Herrera’s legacy also lies in the example of her late-blooming career. Like other women artists such as Louise Bourgeois, her life has been dedicated to art, but she did not find an audience for her work until she was very old. Her legacy, then, is not just about her painting but about her tenacious creative perseverance in the face of an indifferent, oar biased, world.
Piper’s distinctly confrontational ability to address pertinent topics around racial segregation and stereotyping have established her voice as one which is fearless, powerful, and hugely influential.
Margaret Preston was a leading painter, printmaker and designer.
War internee and artist, Miné Okubo is well known for her representations of daily life and humanity. She is most famous for her drawings depicting Japanese and Japanese American internment during World War II.
Rachel Ruysch was a Dutch still-life painter who specialized in flowers, creating her own style and earning international fame in her lifetime. With a long and successful career that spanned more than 60 years, she became the most well-documented woman painter of the Dutch Golden Age.
Virginie Bovie was a Belgian painter and arts patron, well-known in her time but later largely forgotten. Current whereabouts are only known for seven of her more than 200 works.
Lili Elbe was a Danish painter – successful under her birth name Einar Magnus Andreas Wegener – and transgender woman who was an early recipient of sex reassignment surgery.
Although Élisabeth-Sophie Chéron is best remembered today as a painter, she was actually a true Renaissance woman, acclaimed during her lifetime as a talented poet, musician, artist, and academicienne. In her childhood, she was trained by her father in the arts of enamelling and miniature painting. Under the sponsorship of the prominent artist Charles Le Brun, she was admitted to the Académie Royale of Paris as a portrait painter in 1672. She exhibited regularly at the Salon in Paris, while also producing poetry and translations; she was fluent in Hebrew, Greek and Latin. Chéron’s literary talent was recognized in 1694 when she was named a member of Italy’s Accademia dei Ricovrati in Padua, and given the academician name of Erato, after the muse of lyric and love poetry.
Norwegian feminist writer and artist
Vanessa Bell was an English painter and interior designer, and the sister of Virginia Woolf.