Most collection displays are a gallery showing you its best things. Taking Centre Stage, at The Atkinson in Southport until 27 February 2027, is doing something more awkward and more interesting than that. It is a gallery showing you what it has by women artists, and being fairly direct about everything it does not have.
The exhibition runs from Alice Mary Havers (1850-1890) through Dame Laura Knight (1877-1970) to Dame Tracey Emin (b.1963), tracing a line from traditional modes of representation to contemporary practice. Painting sits alongside sculpture, ceramics and textiles, and more recent acquisitions bring in photography, film, digital and mixed-media work.
It opened on 13 June and has a long run ahead of it, which means there is no rush, but also no excuse.
The under-representation of women artists in museum and gallery collections is well documented and not remotely unique to Southport. What is less common is a gallery saying so on the wall.
The Atkinson has committed to addressing these historical inequities through how it collects and how it programmes, and this exhibition is presented as part of that ongoing reflection rather than as a one-off celebration. It spotlights the women artists already in the collection while acknowledging the wider absences that shape the story art history tells about itself.
That framing changes how you walk around it. You end up reading the show partly as a list of what is present and partly as an outline of what is missing, which is a more useful exercise than admiring forty good pictures in a row. If you make work yourself, it also raises an uncomfortable and practical question about which artists end up in public collections at all, and on what basis.
One detail worth holding onto: The Atkinson has been collecting contemporary art since the 1870s. Every acquisition reflects the moment it was made in, which means the collection functions as a slow record of changing taste rather than a fixed canon.
That is why the range of media here is so wide. A collection that has been buying for a century and a half accumulates painting and sculpture first, then ceramics and textiles, then photography, film and digital work as those things arrive. Seeing them in one room makes the shifts visible in a way a single-period display never could.
The exhibition explicitly invites visitors into the conversation about where the collection goes next. That is worth taking seriously rather than treating as a formality, particularly if you work in a medium the collection is thin on.
Among the works on display is Laura Knight's "Portrait of Ethel Bartlett" from 1926, which the gallery has used as the exhibition's lead image. Knight is one of the few women artists of her generation whose name reliably makes it into general accounts of British art, and that fact is itself part of what the show is examining.
The talk that accompanied the exhibition in July, "Where Are All The Women Artists?" by Dr Julia Clayton, opened with a question worth carrying round the galleries with you: can you tell, just by looking at a work, whether it was made by a man or a woman? The answer is almost always no, which makes the historical sorting harder to explain away as anything other than what it was.
For painters in particular, the run from Havers to Knight to the present offers a useful century and a half of technical comparison, quite apart from the argument the show is making.
Worth flagging separately: The Atkinson, with The Arts Society Southport, is running its fifth Poetry & Creative Writing Competition, and this year entrants are asked to respond creatively to works in Taking Centre Stage.
It is open to anyone aged 18 or over with a connection to the Sefton borough, and the deadline for entries is Sunday 18 October. All entries go on The Atkinson's website, winners receive prizes donated by The Arts Society Southport, and winning work is displayed in the art gallery for visitors to read.
If you work across writing and image making, or know someone who does, that is a genuine opportunity with a real audience attached, and the entry route is straightforward.
Taking Centre Stage: Female Artists in The Atkinson's Collection runs at The Atkinson, Lord Street, Southport, PR8 1DB, from 13 June 2026 until 27 February 2027. Entry is free.
The galleries are open Monday to Saturday, 10am to 4pm, and closed on Bank Holidays. That weekday and Saturday pattern is worth noting if you had a Sunday visit in mind, because you will find the doors shut.
The Atkinson is currently showing several exhibitions at once, including Brian & George Fell and the Sefton Young Artist of the Year, so it is worth checking what else is running on the day you go. Full details and any associated talks are best confirmed on The Atkinson's own website before travelling.