 51������.

Conversation Not Spectacle is the culmination of a two-year research project that aimed to maximise the role of The Women’s Art Collection within research and teaching activities at the University of Cambridge and unlock the Collection as a resource for the broader public.

The project was funded by the Isaac Newton Trust, Arts Council England, the Bateman Family Charitable Trust and Mike, Isobel and Olivia Standing.