For the past eight years, Linsey Young has held the position of Tate Britain’s curator of contemporary British art, taking on the lead role for the Turner Prize’s curation. As well as her role at the Tate, Young has also worked with 2018 Turner Prize Winner, Charlie Prodger, in the curation of her show at Scotland+Venice 2019, an international project designed to uphold Scottish creativity.
Among a heap of other projects and collaborations, Young has spent the last five years as the lead curator for Women In Revolt, a celebration of the Women’s Liberation movement from the 1970s through to the 1990s.
The exhibition, originally running from last November in Tate Britain, is now in Edinburgh’s National Galleries of Scotland: Modern Two until January 2025. Having worked for Inverleith House and the National Gallery in Edinburgh before her time with the Tate, Women in Revolt acts as a homecoming show for Linsey.
Where did the idea for Women in Revolt come from?
Being here [the Tate] for a while, I realised that I couldn’t tell – through the collection, through the objects we own – the stories of working-class women, or the stories I’m interested in: in particular the movements in British history of the 70s and 80s and 90s, and of intersectional, left-wing, queer, and radical politics.
The other massive influence for the show is my mum; I was raised by a single mum and I’m an only child. She worked as a nurse and didn’t get any support from my Dad. She was really funny; she was really glamorous; she was quite left-wing; and I grew up seeing this woman as the absolute queen of the universe, you know? This goddess. And then you go out into the working world and you realise that no one listens to a thing women say.
So I wanted to celebrate her generation of women. The post-war generation of women, who lived through seismic change. As women get older they seem to become invisible, and I wanted to make a show for women in their sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, to show them that people care about the work that they made.


Is now a particularly poignant time for Women in Revolt to exist?
Well, it’s interesting, because people say that to me a lot; but actually it’s been in the planning for five years and before that loads of other curators have had the idea of doing something like this. Also, feminist politics is always relevant because men continue to ruin everything. So there is never a moment in history where women are not pushing back against the patriarchy. So you could literally do the show at any time, which is what is so depressing about it.
However, it was really important to me: my mum died at 64 and some of the women featured in the show have also passed away. It was so important to me, and my whole team, to give these women this visibility while they could still enjoy it. One of the best things about the show is watching that happen.


You spoke with quite a few of the artists, and to the children of the artists who had passed away. How was the process of finding and talking to these people?
It was like heaven. I got funding from Jonathan Ruffer, the art fund, to travel around the UK and it was just amazing. I really wanted it to be about reciprocal conversations and not just about extracting things from people, because I think institutions have a tendency to do that. So I would go and meet people and bore them with my ideas and drink lots of tea and or wine or whatever the situation needed, and it was just lovely.
It was really, really nice to talk to people about their fears for the show… a lot of them had really been burnt by horrible reviews in the 80s. They were really scared that that was going to happen again. And it didn’t! Well, there were a couple of exceptions, but largely it’s been absolutely amazing.
How have you found the responses to the exhibition in general?
My two favourite reviews are absolutely scathing… Alastair Sooke [Telegraph] and Jackie Wullschläger [Financial Times]. I love it because it shows how scared they are of change. It shows how absolutely terrified Tories are of properly reflecting culture and properly reflecting history.
Beyond that, it’s been absolutely amazing to see people love their [featured artists’] work. A lot of the artists came to the gallery… and they came to a lot of events. They’ve got students reaching out to them, they’ve got galleries asking them for shows, or they’ve just met friends they haven’t seen for a long time.


Are you happy with how it turned out?
Oh my god, it’s better than I could have ever imagined. When I say that it’s because it has been received so fully. Every time I would open the doors to women and revolt, it was just a riot of women going, ‘Oh my God, have you seen this?’ ‘Do you remember this?’ People crying, people making friends with strangers… it felt so alive.
That is the goal, right? To make exhibitions that make people feel like they’re connected to art and feel like these things are relevant to their lives. I mean, I gotta say, I think my mum has been looking down on this exhibition.
Were there any major roadblocks in the five-year journey that was the making of the exhibition?
What is interesting to me is we couldn’t get a commercial sponsor which I actually love because it’s a show about radical women. Normally people are kind of clamouring to be commercial sponsors for Tate and it just didn’t happen.
Every time we did a presentation we’d be like ‘okay, we’re going to talk about menstruation. We’re going to talk about sex. We’re going to talk about trans inclusion. We’re going to talk about abortion.’ We even went to tampon companies… and everyone said no. So that was a stumbling block, but also I love it. It means there’s no commercial ownership over the show.
One of the things that helped there not be roadblocks was that colleagues in Edinburgh and Manchester signed up to the show almost three years ago. They really committed to it and their support meant that it was much easier to kind of build momentum here.
What’s next for you?
I have quit my job and I’m going to do a PhD, kind of as an extension of the exhibition. I got funding a few weeks ago and I’ll be taking ideas from the show and going deeper. I’ll be working on some freelance shows and I’m also writing a book about art and feminism in the nineties. Yeah, I’m being a bit of a free bird for a while!
Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990 at National Galleries Scotland: Modern Two till 26th January 2025. More information available here.
Main Photo credit: Julie Howden