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Three ancient Egyptian objects – a mirror and two sistrums – are painted against a pale pink backdrop. The objects are stripped of their context and non sequentially-numbered (2, 11, and 7). The uneven text scrawled above reading, “In Spinster Salt’s Collection,” implies their display in a museum case. This is the title of the 1989 work by Zanzibar-born British artist, Lubaina Himid [Fig. 1].  

Himid was one of the first artists to donate a painting to The Women's Art Collection (WAC) in 1992. In this work, Himid presents the ramifications of British colonial power within the imperial museum. The objects’ numberings imply institutional neglect, presented by Himid in disarray, where standardised museum collecting practices once imposed numerical order. Their lack of identification beyond the collector’s name emulates colonial collecting processes that reduce so-called ‘ethnic’ artefacts to ‘types’.  By making Egyptian objects the subject of an oil painting on a large scale, Himid challenges the viewer to recognise the presence of such objects in the museum, and question their classification as generic signifiers of ‘Africanism.’

In Spinster Salt’s Collection is part of a wider story of the Black British Arts Movement in the 1980s represented within The WAC. Histories of The WAC typically begin with the so-called artist campaign of 1991, when selected women artists were invited to donate works to New Hall College. Following this initial success, a second list of selected women artists was compiled in 1992. Several names associated with Black feminist organising in the UK were included in this second list, including Himid, as well as Maud Sulter, Zarina Bhimji, Sonia Boyce, and Veronica Ryan, although the latter two did not enter the Collection. Since 2017, the Collection has acquired works by Permindar Kaur and Chila Kumari Burman, two additional artists associated with the Black British Arts Movement.

Britain in the 1980s was marked by political unrest and racial violence, but also the flourishing of Black arts activity, known as the Black British Arts Movement. Similar to its American counterpart, anti-racist cultural activism of artists and art workers focused its critiques on established artworld institutions and centred the activities of artists of colour. In Britain, the explicitly politicised identity ‘Black’ was strategically claimed by artists of African, Caribbean, South Asian, and Middle Eastern heritage for its political usefulness in addressing a shared struggle against racism and class exploitation. 

In this context, the Scots-Ghanaian artist Maud Sulter warned of the precarious position for young Black women artists in art history in her essay “Call and Response” (Feminist Art News, 1988). “Being written out of history can happen to you,” she wrote, underlining the necessity for Black artists in the 1980s to be their own curators, archivists, historians, critics and collectors. Motivated by the institutionally-directed nature of Sulter’s criticisms, this essay will consider the context from which The WAC acquired work by Black women artists at its inception. The Collection founders' vision – to create a collection of work by women artists, to be housed in a women's college – could be considered a critical intervention to conventional display and collecting practices because of its gendered parameters and domestic setting. However, the relative isolation of artists of colour in the Collection should be interrogated in relation to Sulter’s cautionary message. This essay will outline how artworks by Sulter and Himid within The WAC address the invisibility of Black women’s creativity in national museums, and offer a decolonial critique of nineteenth century collecting practices. I will reflect on Sulter’s politics of solidarity as outlined in “Call and Response” to consider the Collection’s collective spirit, and Himid and Sulter’s own Black feminist cultural activism.  

Himid and Sulter were instrumental in documenting the work of Black women artists in the 1980s through exhibition-making, writing, and publishing, and in their visual art practices. In “Call and Response,” Sulter considers the activity of “Blackwomen” artists, noting that, “Without funding, without support we were making things happen for ourselves.” Sulter’s decision to invite Himid to donate a painting to The WAC, following her own invitation in 1992, can itself be considered as an act of agency and one of “making things happen.” Sulter’s invitation is indicative of Marlene Smith and Sutapa Biswas’ identification that women artists of colour were implored to take on a multitude of roles and responsibilities – curator, administrator, historian, and art critic – to champion the work of themselves and their contemporaries where institutional support was lacking. Himid had begun this kind of institutional critique and administrative work as a master’s student, issuing a call-out and questionnaire as part of her dissertation to those who identified as Black artists in Britain, which exposed Black women’s experiences at art school as isolating and lacking in opportunity. Galvanised by this research, Himid organised exhibitions which focused on Black women artists to create space for their work to thrive. Five Black Women Artists (1983), Black Woman Time Now (1983), and The Thin Black Line (1985), asserted the presence of Black women artists and established space for networks between these women to develop during a time of heightened racialised violence in Britain.

Cultural activism between Black women artists stems partly from the First National Black Art Convention, held at Wolverhampton Polytechnic in 1982, where over 100 art students of colour met “To discuss the form, functioning and future of Black art.” The only woman of colour to speak at the convention was Claudette Johnson, whose talk “Images of Black Women in Art” was disrupted by male members of the audience. This prompted fellow women artists and art students – including Himid, but also Marlene Smith, Ingrid Pollard, and Sonia Boyce – to gather separately to continue the conversation without interruption. Sulter and Pollard connected at this conference, which led Sulter to  later discover Himid’s exhibition-making practice. This instance of collective action at the Wolverhampton conference marked a shift in Black arts in Britain when networks of diasporic Black feminist art practice flourished through the 1980s. Black women artists were forming spaces to make change against their doubled oppression across gender and race that was distinct from the experiences of black men and white women. 

