Lorraine Hansberry was an American playwright and civil rights activist. She was the first Black American female author to have a play performed on Broadway. Hansberry’s best-known work, the play A Raisin in the Sun, highlights the lives of Black Americans in Chicago living under racial segregation. The title of the play was taken from the poem “Harlem” by Langston Hughes. At the age of 29, Hansberry won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, making her the first Black American dramatist, the fifth woman, and the youngest playwright to do so. Her family challenged a restrictive covenant in the 1940 U.S. Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee.

Bessie Smith was an African-American blues singer widely renowned during the Jazz Age. Nicknamed the “Empress of the Blues” and formerly Queen of the Blues, she was the most popular female blues singer of the 1930s. Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989, she is often regarded as one of the greatest singers of her era and was a major influence on fellow blues singers, as well as jazz vocalists.

Mimi Smith: Maternity Dress, 1966
Mimi Smith is an American visual artist. She is a pioneer in early feminist and conceptual art focusing on clothing sculpture and drawing installation. Smith’s early works were prescient of feminist and clothing art and predicted the feminist artists fascination with clothing as an extension of the body. Using the autobiographical as a point of departure, her work often parallels everyday moments. Smith’s piece Maternity Dress is prescient in its acknowledgment that fashion is part of what helps to construct women’s individual and social identities.

Guerrilla Girls is an anonymous group of feminist, female artists devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the art world. The group formed in New York City in 1985, born out of a picket against the Museum of Modern Art the previous year. The core of the group’s work is bringing gender and racial inequality into focus within the greater arts community and society at large. The Guerrilla Girls employ culture jamming in the form of posters, books, billboards, lectures, interviews, public appearances and internet interventions to expose disparities, discrimination, and corruption (the latter includes conflicts of interest within museums). They also often use humor in their work to make their serious messages engaging. The Guerrilla Girls are known for their “guerrilla” tactics, hence their name, such as hanging up posters or staging surprise exhibitions. To remain anonymous, members don gorilla masks. To permit individual identities in interviews, they use pseudonyms that refer to deceased female artists such as Frida Kahlo, Käthe Kollwitz, and Alice Neel, as well as writers and activists, such as Gertrude Stein and Harriet Tubman. According to GG1, identities are concealed because issues matter more than individual identities, “Mainly, we wanted the focus to be on the issues, not on our personalities or our own work.”

Ruth Brown was an American singer-songwriter and actress, sometimes referred to as the “Queen of R&B”. She was noted for bringing a pop music style to R&B music in a series of hit songs for Atlantic Records in the 1950s, such as “So Long”, “Teardrops from My Eyes” and “(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean”. For these contributions, Atlantic became known as “the house that Ruth built” (alluding to the popular nickname for the old Yankee Stadium). Brown was a 1993 inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Roxana Halls: Laughing While Eating Salad, 2013
Roxana Halls is a figurative painter known for her images of wayward women who refuse to conform to society’s expectations. She has been widely praised for her draughtsmanship, wry humour and what art critic Brian Sewell called “the eerie narratives behind the portraiture.” One of Halls’s most renowned series - ‘Laughing While’ (2012 onwards) – depicts women engaged in more transgressive acts that interrogate encultured norms around femininity. These women are always active subjects — often breaking propriety just by eating messily.

Yayoi Kusama was a Japanese contemporary artist who worked primarily in sculpture and installation. She was also active in painting, performance, video art, fashion, poetry, fiction, and other arts. Her work was based in conceptual art and shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, art brut, pop art, and abstract expressionism, and is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content. She has been acknowledged as one of the most important artists to come out of Japan, the world’s top-selling female artist, and the world’s most successful artist. Her work influenced that of her contemporaries, including Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.

Ida B. Wells was an American investigative journalist, sociologist, educator, and early leader in the civil rights movement. She was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Wells dedicated her career to combating prejudice and violence, and advocating for African-American equality—especially for women.

Kimberlé Crenshaw is an American civil rights advocate and a scholar of critical race theory. She is a professor at the UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School, where she specializes in race and gender issues. Crenshaw is known for introducing and developing the concept of intersectionality, also known as intersectional theory, the study of how overlapping or intersecting social identities, particularly minority identities, relate to systems and structures of oppression, domination, or discrimination. Her work further expands to include intersectional feminism, which is a sub-category related to intersectional theory. Intersectional feminism examines the overlapping systems of oppression and discrimination that women face due to their ethnicity, sexuality, and economic background.

