Before “representation” became a corporate slogan, a few people were quietly doing the actual work of it — one book, one wall, a hundred artists at a time. CURVY was one of them.
One hundred women a year
The phenomenon that is CURVY began in Sydney, Australia, in 2003 as an annual book and exhibition series championing some of the most exciting female graphic artists and illustrators on earth. Each edition shines a spotlight on 100 established and emerging female artists — a deliberately large, deliberately generous number. The point is not to crown a single star but to demonstrate abundance: to make it impossible to claim there isn't enough female talent to fill a hundred pages, every year, indefinitely.
A genuinely global net
What gives the project its texture is its reach. CURVY collaborates with women from across the globe — from the art-and-design hotspots of Paris, London, New York, Sydney and Tokyo to the lesser-known but equally powerful creative centres of Mexico, Moscow, Norway, Malta, Israel and Indonesia. By looking past the usual capitals, it builds a map of contemporary illustration that the established art press rarely draws, and lets artists working far from the centre share a page with the famous. Each annual edition builds on the momentum of the last, compounding into a rolling wave of creative and social energy.
Athena Nochua in Adelaide
The Adelaide chapter, Athena Nochua, brought the idea off the page and onto the wall — a stirring group exhibition rejoicing in the talents of female artists from Australia and around the world. A line-up of 24 powerful graphic artists and illustrators filled the cosy confines of Espionage Gallery in South Australia, opening on Thursday 13 June. The intimacy of the room was part of the message: a small space, densely hung, that insisted on the sheer quantity and range of the work.
The view from 2026
Two decades on from CURVY's first issue, the conversation it helped start has been absorbed into the mainstream — festivals, grants and platforms now exist to do, at scale, what a single self-published book once did alone. But the model still teaches something the current moment often forgets: that visibility is not a press release or a one-off campaign, it is a practice you repeat, year after year, until the absence you were correcting stops being normal. CURVY did the unglamorous, cumulative work — the same patient logic behind the cinema-preservation effort we cover in the fund that saves women's cinema. The wave it set going has not stopped.