The Nine of Pentacles is a card of success and accomplishment. It represents the achievement of that kind of confidence and security that comes from having created something solid, something real, that you can now relax and enjoy. It’s a card of abundance and gratitude too. It represents feeling rich and strong in a really good way, having earned good things and appreciating them.
Some accomplished women use their good fortune to leave a rich legacy. Sheila: A Foundation for Women in Visual Art is one example of such a legacy.
Known simply as ‘Sheila’, this foundation was launched in May 2019. ‘Sheila’ aims “to overturn decades of gender bias by writing Australian women artists back into our art history and ensuring equality for today’s women artists.” Sheila now supports female artists by purchasing and commissioning works; by providing scholarships for female art historians and curators; and by hosting an annual symposium on female Australian art.
This foundation exists because of the ground work of Lady Sheila Cruthers. The late Lady Sheila Cruthers was a passionate advocate for female artists. Leaving school at 14, Sheila had dreams of being a lawyer. She never got the chance, becoming instead a wife and mother. But this ambition, says Cruthers, channeled itself in other ways. In the 1970s she started to collect female Australian artists, dating from the contemporary back to the 1880s. (Just over 18% of the collection is Aboriginal.)
In 2007, the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art – the country’s largest collection of its kind – was gifted to the University of Western Australia. Now housed at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery in Perth, her collection numbers over 700 works and is the largest, and the only stand-alone, collection of its kind in the country.
Waltzing With Matilda's 