Women artists currently make up just 1% of the National Gallery collection in London, while 2023 marks the first time the Royal Academy of Arts has ever hosted a solo exhibition by a woman – Marina Abramović – in their main space. Curator and art historian Katy Hessel, who created the @thegreatwomenartists Instagram account, challenges the art canon as we know it and showcases the female and gender non-conformist artists who are so often excluded from the history books, shining a spotlight on the glittering paintings of Sofonisba Anguissola of the Renaissance, the radical work of Harriet Powers in the nineteenth-century US, the astonishing work of post-war artists in Latin America and the women artists defining art in the 2020s.
