Barbara Walker, a British artist who draws huge portraits of Black people onto gallery walls, and Jesse Darling, a sculptor whose works evoke fragile bodies, are among the artists nominated for this year’s Turner Prize, the prestigious British visual arts award.

The four-strong shortlist was announced on Thursday at a news conference at the Tate Britain art museum in London.

Walker, 58, is perhaps the highest-profile artist to be nominated, with works in the collections of Tate, the British Museum and the Yale Center for British Art.

She is nominated for “Burden of Proof,” which appeared last year at the Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates, and included charcoal portraits of people affected by Britain’s “Windrush scandal,” in which some long-term British residents, originally from the Caribbean, were misidentified as illegal immigrants and threatened with deportation. Walker drew these portraits directly onto the gallery walls, as well as onto copies of the paperwork that the British government demanded the residents produce.

In a 2020 interview with The New York Times, Walker, who did not go to art school until her late 20s and gradually built a career in middle age, said that her work could be about reclaiming visibility for people society ignores. “With visibility comes worth, and with worth comes humanity,” Walker said.

Darling, 41, was nominated for two recent solo exhibitions at British museums that included sculptures made using clay and metal mobility aids, bent so that they looked like they were crawling across the floor.

At Thursday’s news conference, Melanie Keen, the director of the Wellcome Collection and one of the Turner Prize judges, praised Darling’s “fragile and often precarious sculptures” evoking vulnerable bodies.

Founded in 1984, the Turner Prize is one of the art world’s major awards. Many of its past winners, who include Steve McQueen, Damien Hirst and Gilbert & George, have become global stars. Every year British art critics use the prize as an excuse to praise, bemoan or mock the state of contemporary art.

Last year, the prize went to Veronica Ryan, a sculptor whose work has been shown at the Whitney Biennial.

Alongside Walker and Darling, the other nominees are:

• Ghislaine Leung, an installation artist nominated for “Fountains” at the Simian exhibition space in Copenhagen, Denmark. That show featured water pouring through the building’s ceiling and a baby monitor that visitors could use to observe the gallery’s staff at work. Helen Nisbet, the artistic director of the Art Night festival and one of this year’s judges, said at Thursday’s news conference that Leung, 42, impressed the jury “with her rethinking of the gallery space” and work filled with “warmth, humanity and humor.”

• Rory Pilgrim, a multimedia artist and musician, nominated for “Rafts,” a film shown at London’s Serpentine Gallery that included residents of the city making art and music and reading poems about the coronavirus pandemic and climate change. The film received mixed reviews in Britain. Ben Luke, writing in The Evening Standard, said it was “often heartbreakingly beautiful,” while Eddy Frankel, writing in Time Out, called it “cold and stilted.”

The winner of this year’s prize will be announced on Dec. 5 in a ceremony at Towner Eastbourne, a museum in southern England. The winner will receive 25,000 pounds, about $31,000. An exhibition of the nominees’ work will run at the same museum from Sep. 28 through Apr. 14.