A woman artist’s archive is never just her own. Every letter, sketch or diary entry she leaves behind speaks to the struggles, triumphs and silences of countless women who came before her. To preserve one artist’s traces is to honour the many others whose voices were silenced, scattered, or forgotten.
While in art school, I came across a groundbreaking essay by American art historian Linda Nochlin: Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?. Nochlin argued that women were not absent from art because they lacked talent. They were absent because the systems around them — academies, institutions, publishers, even families — excluded them. Her words revealed that what we call “art history” is not neutral but shaped by power, access, and bias.
That bias is visible in books still considered foundational today. E. H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art, first published in 1950, remains one of the most widely read introductions to art history. Yet its English and French editions include no women artists at all, while the later German edition mentions just one. Books like these are not formal archives, but they function as such: they define what is remembered, who is celebrated, and who is forgotten. And when women are left out of these narratives, their contributions become harder to trace, harder to value, and easier to forget.
Working with the archive of Dutch ceramicist Babs Haenen has shown me what it means to challenge that assumed silence. At first glance, her archive looks ordinary: exhibition catalogues, studio notes, glaze experiments, photographs. Yet as we build the database, its survival feels extraordinary. For many women artists, such records were never kept, nor recognized. Every file in Babs Haenen’s archive tells more than her personal story; it reflects the precariousness of women’s visibility in art as a whole.
A powerful example of how women should be portrayed in the art world can be found in AWARE (Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions), a nonprofit based in Paris. Through their database, research, and exhibitions, they reveal how women artists’ presence and absence in history are deeply connected. Their work shows that one woman’s archive is never just her own, but part of a broader effort to bring women’s stories back into art history and our shared cultural memory.
History is full of such erasures. Artemisia Gentileschi’s David and Goliath (c. 1600s) was long attributed to a male artist, until conservation work in 2020 revealed her hidden signature along the blade of David’s sword. For almost 400 years, her authorship was literally covered over, a striking metaphor for how women’s contributions were obscured or erased from view. Artemisia’s act of signing in “common view” can be read as a deliberate strategy, almost an early act of archiving to secure her place in history.
The same is true in ceramics, long dismissed as “craft” associated with domesticity. Women’s work with clay was rarely recognized as art, let alone preserved in archives. And yet, through Babs Haenen’s dynamic forms and fearless use of colour, we see how ceramics can embody innovation, movement and artistic vision equal to any medium. Preserving her archive, then, is not just about one career; it is about reclaiming the legacy of an entire field and honouring the women who came before her. Ultimately, her digital archive will reflect the echoes of all the women whose stories were lost: the artists dismissed as craftswomen, the names erased from catalogues, the voices silenced by institutions or cultural norms.
Archiving women’s art is not just preservation. It is about recognition and a promise to the future: that we will not let women artists be overlooked ever again.
Marilia Fara
Your reflection makes clear how an archive can never be neutral. The absence of women in canonical texts like Gombrich’s shows how omission itself becomes a kind of archive, one that preserves silence rather than memory. The work you describe with Babs Haenen’s materials feels like a powerful counterpoint — demonstrating how even “ordinary” records gain weight when set against a history of exclusion. To preserve them is to insist that women’s contributions to art are not peripheral, but integral, and must be continually written back into history!