The Ikon Gallery is an English gallery of contemporary art, located in Brindleyplace, Birmingham. It is housed in the Grade II listed, neo-Gothic former Oozells Street Board School, designed by John Henry Chamberlain in 1877.
Emma Frith Bridgwater, known as Emmy Bridgwater, was an English artist and poet associated with the Surrealist movement.
Susan Collis is a British artist working in Hackney, London. She is known for crafting ordinary looking, everyday objects from valuable materials. In her approach to sculpture, Collis manages to elevate the mundane, celebrate traditional craft techniques, and encourage viewers to take second, closer looks.
Sokari Douglas Camp CBE is a London-based artist who has had exhibitions all over the world and was the recipient of a bursary from the Henry Moore Foundation. She was honoured as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2005 Birthday Honours list.
Elaine Kowalsky was a Canadian printmaker and artists' rights campaigner. She lived and worked in the United Kingdom for over 30 years. Her prints and various other artworks are held in public collections around the world, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.
Sylvani Merilion was an English artist and former art teacher. In 1964 she was one of the four founder members of Birmingham's Ikon Gallery.
Angus Skene was a Scottish accountant, art collector and art gallery-owner, notable as the founder of the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham.
David Prentice was an English artist and former art teacher. In 1964 he was one of the four founder members of Birmingham's Ikon Gallery.
Emma Amos was a postmodern African-American painter and printmaker.
Wendy McMurdo specialises in photography and digital media. In 2018 she was named as one of the Hundred Heroines, an award created by the Royal Photographic Society to showcase global female photographic practice.
Elizabeth Fritsch CBE is a British studio potter and ceramic artist born into a Welsh family in Whitchurch on the Shropshire border. Her innovative hand built and painted pots are often influenced by ideas from music, painting, literature, landscape and architecture.
Birmingham has a distinctive culture of art and design that emerged in the 1750s, driven by the historic importance of the applied arts to the city's manufacturing economy. While other early industrial towns such as Manchester and Bradford were based on the manufacture of bulk commodities such as cotton and wool, Birmingham's economy from the 18th century onwards was built on the production of finished manufactured goods for European luxury markets. The sale of these products was dependent on high-quality design, and this resulted in the early growth of an extensive infrastructure for the education of artists and designers and for exhibiting their works, and placed Birmingham at the heart of debate about the role of the visual arts in the emerging industrial society.
Rose Garrard is an installation, video and performance artist, sculptor, and author. Garrard's works have been exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Tate Gallery, the British Council maintained Great Britain pavilion at the 1984 Venice Biennale, and national galleries in Austria and Canada.
Vanley Burke is a British Jamaican photographer and artist. His photographs capture experiences of his community's arrival in Britain, the different landscapes and cultures he encountered, the different ways of survival and experiences of the wider African-Caribbean community.
Chila Kumari Singh Burman is a British artist, celebrated for her radical feminist practice, which examines representation, gender and cultural identity. She works across a wide range of mediums including printmaking, drawing, painting, installation and film.
Rita Keegan, is an American-born artist, lecturer and archivist, based in England since the late 1970s. She is a multi-media artist whose work uses video and digital technologies. Keegan is best known for her involvement with in the UK's Black Arts Movement in the 1980s and her work documenting artists of colour in Britain.
Ann Sutton is a British artist, author, educator and broadcaster. She gained international recognition as an innovative textile artist and designer from the 1950s and has continued to develop her making and research in other media to the present day.
Pamela Scott Wilkie is a British painter and printmaker.
Darcy Bruce Espie Lange was a New Zealand artist born in Urenui. Lange studied at the Elam School of Fine Arts (1964–1967) creating hard-edge abstract sculptures before studying at the Royal College of Art in London and shifting his focus to moving image and photography.
Judy Margaret Inglis, née Wain, was a British artist known for her oil paintings and her draughtsmanship.
