FIVE FACTS ABOUT ... MAUD SULTER
Every week we’ll highlight famous Glaswegians
1 Maud Sulter was a Scottish contemporary fine artist, photographer, writer and curator. She was born in Glasgow in 1960, of Scots and Ghanaian descent, and left the city at 17 to attend the London College of Fashion, later graduating with MA in Photographic Studies at the University of Derby. She returned to Scotland to raise her children.
2 She was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery to photograph several children’s writers, and used a special Polaroid machine which produced 20in x 24in photographs. This was also the medium for a series of portraits she made of Scottish cultural figures in the summer of 2002, and 10 of her portraits of writers were toured round Scotland by the Scottish Poetry Library in 2003-4. Glasgow acquired her portrait of Edwin Morgan from this series.
3 Maud co-founded and was active in a range of Black feminist and lesbian projects from the early 1980s, and worked hard to highlight inequalities both historical and contemporary. She came to prominence as one of 11 women exhibited in the Thin Black Line in 1986, a significant breakthrough for contemporary Black and Asian art in a British public gallery.
4 Maud won many awards, including the British Telecom New Contemporaries Award 1990 and the Momart Fellowship at the Tate Gallery Liverpool. She wrote and lectured extensively on art history. She sadly died of cancer in 2008, aged just 47, survived by her mother and her three children.
5 Maud was one of the first three women to be honoured at Glasgow Women’s Library’s Open the Door event in 2017 – a festival of Scottish Women’s Writing. Her poetry, prose and photography can be found on the shelves at GWL in Bridgeton.