Ann Newmarch

The tiny 1940s snapshot on which the screenprint was based was "a little summer picture of something [Peggy] had done for a dare when a whole lot of people at a party had said ‘I bet you couldn’t lift your husband up’".

Newmarch's work, which included adding Mao's famous quote, turned it into an empowering image for women.

In it, she aimed to "show the strong encouraging aspects of women", in contrast to her earlier work focussing more on suburban alienation, and criticism of images of women in advertising.

Newmarch said of the work "It was never intended as an art image, it was intended as a confirming, joyful, cheap available poster"; however, it has had a huge impact, being exhibited all over Australia and the world.

Newmarch had a huge interest in politics, which always played a role in her work.

Her work was infused with her social, political and environmental concerns, which included Aboriginal land rights.

Ann Foster Newmarch (9 June 1945 – 13 January 2022), known as "Annie", was a South Australian painter, printmaker, sculptor and academic, with an international reputation, known for her community service to art, social activism and feminism.

Ann Foster Newmarch was born on 9 June 1945 in Adelaide, South Australia.

She graduated with a teaching diploma from the Western Teachers College in 1966 after three years' attendance there, after which she studied philosophy and psychology at Flinders University in Adelaide for a year.

She spent 1968 teaching art, at Croydon and Mitcham Girls High Schools, and became a lecturer at the South Australian School of Art in 1969, continuing there until 2000.

In 1969 she held her first solo exhibition at the Robert Bolton Gallery in Adelaide, but criticised commercial galleries for being dominated by male artists and driven by the market.

She was introduced to the women's movement in 1970 and balanced teaching, mothering and artmaking with community and cultural development work.

She worked in painting, printmaking, and sculpture, but was especially known her experimental printmaking practice, sometimes using personal imagery to make social and political points about the role of women in society.

Her art practice was concerned with the gendered basis of the world and is a practitioner whose work critiques underlying assumptions around understandings of gender.

Embracing feminism from the early 1970s, her art practice highlights that all representation is political and the absence of voice is in itself an acceptance of the status quo.

Her early work heavily featured silkscreen printing, a relatively cheap and accessible form of art, and one at which she excelled.

In 1973 to 1974 Newmarch continued to study philosophy, and also took subjects such as women's studies and politics and art at Flinders, as she evolved into an overtly political artist.

Newmarch was co-founder in 1974 of the Progressive Art Movement (PAM), which focused on political issues, social concerns, and education, and included writers, artists, filmmakers and poets among its membership.

She was a significant figure in Adelaide's Women's Art Movement (WAM), founded on 7 August 1976.

Printmaker Ruth Faerber wrote when reviewing an exhibition of Adelaide art at the Art Gallery of NSW in 1977 that PAM was "motivated by a strong Marxist sociopolitical direction, agreed to a shared program for action and a sense of immediate imperative", compared with the Experimental Art Foundation, which did not commit to a set of agreed aims, and stated that they had an "open ended" attitude against mainstream, non-conformism as against entrenched doctrines, "experimentation as against patrician formalism".

Other artists associated with PAM included:

She co-founded the Progressive Art and the Women's Art Movement (WAM) in Adelaide, and is especially known for her iconic 1978 colour screenprint piece titled Women Hold Up Half the Sky!.

Her striking image entitled Women Hold Up Half the Sky! (1978) had a huge impact on both her career and other artists, and is the most well-known of all her works.

At the end of 1978, she started running screen-printing workshops Prospect studio, and also founded the Prospect Mural Group in that year.

Newmarch's most well-known work, Women Hold Up Half the Sky! (1978) is a colour screenprint based on a photograph created in 1978, was so titled as a play on the phrase "Women hold up half the sky" made by former Chinese Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong.

Originally designed as a poster, it shows a photo of a middle-aged woman carrying a man in her arms, with the words written at the bottom.

The woman in the photo was her Aunt Peggy, a single mother who raised eight children, and by the time of the artwork, had 23 grandchildren and seven great‑grandchildren.

She much admired by Newmarch, seeing her as someone who lived an unconventional and feminist lifestyle, having mostly built a house on her own, learning the work usually done by tradespeople and doing it herself.

In 1980, after a trip to the US and UK, Newmarch and other members of WAM painted Reclaim the Night for the Adelaide Festival of Arts, featuring women staging a street protest along with word art.

In an article in Lip: A Feminist Arts Journal (1981), Newmarch wrote that with her work she aimed to reach "women who are oppressed by sexism and people who are exploited by capitalism", and that her work was not aimed at "an 'elite educated' art gallery audience who can afford to ‘invest’ in art".

She later wrote: "Art should be made out of personal experience not out of “art” concerns. Personal experience is only a useful source of art when it is accompanied by an understanding of the social conditions in which it arises. An artist has a responsibility as an image make to concerns wider than herself or her art."

She was the initiator of Stobie pole art in 1983, a practice which continues today.

In 1988, upon being invited to China along with Anne Morris on a Sino-Australian cultural exchange, the two Australian artists worked with four Chinese artists on a series of large murals in Xianyang, in Shaanxi province.

Newmarch's work is extensive and she did not hold to an individualistic prescriptive signature style.

Later, in the 1990s, her work included more sculptural objects, and after that she focused on the objects being the subjects, allowing hands and the body to become canvases for the exploration of artmaking.

Her work has been described as political, feminist, emotional, personal, and complex.

Her art practice epitomised "the personal is political", and included representations of women's unseen labour, motherhood, and other women's issues.

Newmarch was one of the first female teachers at the South Australian School of Art, and was the first woman to be the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia in 1997, The Personal is Political.

She lived and worked in the inner-northern suburb of Prospect for around 50 years, working at her studio in Beatrice Street.

She was the first person to be appointed artist-in-residence with City of Prospect.