Exhibition celebrating women who changed the world

Hull Museums are bringing an exhibition celebrating women who changed the world to the Museums Quarter, with portraits by Doncaster-based artist Chinwe Russell taking centre stage. It's split across the Streetlife Museum and Wilberforce House Museum, so you'll be moving between the two to see the full collection.

Russell is a Nigerian British painter, and her work here is bold and vivid, giving a lot of energy to the stories of scientists, artists and civil rights pioneers. The whole series spans from the 1500s right through to the present day, and it's a wide-ranging mix: royalty sits alongside modern inventors like Stephanie Kwolek, who invented Kevlar, and well-known figures like Marie Curie, Zaha Hadid and Florence Nightingale. It's not just one era or one field, so you'll find people from completely different centuries and backgrounds sharing the same walls.

There's a bit of a story behind how it came together, too. Russell found the spark for the series back in 2018 while watching Magnificent Century, the Netflix show that follows Hurrem Sultan's rise from slave girl to the official queen of Suleiman the Magnificent. From there, the collection took eighteen months to complete and has been touring the UK since 2021, so it's had plenty of time to find its feet before arriving here.

The exhibition is part of Hull Museums' wider 2026 programme, and the Museums Quarter revamp itself is part of the £27.5m Hull Maritime scheme devoted to the city's maritime heritage. Entry to Hull Museums and the Ferens Art Gallery is free, so you can wander through without spending a penny.