Betye Saar⁣⁣

Saar was a key player in the post-war American legacy of assemblage. Her attitude toward identity, assemblage art, and a visual language for Black art can be seen in the work of contemporary African-American artist Radcliffe Bailey, and Post-Black artist Rashid Johnson.

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Helen Chadwick

Helen Chadwick was a pioneering British artist who expanded the boundaries of Body Art – from the principally performative and shouting to be heard practice of the 1970s – towards a more intellectual, complex, and sensuous language.

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Hēni Hoana Tōpia

Mereana Tōpia, better known as Maria, and her daughter Hēni Hoana or Jane Tōpia, were outstanding leaders in their local communities. Among their many activities they fostered the practice of traditional Māori arts and crafts.

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Eileen Agar

Eileen Agar helped to shape the development of Surrealism in Britain, a contribution made all the more impressive by the fact that she was one of only a few women associated with the movement. Her work continues to be exhibited in galleries all across the world, while the impact of her aesthetics can also be seen in the work of contemporary artists crafting their own versions of Surrealism.

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Pauline Boty

Unlike her few other female contemporaries, such as Bridget Riley, Boty refused to to negate her feminine side and was not overly concerned with seeming serious, intellectual or dispassionate at the expense of her true self. Boty instead celebrated these supposedly “feminine” traits. Her work came unabashedly from a woman’s perspective and it was emotionally engaged and celebratory towards women’s sexual desires.

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Julia Margaret Cameron

Cameron embraced the ambiguity around her portraits and cultivated it intentionally, making her a forerunner to the Pictorialist photographers, particularly Gertrude Kasiber and Heinrich Kühn, and also an inspiration to Surrealist photography thereafter.

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Lygia Clark

By breaking down the barriers between art and life, Clark challenged received ideas about what art could or should be. Accordingly, she is a major reference point for contemporary artists dealing with the limits of conventional forms of art.

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Tania Bruguera

Forcing awareness and reassessments of historical and current socio-political issues in Cuba, her legacy comes not only from her work itself, but also the media coverage of her numerous arrests, incarcerations, and interrogations by Cuban authorities, who view her work as a threat to their political system.

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VALIE EXPORT

EXPORT was a pioneer of engagements with intermedia and this has been influential on subsequent generations of new media practitioners, particularly in relation to Feminism.

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Hedda Sterne

Hedda Sterne lived to be one hundred years old, and within those years had a prolific and unceasingly experimental artistic career. She was an early Surrealist, her beguiling and disturbing collages reminiscent of Dora Maar, but she achieved most of her fame when she was grouped with the Abstract Expressionists in New York in the 1940s and 1950s.

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