A Spirit of Generosity. Behind the Scenes at The Women’s Art Collection

BY MARGIE MACKINNON

This article was first published in Restoration Conversations

Magazine Issue 7, Spring 2025

Harriet Loffler, Curator, The Women’s Art Collection, Ph. Lloyd Mann

The Women’s Art Collection at Cambridge University’s Murray Edwards College has over 600 artworks by more than 300 women artists.  Housed in a strikingly modern purpose-built building which opened in 1965, the Collection consists mainly of works donated by artists, alumnae and supporters which are exhibited throughout the college, allowing students to live and study surrounded by art. The Collection is also open to the public. Restoration Conversations had the pleasure of viewing the Collection in the company of Curator Harriet Loffler, who recounted the history of the college and the origins of its unique art collection and shared her excitement about an upcoming exhibition planned for 2026.

Restoration Conversations:  Your current exhibition, which tells the story of The Women’s Art Collection, is called Conversation not Spectacle. Have the artists in this collection become a bigger part of the conversation over the thirty years since the collection began?

Harriet Loffler:  Absolutely. Despite being the largest collection of art by women in Europe, to a certain extent, we are still undiscovered. And I think we’re at an interesting moment where people are starting to learn more about us and to engage with our work. But it’s uncharted territory.  There are a lot of artists in our collection who haven’t been subject to that much research, so it’s a treasure trove. It feels like a charged moment that is full of potential.

RC: What can you tell us about the history of Murray Edwards College?

HL: The College was founded as New Hall in 1954 at the instigation of a group of very determined individuals who wanted a college for women because, at that point, Cambridge University had the lowest proportion of female undergraduates of any university in the UK. The university did not admit women until the late 19th century, and then it took another 70 years for women to be issued with degrees.

Rosemary Murray, who was the founding president, went on to become the first female vice chancellor of Cambridge University.  But, at the time, nobody knew who she was because, when students arrived at the College, Rosemary could just as easily be found making the tea, emptying the bin, or interviewing prospective students. The College was renamed Murray Edwards in 2008 to honour Murray as well as the Edwards family who provided a generous endowment.

RC:  Given that many Cambridge colleges date back to Tudor times and even earlier, Murray Edwards stands out as a modern presence amongst the more traditional college buildings.  What was the thinking behind its distinctive design?

HL: Rosemary Murray appointed the architects Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, who would go on to design the Barbican in London, in the then emerging Brutalist style.  The College was designed very much as a manifesto for the education of women, with an intention of looking up and aiming high. You feel that in the dome, which is an iconic space, and then in the library, which was seen as a kind of Temple to Learning with this rising staircase in place of an altar. I think it is fascinating that the importance of women’s education is articulated in the fabric of the building. Outside, instead of the traditional Cambridge cloister, we have a fountain court which is flooded with daylight.

RC:  How did the College’s art collection come about?

HL:  The collection started when Mary Kelly, the American conceptual feminist artist, was in residence at New Hall as part of a program which placed artists into the Cambridge colleges. Valerie Pearl, who was Murray Edwards’ president at the time, wanted to bring more creativity into the space where she was working, and Kelly had just shown a conceptual work in London which had caused considerable controversy.  So, it was a bold choice of the College. Kelly made a body of work called Extase (1986), as part of a wider series, Corpus, about women’s experience, which was acquired by the College.  That kick-started something in the College community to think, Okay, well, what else can we do?  The response was, Why don’t we ask women artists to donate work? Ann Jones, who was an independent curator and married to a fellow at the College, put together a list of 46 artists and sent letters to each of them asking for artworks.

RC:  Who were the artists they first approached?

HL: The artists were mainly British-based but very intergenerational. Established artists like Paula Rego were selected alongside Maud Sulter, who was then an early-career artist. There wasn’t really an overarching theme, so the collection is eclectic, as you can imagine. They were mainly looking for wall-based work. And, as much as we would like to say that we took a radical feminist, political approach, it really wasn’t that strategic. It was just about adorning the walls of the College with some work that would inspire the students and might or might not be a financial asset.

Suzanne Treister, Discover the Secrets of the Universe, 1991, on long term loan to The Women’s Art Collection

RC:  What was the response to the letters?

