Vivian Lynn

Vivian Lynn (born 1931) is a New Zealand artist.

Lynn was born in Wellington in 1931 and attended Wellington Girl's College from 1945 to 1948. She completed a Diploma of Fine Arts at the School of Fine Arts at Canterbury University majoring in painting in 1952, and a Diploma of Teaching at Auckland Teachers College in 1954. At art school her lecturers included Rata Lovell-Smith, Bill Sutton and Russell Clark. Lynn recalls the curriculum being focused on the history of Western art, with little attention to New Zealand or contemporary art, although she did meet artists such as Colin McCahon, Toss Woollaston, Doris Lusk and Rita Angus and see their work in The Group exhibitions.

Lynn was one of the first New Zealand artists to address feminist issues in their work, beginning in 1968. She was an active supporter of the women's art movement in New Zealand and in 1983–84 was involved in setting up the Women's Art Archive.

Lynn was featured in a special issue of the New Zealand feminist magazine Broadsheet published in 1983, focused on feminist art. In an interview Lynn discussed how during World War II she had seen both her parents working in jobs, raising their children and sharing family chores. She continued:

There was value placed on women’s work because it was politically expedient for it to be so in the early 1940s ... so I had formative years where I was conditioned to expect equality. But social values changed after the War as women were required to be wives and mothers again, rather than members of the paid workforce. A profession and marriage were again presented as mutually exclusive.

Lynn has worked across a wide range of media, including collages, drawings, paintings, prints, books, sculptures, photographs and installations.

In 1972 Lynn spent a year in America where she developed her interest in printmaking; throughout the 1970s she worked with this medium, producing works such as Book of Forty Images (1973–1974) and Playground,, which explore 'the reasons behind women's social and political oppression'.

In 1977–1979 Lynn produced a series of works on paper, now held in the Christchurch Art Gallery, in which she reworked drawings and life studies made at art school, in a comment on 'the sexual politics of the Western art historical tradition'.

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