This joyful portrait of Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Walker is part of Maud Sulter’s iconic series Zabat, which features large-scale photographs of contemporary Black women in the guise of the Greek Muses. The series, which the artist called a ‘diasporan family portrait’, challenges the invisibility of Black women in Western art history. The sitters’ front-facing poses and elaborate props recall Victorian studio photography. Instead of their usual attributes the Muses hold objects which interweave the histories of Africa, America and Europe. Alice Walker is cast as Thalia, the Muse of idyllic poetry. Thalia is deliberately misspelt in the title as Phalia, the name of a city in Pakistan, reflecting Sulter’s interest in wordplay.

Part-painting, part-sculpture, this work depicts Judith Leyster – a Dutch Golden Age artist who was prominent and successful during her lifetime but fell into posthumous obscurity when her works were misattributed to her male contemporaries. The work is part of Garrard’s Madonna Triptych series which recreates self-portraits by three historic women artists. Each portrait has an elaborate plaster frame with casts of objects from the artist’s childhood which are laden with symbolism. In Madonna Cascade, the tumbling plaster casts are based on a figurine of the Virgin Mary that was placed next to Garrard’s bed by her Catholic mother. Garrard reclaims women artists of the past and interrogates the reasons they were lost to history.

This quiet domestic scene depicts the artist’s kitchen with her mother seated at the table. The luminous colours convey the impression of dusk, mirroring her mother’s old age and physical frailty. The large red mug which stands centre stage further emphasises the figure’s small stature. Born into a Jewish family in Berlin, Marlene Rolfe’s mother Ilse was a member of the German Communist Party and spent three years in Nazi concentration camps before emigrating to England. Born in 1946, Rolfe herself knew almost nothing of this family history until the 1980s after which it became the focus of much of her work. In her own words, she aims to record ‘personal, private histories and continuities’, as well as ‘women’s work and women’s language’.

Often taking inspiration from the folklore of her native Portugal, in this painting Paula Rego depicts the macabre tale of the 14th-century Portuguese noblewoman Inês de Castro. The story goes that Inês was murdered by the King and then exhumed and coronated by her lover, the Prince. Rego has described her work as a subversion of hierarchies: ‘I can turn the tables and make women stronger than men’. In her interpretation of the tale of Inês, Rego foregrounds her female protagonist so that she dominates the composition, even in death. The gold and red colour palette and the characters’ courtly pose mimic the appearance of a medieval illuminated manuscript. The painting explores themes of violence and nationalism, but also eternal love.

Anya Paintsil directly draws on her Welsh-Ghanaian heritage to create her distinctive textile pieces. She uses rug-hooking, passed down by generations of Welsh women in her family. She also employs Black and Afro hairstyling techniques, often integrating real and synthetic hair into the works themselves as both a personal and political act. She aims to elevate traditional craft-based practices associated with women of colour and working-class women. Blodeuwedd is part of Paintsil’s series of portraits of women from Welsh folklore, which challenges the assumption that to be Welsh means to be white. Blodeuwedd, the central character in the tale of Math fab Mathonwy, translates from Middle Welsh as ‘Flower Face’.