The work of the Scots-Ghanaian artist, writer and curator Maud Sulter (1960–2008) embodied many of the characteristics of what is now often referred to as ‘art writing’ or experimental writing within the fields of visual art and art history. Sulter’s practice, spanning photography, collage, installation, poetry, activism, publishing, curating and teaching, frequently challenged the boundaries between these areas of enquiry. Her writing performed her politic and consistently sought to, in Sulter’s words, ‘put black women back in the centre of the frame’.
In 1988’s Call and Response she subverted the conventions of academic writing, adopting a highly personal, manifesto-like register in her demand for the visibility and acknowledgement of ‘Blackwomen's representation and position in a white heterosexist male-dominated world’. In 1989’s Zabat Narratives, she created object biographies for her black foremothers, allowing reimagined archetypes to speak for themselves while returning agency to the silent, passive figure of the Muse. Her 1991’s multi-media installation Hysteria, loosely based on the life ofAfrican-American sculptor Edmonia Lewis, prefigured the use of historical speculation in contemporary art, while her 2002 play Service to Empire represented an innovative recasting of her own biography through a fictionalised account of the life of Ghanaian leader Jerry J Rawlings.
In spite of her award-winning early work as a poet, and her prolific work as a writer and publisher across form and medium for over two decades, Sulter’s legacy is often discussed only in relation to her work as a visual artist.
This paper seeks to examine the mode and style of Sulter’s poetic, dramatic and narrative writing as key examples of cross-genre and auto-theoretical feminist, queer and postcolonial practices which prefigure the emergence of these approaches in contemporary art and art history today.