HL: I think Valerie and Ann were stunned at the response as almost everybody said yes. It was an amazing act of collective generosity: the College received over 70 artworks.  But it is important to say that lots of artists couldn’t afford to donate work.  Elizabeth Vellacott, for instance, and Suzanne Treister, initially said no, although we are thrilled that they are now represented in the collection.

One of the essays that accompanied the first exhibition of all the donated works was by Marina Warner, who was actually critical of the endeavour. She problematised the ‘woman artist’ label, and she also questioned why women should be expected to donate their works. Would we ask men to do that, she wondered. Among the first cohort to give, there was a resistance to being known as a ‘woman artist’ rather than an artist, but I think there’s a lot more ownership now of that identity. There’s power in it now, which maybe there hasn’t been in the past.

RC:  How did the collection grow from there?

HL: There was a period of about 20 years when the college just received donations. Artists were recommending other artists. There was an informal arrangement whereby artists could have the exhibition space for free for a month in return for a work. This became a sort of self-organised open-source way to acquire new works. As a result, there are a number of pieces in the Collection that were not necessarily selected or shortlisted. In more recent years, we’ve had a curator in place, so there has been a shift from the initial organic acquisition strategy to a focus on choosing artworks that address themes of inequality and question the rigid hierarchies within the art historical canon and stereotypes about women generally.

RC: One of the artworks that caught my eye as we walked around the collection was the piece in the stairwell with the frame that was coming off the wall. What can you tell us about that particular work?

Rose Garrard, Models Triptych: Madonna Cascade, 1982, The Women’s Art Collection © The artist

HL: That is Rose Garrard’s Models Triptych: Madonna Cascade (1982). Some time ago, Garrard talked about an exhibition she had been to in Nottingham in 1982 called the Women’s Art Show, which was an historical exhibition of women artists.  She just couldn’t believe what she was seeing, because she was like, There are all these women artists! How did I not know about these women? She said she had found her family, her [artistic] genealogy.

Madonna Cascade is one of three works which recreate self-portraits by women artists [the others being Artemisia Gentileschi and Elisabeth Vigée LeBrun] who were once highly regarded but fell into posthumous obscurity. It shows Judith Leyster, the Dutch Golden Age painter, holding her paintbrush and palette, framed by cascading plaster figurines of the Virgin and Child. Judith Leyster was almost erased from history after her death, by dealers who attributed her work to male contemporaries like Franz Hals. The deconstructed frame suggests a breaking away from the patriarchal art ‘his-story’ which has hitherto suppressed her. It literally takes up space. And I think she is making a point about the frameworks that women have to break through in order to take up space, politically, socially, domestically. I love that behind it you see the bricks and mortar of the College. It’s a sort of support structure for women across the centuries.

RC: Garrard’s work would have been one of your earlier acquisitions.  Can you tell us about a work you have acquired more recently?

HL: Not long ago we acquired a performance piece, Nativity (2022), by an artist called Rosa-Johan Uddoh. This work is about Balthazar, the Black wise man at the birth of Christ who appears in lots of nativity scenes across Western art history. Her piece was a kind of pantomime, performed by three Black women. It examines the role of people of colour within popular culture. I love the idea of performing this every five years and to see how it alters our perception of nativity plays which seem to be less and less a feature of children’s education.  

RC: What is it that you get when you acquire a performance?

HL: That’s an interesting question, especially as it pertains to acquisition and conservation and all the things you think about when looking after an accredited collection. In this case, we got a box of props, a script, instructions, permission to perform it again and a film documenting the first performance.

RC: As we are focussing on women and gardens in this issue, could you tell us a bit about the College gardens?

HL: The College was built around some quite ancient woodland so, while the building is modern, it is surrounded by some very mature trees. The land was donated by the family of Charles Darwin, and we still have his widow Emma Darwin’s greenhouse with its original tiles. Darwin’s granddaughter, Nora Barlow, was an important botanist who lived on this site. A very old plant specimen, the Aquilegia Nora Barlow, which was named for her, is still grown here. Katie Schwab, an artist we have commissioned for a new project [see p. x] is thinking of drying some of those flowers from the garden and making paper which will be used in hand-printed designs.

There is a wonderful interplay between the gardens and the architecture, with sight lines that allow you to see the gardens while looking at the art and to see the art from afar while sitting in the garden.  You will never see a Keep Off the Grass sign here, and the students are encouraged to pick the flowers. There is an amazing spirit of generosity which runs through the College and its Collection.