Later this month Central St Martins is hosting an exhibition of work from the last 100 years of the college’s female alumni and staff. It will feature work by creatives including Morag Myerscough, Astrid Stavro, Lucienne Roberts and Sara De Bondt, alongside earlier 20th Century pieces by designers like Heather ‘Herry’ Perry, Dora Batty and Kathleen Hale. Why does this show have to happen though? Why do we still have to make a point of showing work by women? We asked the curator Ruth Sykes to explain why this show is so important.

The unfortunate thing is, he actually succeeded in guilting me into a second date. At the time, I wasn’t well versed in what a self-identified “nice guy” (also sometimes known in feminist circles as Nice Guys™) actually was: someone who feels entitled to women for his supposed kindness. 

I now know that Nice Guy™ behavior– which is based on one’s sense of superiority stemming from one’s “nice guy” status and usually accompanied by indignation when women reject the “nice guy” – is actually a telltale sign that someone is not nice.

Video games are more important than ever before. They’re travelling further, they’re making more money, they’re reaching more people and they’re telling us more stories. Their influence upon society is more significant than it has ever been and this is why one of the most important video game Kickstarters of last year wasn’t a video game itself, but something that set out to examine the medium, taking a close and critical look at the characters that games portray and the tales that they tell.

Last year an artist fired one of their studio assistants for being pregnant. The assistant recalls: ‘As soon as I announced the pregnancy I was treated differently, spoken to as though I had made a huge mistake and told that there was no way I could continue to work at the studio with a child. Despite working as hard as I could in an attempt to prove I was managing, things deteriorated and I was eventually asked outright to leave when I had the baby, and even to forgo my rights to statutory maternity pay.'

You proudly claim the mantle of transgender ally. But are you one?

Some recent conversations I’ve had have revealed prevalent myths and misconceptions about transgender people that we need to move beyond. Simple definitions aren’t enough: we need to be talking about lived realities.

In May last year, the Centre Pompidou consigned to storage nearly all its works by male artists and ­rehung its permanent collection to show only works by women. Camille Morineau, the curator of elles@centrepompidou, said the show was "going to be dramatic in a big way". It wasn't. The art press simply ­ignored it. The Guardian was one of few newspapers to ask itself the ­question: "Is the art world finally taking work created by women seriously?"

artnet News has noticed that bias, both conscious and unconscious, is, well, rampantthroughout the world—down the hall, across the street, on the other side of that cubicle partition. It's in the umpteenth exhibition not featuring a woman. It's in the evening auction whose top winners are, well, male. It's in art schools the world over, germinating and putting down roots.

Archive of original Heresies magazine issues (1972-1992) in HD.

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"HERESIES is an idea-oriented journal devoted to the examination of art and politics from a feminist perspective."

From the intro to HERESIES #17