Maud Sulter
Maud Sulter was a Scottish-Ghanaian artist, poet and curator whose practice interrogated the representation of Black women in the histories of art, photography and the media. Sulter grew up in Glasgow and moved to London at the age of 17 to study at the London College of Fashion. She later earned an MA in Photographic Studies from the Derby School of Art. In the early 1980s she co-founded the Blackwomen’s Creativity Project which resulted in the 1990 publication, Passion: Discourses on Blackwomen’s Creativity. It was published by Urban Fox Press, the imprint Sulter founded with artist Lubaina Himid as ‘a revolutionary new press for the more radical 90s’. In 1985, Sulter published her debut poetry collection As a Blackwoman. That same year she took part in the landmark exhibition, The Thin Black Line, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, curated by Lubaina Himid. In 1999, Sulter opened a gallery in London, named Rich Women of Zurich, where she exhibited her own works and those of women artists and artists of colour, including Claudia Clare (whose work is also represented in The Women's Art Collection).
Further Reading
Aikens, Nick, and Elizabeth Robbles (eds.). The Place is Here: The Work of Black Artists in 1980s Britain. London: Sternberg Press and Van Abbemuseum, 2019.
Himid, Lubaina. “On the Life and Work of the Late Maud Sulter (1960–2008).†In A Thousand of Him Scattered: Relative Newcomers in Diaspora, edited by Tiffany Boyle and Jessica Cardon. London: TrAIN, University of the Arts London, 2014.
Cherry, Deborah (ed.) and Maud Sulter. Maud Sulter: Passion. Altitude Editions, 2015.
Maud Sulter, “Call and Response,†Feminist Art News 2, no. 8 (Autumn, 1988): 15-17.
Selected Collections
National Galleries of Scotland: Portrait
National Portrait Gallery, London
Touchstones Rochdale
