Collective making as resistance? The contemporary appeal of See Red Women’s Workshop

Recent exhibitions have shown a strong engagement with the work of earlier creative collectives including See Red Women’s Workshop, the feminist poster-making collective which ran from 1974 to 1990. A book about See Red’s work was published in 2016 and the group had a central place in Tate’s celebrated exhibition Women in Revolt, a survey of the artistic engagements of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain. I consider why there has been a revived focus on See Red and other peers who worked as collaborative makers and attribute it to an identification with the themes at the heart of See Red’s work, which have continuing relevance, including domestic inequalities and the impact of social isolation on people’s lives and the strong contemporary interest in strategies for protest.