Margery Somers Foster Center

The Mabel Smith Douglass Library and Douglass College at Rutgers have been at the nexus of contemporary women's art since the beginning of the 1970s. This came as the result of the founding of the Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series at the Douglass Library in 1971. Many individuals involved with the Series received unsolicited mailings from artists and art venues that over time accumulated in the library. The Contemporary Women Artists Files (CWAF) was established to organize and make these materials available to library users. The CWAF presently contains information on over 1500 women artists and continues to grow each day.

In 1994, Ferris Olin, then curator of the Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series, established the Contemporary Women Artists Archive to organize and preserve any documentation supplied by women artists about themselves or by exhibition venues. Many of the artists had, through the open submissions policy of the Women Artists Series, sent materials for consideration, but were not selected for exhibition in the series. Yet, their documents were held as a record of their careers. Artist materials of this kind collected prior to 1994 were retroactively transferred to the Contemporary Women Artists Archive. In addition, exhibition announcements received from other artists or galleries were collected and maintained in individual artist files.

In 2006, the Contemporary Women Artists Archive was renamed the Contemporary Women Artists Files, so as to more accurately reflect its contents.