Remembering ARTEMIS brings together a series of texts discussing the ARTEMIS Women’s Art Forum INC, an organisation devoted to raising the status of women in the arts in Perth, Western Australia, in the late 1980s. ARTEMIS began as a series of informal meetings between women working in the arts and eventually grew into an organisation with close to 300 members before losing its funding in 1990. The rise and fall of ARTEMIS unfolded amid a ‘golden age’ of creativity in Western Australia that fostered experimentation and collaborations between disciplines and a boom of activism and political awareness, particularly among women, who sought new support structures, language and visibility for their work.
This collection aims to examine an under-recognised history of Western Australian feminist art practice - occurring against an often-tumultuous political landscape of both reform and excess - against the broader context of Australian feminism and contemporary art. Often conversational and contemplative, Remembering ARTEMIS reflects not just on the organisation but on the ways in which history itself is — or isn’t — made.
