Sick of her friends getting nowhere, she co-founded The Women in the Arts Foundation and they protested across New York. Ahead of a UK show, Roser talks about escaping wartime Shanghai – and still painting three a day

In January of 1971, the American art historian Linda Nochlin published a landmark essay, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? It was a provocation and a call to arms that was to send shockwaves through the arts establishment.

“It wasn’t just a problem for artists,” says Ce Roser, more than half a century on. “My older friends could not get shows, although they had had brilliant careers before, and that happened also to all of my friends who were poets or writers. Nobody seemed to be able to establish themselves as career artists. So we got together, we complained, and I decided we should have a meeting and really talk seriously about it.”

That first meeting at Roser’s home in New York led to the establishment of the Women in the Arts Foundation, which took to the streets to force a change in the status quo. As well as being a priceless witness to an activist movement that altered history, she is also making her own history at London’s VeneKlasen gallery this month, as the first American artist to make their European debut as a centenarian.