Maud Sulter was born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1960. In 1977, Sulter left Glasgow for London, where she became an active member of black-feminist and lesbian communities. Her diverse body of work, as artist, writer and curator, prior to her untimely death in 2008, was underpinned by her desire to 'put black women back in the centre of the frame' (Thompson, 2021).
Artist, writer, educator and curator, Maud Sulter was born to a Scottish mother and Ghanaian father in Glasgow, Scotland on 19 September 1960. Her father had immigrated to the UK in 1947 (Wardlaw Museum). Despite living in the Gorbals, an area of Glasgow with a large immigrant population, Sulter experienced both racial isolation and racism during her upbringing, something she addressed in As a Black Woman (1985), her first collection of poetry. In 1977, the 16-year-old Sulter left Glasgow for London, where she became an active member of black-feminist and lesbian communities. She wrote and performed poetry, exhibited her art and, in 1982, co-founded the Blackwomen’s Creativity Project with the photographer Ingrid Pollard. That same year, Sulter became the first black woman to join the Sheba Feminist Publisher’s Collective. In 1985, she curated Check It!, a ground-breaking two-week festival at the Drill Hall, where which showcased black women’s creativity, and participated in The Thin Black Line, the landmark exhibition of work by 11 black British women artists organised by artist Lubaina Himid orgat the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London. Sulter was also awarded the Vera Bell Prize for poetry for the poem As a Blackwoman.
1990 was another important year for Sulter. She obtained a Masters in photographic theory from Derby School of Art (now University of Derby) and she and Himid co-edited Passion: Discourses on Blackwomen’s Creativity, the first British-produced publication dedicated to the work of black women artists. Passion was published by the imprint Sulter founded, Urban Fox Press, ‘a revolutionary new press for the more radical 90s’ (artist’s website). That same year, Sulter gained international recognition as an artist when she was awarded the BT New Contemporaries Award and the Momart Fellowship at Tate Liverpool. The fellowship culminated in Hysteria, a multimedia travelling installation inspired by the life of African American sculptor Edmonia Lewis, and the exhibition Echo: Work by Women Artists produced between 1850-1940, in which she brought a contemporary perspective to paintings from the Tate’s collection (Cherry, 2015; Diaspora Artists). Sulter curated approximately 20 exhibitions in her lifetime and, in 1998, she set up a gallery called Rich Women of Zurich in Clerkenwell, London to promote diversity in the arts and to provide a platform for mid-career artists. She was nominated for the European Photography Award in 1991 and, in 1995, the British Council selected her photographic series Syrcas (1993) to represent Britain at Africus, the first Johannesburg Biennale. Sulter lectured extensively on art history (specialising in women’s art practice form the mid-19th to the early 20th century) and she was Principal Lecturer in Fine Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University between 1992 and 1994.
On moving back to Scotland in the early 2000s, Sulter worked primarily as a studio photographer. In 2001, the National Portrait Gallery, London commissioned her to take six large-format Polaroid portraits of prominent children’s writers and she used the same medium when she photographed Scottish cultural figures the following year. Reflecting on her diverse body of work, Sulter suggested that it was underpinned by the ‘notion of the disappeared […] I’m very interested in absence and presence in the way that particularly black women’s experience and black women’s contribution to culture is so often erased and marginalized. So that it’s important for me as an individual, and obviously as a black woman artist, to put black women back in the centre of the frame – both literally within the photographic image, but also within the cultural institutions where our work operates’ (James, 2022).
Maud Sulter died of cancer in Dumfries, Scotland on 27 February 2008, aged 47. Her artwork is represented in numerous UK public collections, including the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Tate, and the V&A. Her written material is held across many libraries, including the Glasgow Women’s Library, the Stuart Hall Library at Iniva in London and the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh. Since her death, Sulter’s artwork has been exhibited at museums and galleries worldwide, including at Ben Uri Gallery and Museum in London, where seven photographs from the series Zabat (1989) were featured in the 2013 exhibition Looking In: Photographic Portraits by Maud Sulter and Chan Hyo-Bae and the accompanying catalogue (Barron and Butchart, 2013).
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Maud Sulter]
Publications related to [Maud Sulter] in the Ben Uri Library