Lubaina Himid was born in 1954 in Zanzibar, Tanzania, and currently lives and works in Preston, United Kingdom. She received a BA at Wimbledon College of Art in 1976 and an MA from the Royal College of Art in 1984. Through her paintings, installations, and sculptures, Himid creates platforms for viewers to engage with pressing questions about race, gender, class, and history. Working on traditional canvases, cut-out cardboard portraits, or repurposed domestic furniture, the artist calls attention to forgotten marginalized histories and people and connects them to the present. An early pioneer of the Black Arts Movement, Himid has been an advocate for inclusion in the art world, curating exhibitions and creating spaces for Black female artists in the United Kingdom.

Guerrilla Girls are an anonymous collective of women artist-activists who began working together in 1985. Working across various media, the collective challenges the systems and individuals perpetuating discrimination and inequality in the art world by publicly sharing data and statistics about the representation of women and artists of color in commercial and institutional art spaces. Embracing the disruptive, confrontational, and irreverent, Guerrilla Girls draw from street art and the legacies of feminist activism to launch their critique of the art world.

Repetition and revision are central to Ellen Gallagher’s  treatment of advertisements that she appropriates from popular magazines like Ebony and Our World. Initially drawn to wig advertisements because of their grid-like structure, she later realized that it was the accompanying language that attracted her. Gallagher began to bring these “narratives” into her paintings—making them function through the characters of the advertisements, as a kind of chart of lost worlds. Although the work has often been interpreted strictly as an examination of race, Gallagher also suggests a more formal reading with respect to materials, processes, and insistences. From afar, the work appears abstract and minimal; upon closer inspection, googly eyes, reconfigured wigs, tongues, and lips of minstrel caricatures multiply in detail.

Whether questioning consumerist impulses, describing torture, or lamenting death and disease, Jenny Holzer’s use of language provokes a response in the viewer. While her subversive work often blends in among advertisements in public space, its arresting content violates expectations. Holzer’s texts—such as the aphorisms “Abuse of power comes as no surprise” and “Protect me from what I want”—have appeared on posters and condoms, and as electronic LED signs and projections of xenon light.