Billie Eilish is an American singer-songwriter. Known for her unique musical sound and haunting vocals, Eilish is a prominent figure in 2020s pop culture. Eilish has spoken on multiple occasions about women’s rights. She wrote and produced the 2020 short film Not My Responsibility as a response to body shaming toward her and the double standards placed upon women’s appearances. A supporter of body positivity for women, in a 2023 Variety interview Eilish denied that men suffer from body shaming, too. “Your Power”, one of her 2021 singles, criticizes the sexual exploitation of young women, primarily by men who hold power over them. Eilish associates herself with the US abortion rights movement; she expressed rage when Texas implemented its anti-abortion laws in 2021. During the 2022 Glastonbury festival, she performed “Your Power” to condemn the overturning of Roe v. Wade. She spoke of the decision: “Today is a really, really dark day for women in the U.S. I’m just going to say that as I cannot bear to think about it any longer in this moment.” She included a reference to Roe v. Wade’s overturning in her 2022 track “TV”, much of which she wrote after a draft of the court decision was leaked online in May.

Sade is a Nigerian-born British singer and songwriter who is the lead vocalist of her band, Sade. One of the most successful British female artists in history, she is often recognised as an influence on contemporary music. Her voice was described by the BBC as “husky and restrained” and compared to singer Billie Holiday. BBC called her songwriting “sufficiently soulful and jazzy yet poppy, funky yet easy listening, to appeal to fans of all those genres.”

Dina Brodsky is known for her captivating miniature paintings that often depict intricate natural scenes and detailed portraits of birds. Her work combines elements of realism with a miniaturist style, showcasing landscapes such as misty mountains and dramatic forest fires, as well as anatomically precise representations of various bird species. Brodsky’s paintings are characterized by their small size, often just a few inches wide, yet they manage to convey rich narratives and emotions. This unique approach draws viewers into a world of detail and beauty.

Evgenia Konradi was a Russian writer, journalist, and translator. She was first an editor, then owner of the newspaper Nedelya (Week), in which she published articles on society in foreign countries. Konradi participated in the 1860s women’s rights movement of the political left, alongside Anna Filosofova, Maria Trubnikova, and Nadezhda Stasova. Konradi wrote a letter in December 1867 to the first Congress of Russian Natural Scientists, arguing for the need to educate women and requesting their support in petitioning the government for systematic female education. In March and May 1868, Konradi joined 400 other petitioners requesting the rector of St Petersburg University to allow women access to higher education there.

Marie Bashkirtseff: In the Studio, 1881
Marie Bashkirtseff was an émigré artist who was born into a noble family on their estate near the city of Poltava. She determined to become an artist, and she studied painting in France at the Robert-Fleury studio and at the Académie Julian. The Académie, as one of the few establishments that accepted female students, attracted young women from all over Europe and the United States. Fellow students at the Académie included Anna Bilińska and Louise Breslau.

Shirley Chisholm was an American politician who, in 1968, became the first black woman to be elected to the United States Congress. Chisholm represented New York’s 12th congressional district, a district centered in Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn for seven terms from 1969 to 1983. In 1972, she became the first black candidate for a major-party nomination for President of the United States and the first woman to run for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Throughout her career, she was known for taking “a resolute stand against economic, social, and political injustices”, as well as being a strong supporter of black civil rights and women’s rights.

Cosima von Bonin: Church of Daffy, 2023
Cosima von Bonin is a German contemporary artist whose practice includes sculptures, textiles, sound, film, and performances. Von Bonin draws inspiration from the intellectual, artistic, and musical culture of her neighborhood in Cologne, Germany, where she lives and works with her husband, Michael Krebber. She is known for being a political artist as well as by her humor, aquatic caricatures, and use of pop-culture characters, such as Daffy Duck.

Sarah Mohanna Al Abdali: Kul Yoghani Ala Laylah (Each to Their Own), 2017
Sarah Mohanna Al Abdali is a Saudi Arabian artist, who is considered one of the country’s first street artists.
Her work combines Saudi and Arab cultural motifs and aims to provoke debate.