Pygmalion is an automaton based on the laughing policeman one might encounter at a funfair. To some this might represent a figure of fun, to others it conjures up the grotesque. Rodney's version features the blackened face of Michael Jackson, wearing a Jeri-curl wig, gold-trimmed jacket and customary single silver glove. Pygmalion points to the dichotomy of Jackson's fame and infamy. Moreover, it asks wider questions of constructs of race and colourism and Black masculinities.

Piper made these works the year after the 'Black Art An' Done' exhibition at Wolverhampton Art Gallery in 1981, in which he exhibited whilst still an art student. Like many of his works of the period, this pair of drawings combines images and text. The Black male and female figures are presented 'naked', with only part of their heads visible, suggesting an incomplete identity. The text around each figure describes feelings of fear and desire. The images explore power relationships and the objectification of the Black body – themes that recur in Piper's work over the following decades.

This work depicts a young Black woman imbued with a sense of confidence, although she does not meet the audience's gaze. While Johnson's drawings are often referred to as portraits, the artist suggests that they sit outside portraiture; the figures inhabit an undefined space that makes no reference to the sitter's personal history or location. In her large-scale drawings, Johnson uses varied mark-making techniques to investigate her interest in the Black figure, creating a place where race, gender and belonging collide.

This drawing marks a stark contrast to the Western tradition of the female nude. Whereas the conventional 'nude' is presented as a passive figure to be viewed by others, Johnson's standing figure is depicted as a 'naked' woman whose physical and emotional presence fills the space, as she holds our gaze. The writer and curator Gilane Tawadros has commented on the agency Johnson instils in her naked figures, 'thereby extracting them from a conventional art history of female representation'.

Claudette Johnson's 'Trilogy' series personifies the idea of the Black gaze. Through the act of painting Black women, Johnson brings into being subjects that have historically been rendered invisible within Western art. The female figures in each of these works take up the entire picture space, becoming the sole focus of the frame. By centralising the lives of Black women in paintings and drawings in the early to mid-1980s, Johnson developed a feminist approach to portraiture that forcefully challenges the Westernised male gaze.

This striking large acrylic painting on raw hessian canvas is smeared and dripped with blood-red paint. The left section shows three portraits of glowering Black men baring their teeth. On the right, two further portraits of Black men stare out from the canvas, faces composed but defiant. This work references the conflict between Kenyan Kikuyu groups known as the Mau Mau and British colonial forces in the 1950s. Piper's vivid painting evokes the colonial fear and projection of 'savagery', as well as the strength of a people defending their land. The graffiti-like text features the activist slogans 'no Barclaycards here' and 'no little white lies'.

Purchased by the Arts Council in 1984, this was one of the first works by the 1980s generation of young Black artists to enter a public collection in the UK.

This is a print of an original mixed-media work made in 1987. It depicts the bridal party at the wedding of Smith's Wolverhampton-based uncle. The wedding took place in July 1964 at the New Testament Church of God in Heath Town, Wolverhampton. The 1960s saw many families move to Wolverhampton from Commonwealth countries, and many young people began their married lives with the hope of a bright future in the 'Motherland'.

This small sculptural construction was made using everyday found items. Smith used a solution of sugar and water to stiffen a doily, which she then fixed inside a drawer. This is a companion piece to her earlier work, Art History (1987), now in Sheffield Museums Trust collection. Smith says she was struck by the way the doily moved and swayed. The sugar water solution has frozen that movement in time.