STOCKBRIDGE — Do you know Alice Ball? In 1915, she developed the first effective leprosy treatment, decades before antibiotics.

Ball, a Black woman born in 1892, was a chemist at what is now the University of Hawaii. She died at 24, possibly from chlorine poisoning in the lab, before publishing her research. The school’s president, Arthur Dean, and chemistry professor Richard Wrenshall picked up the baton and published without giving her credit.

Illustrator Anita Kunz painted Ball’s portrait, along with more than 450 others, for her project “Original Sisters.’’ Isolated at home during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, she occupied herself researching and painting a woman each day. Many, like Ball, were largely lost to history. Others are still living. In 2021, Kunz published a book, “Original Sisters: Portraits of Tenacity and Courage.’’

A substantial 287 of them are on view at the Norman Rockwell Museum in an exhibition by the same name, a delightful pantheon of brave, quirky, inventive, and pioneering women. Three of those portraits — of women with ties to the Berkshires — Kunz has donated to the museum: author Edith Wharton; Elizabeth Freeman, an enslaved woman who successfully filed a lawsuit for freedom in Massachusetts in 1781; and Shannon Holsey, now president of the Stockbridge-Munsee Community Band of Mohican Indians.

The artist is best known for her magazine covers. Some of those muscular and often waggish illustrations sparkle in the first of three “Original Sisters’’ galleries. Mona Lisa blocks unwanted attention with her hand in a 2022 New Yorker cover, “No Photos Please.’’ John Belushi brandishes his Samurai sword on the front of the Rolling Stone issue marking “Saturday Night Live’’’s 40th anniversary, in 2015.

“Original Sisters’’ has a reverent tone leavened by Kunz’s direct style, and sometimes by her winking humor. She portrays painter Margaret Keane with saucer eyes, Keane’s own trademark. She, too, had her fire stolen by a man. Starting in the 1950s, her husband Walter Keane claimed to be the author of her paintings. A 1986 paint-off in court proved his fraud.

Kunz is mostly straightforward with these nimble depictions against spare backgrounds. Working from source imagery, she conveys depth of personality with simple strokes and subtle shading. But sometimes there are no sources The original Original Sister, reaching furthest back in time, is anonymous, a Paleolithic artist of cave paintings in France and Spain. Researchers had long assumed male authorship of cave art, but a study published in 2013 upended that theory.

This show describes a bounteous, feminine family tree from that cave painter to women now in their 20s: Climate activist Greta Thunberg, who in Kunz’s rendering wears a crown of leaves, and Malala Yousafzai, shot by the Taliban at 15, now an education advocate for girls and women, here smiling warmly.

Kunz’s book takes readers through the portraits in alphabetical order, but Curator of Exhibitions Jane Dini’s artful installation of wall-filling grids is more fluid, with no particular grouping of, say, athletes, artists, or religious figures, like Saint AEbbe the Younger. Legend has it she chopped off her nose and those of her monastic charges to keep them safe from rape by Viking invaders near the coast of Scotland more than a millennium ago. She’s bloody here, but prayerful. The story may be the source of the phrase “cutting off her nose to spite her face,’’ Kunz reports in a wall label.

There’s no hierarchy to Dini’s freewheeling design, and that seems fitting — power structures snatched the spotlights from many of these women to begin with. The show invites us to follow our eyes and our instincts. Colors find a rhythm and the mind roves, making associations.

“Original Sisters’’ was designed and hung before Election Day, and Kamala Harris takes center stage in the center gallery, mouth determined, eyes compassionate. As the first woman vice president in the United States, Harris was an early subject. Kunz, who wrote the labels herself, makes no mention of her late sprint for the presidency.

Alberta Odell Jones, a civil rights activist and one of the first Black women to pass the Kentucky bar, has a portrait next to Harris’s. She was murdered in 1965 at 34; the assailant remains unknown. On Harris’s other side: Joan of Arc, the 15th-century girl who led the French army to defeat the English, and ultimately captured by the enemy and burned for heresy and witchcraft. Mavericks all.

In March, United Nation’s Secretary-General António Guterres said the rights of women and girls are under threat and patriarchy is “regaining ground.’’ Indeed, last month the UN reported that nearly one in three women around the world has experienced gender-based violence.

Today “Original Sisters’’ feels urgent. It’s a heartening tether between untold histories and a threatening future. As a woman standing in Kunz’s hall of sisters, I felt a knot inside me loosen. Look who we are, I thought. Look what we can do.