Art by Lubaina Himid

Himid, born in Zanzibar and raised in Britain, became the first Black woman to win the Turner Prize, in 2017, after a career spent for decades working largely outside the mainstream institutional spotlight, both making her own art and curating and championing other Black British artists. Her installation Naming the Money, a hundred life-size cutout figures representing enslaved Africans given invented names, trades, and voices, directly confronts how history erases individual identity behind the abstraction of statistics and labor. Winning the Turner Prize at 63, after decades of comparatively little institutional recognition, made her one of the prize's most pointed statements about how late official validation can arrive.