The artist, critic and curator Cordelia Oliver was an integral figure in Scottish art from the late 1950s to her death in 2009. A graduate of Glasgow School of Art with no formal training in curation or criticism, Oliver gave up her career as a painter to become a freelance critic and curator, a dual role which allowed her to offer a unique perspective on the production and reception of contemporary art from Scotland over five decades. Her curatorial work focussed on enhancing the reputation of Scottish art in a British and international context.

A founding member of Glasgow’s Third Eye Centre, she went on to curate a large number of exhibitions throughout the 1970s and 1980s which, considered in retrospect, reveal an implicit yet sustained effort to foreground and champion art by women in Scotland. A close associate and supporter of the artist and gallerist Richard Demarco, Oliver also worked on a number of projects which sought to introduce (mainly European) avant-garde and cross-disciplinary practices to the relatively staid and conservative art institutions of 1970s Scotland (including the seminal 1970 exhibition Strategy: Get Arts, held at Edinburgh College of Art). This article will focus on Oliver’s activities as a ‘maker of exhibitions’ (a term she preferred to ‘curator’) looking in particular at her position as an artist-curator, a polymathic ‘participant observer’ of the artists she critiqued and exhibited.