Sulter’s photograph Phalia (Portrait of Alice Walker) (1989), donated by the artist to The WAC in 1992, can be read as a record of this networked cultural activism [Fig. 2]. Part of a series titled Zabat, Sulter re-imagines the nine muses of Greek mythology – represented as white women in the Eurocentric art historical canon – as black women artists, writers, and activists. Acknowledging a lineage of transatlantic Black feminist thought, Phalia celebrates the writing of the African-American novelist and activist Alice Walker as Phalia, the muse of comedy and bringer of flowers. Referencing traditional Victorian studio portraiture through choreographed pose, a plain studio backdrop, costuming, and an ornate, gold frame, Sulter overturns the visual conventions of imperialist museum collections by placing a Black feminist figure in the centre of the frame. Sulter insists upon their presence in the museum using a large-scale photographic format. The arresting and confrontational gaze of her sitters prompts the viewer to question the absence of black women from museum collections and underscores their agency as subjects. 

Zabat was created through collaborative means. Sulter worked with the sitters of each photograph, who chose their own clothing, props, and pose, disrupting conventional power dynamics between photographer and muse. Writing in “Call and Response,” that, “no one will document our future but ourselves,” Sulter reflects on the need for Black women artists to work together in the face of marginalisation and their precarious position in the art historical record. The photographs in Zabat enact this coming together of a circle of Black women creatives; from well-established figures like Walker, to newly graduated art students like Dionne Sparks, as well as Sulter herself. Zabat represents the politics of “collective equality” in Sulter’s practice, and also documents a significant act of collaboration between Black women artists whose portraits were acquired by national museums like the V&A in 1991 and by The WAC in 1992.

The relational politics that underlines Sulter’s Phalia is reflected in the setting of its home in 51������. Along the walkways of 51������, the Collection’s artworks are hung in conversation with one another, where the long corridors and large windows allow for students and visitors to look across several artworks on two levels. Additionally, the artworks prompt conversation between students and staff in the dining hall and the library. The Collection therefore breaks down conventional hierarchies of display where artworks are weaved into its domestic setting and the daily lives of the women who live at 51������. Sulter’s plea in “Call and Response,” that, “Ours are not pretend family relationships, this thing’s for real,” insists that nourishing relationships and solidarity formed in domestic settings – gathering around food and informal meeting places – is essential to the survival of Blackwomen’s creativity in art history. The WAC’s relational style of display is arguably sympathetic to this politics, where the art historian Griselda Pollock has noted that those who volunteered to donate to the Collection in 1991-92 “were happy to be seen in a community of women, not as examples of woman, but in a community of all these women individuals.”

Collaboration was also a strategy taken up in the context of Himid’s paintings in The WAC that were originally created for her exhibition The Ballad of the Wing (Chisendale Gallery, 1989). The exhibition was intended to mimic a museum – the Wing Museum – with a purpose “to record important moments in black creativity,” and address the neglect and theft at play in Western museums. 

A video of a sung ballad played continuously on a plinth in the gallery, written and filmed by Sulter. Her appearance in the Wing Museum represents Sulter and Himid’s commitment to a practice of mutual celebration and collective equality that was central to their Black feminist politics. In “Call and Response,” Sulter wrote “if we don’t take turns, the circle will no longer be open but closed in upon itself until it is no bigger than a full stop,” highlighting the importance for Black women artists to create opportunities for themselves and for each other.

At the same time, Himid’s paintings outline her decolonial critique of the museum. The exhibition leaflet reads, “The British Museum in London is a showroom for stolen goods.” In Spinster Salt’s Collection uncovers the realities of colonial violence that underlie the Victorian collections at the British Museum. By naming the collector Salt, Himid directs us to the under told story of how objects from Egypt, like those she has painted, entered the museum’s collections in the nineteenth century. Under British colonial rule, the British Consul-General Henry Salt received permission from Egypt’s Ottoman governor, Muhammad Ali, to obtain antiquities from the region. The mirror and the pair of sistra that Himid depicts are representative of objects like them held by the British Museum, but she scornfully suggests that these are in the collection of the colonial figure, Salt. The neglect of these precious objects, now hoarded in a personal collection, symbolises the West’s continued cultural violence against Egypt and Africa, which is absent from conventional museum narratives. Using the derogatory term, ‘Spinster,’ to suggest that these objects are also devalued for their feminised contexts, Himid addresses the intersection between racialised and gendered oppression in histories of colonial plunder. 

While the iconography and political content of In Spinster Salt’s Collection uncovers the colonial power dynamics present in the British Museum’s collections, its inclusion in The WAC sits outside of nineteenth-century collecting patterns in its historical context and its foundation as an artist call-out. The WAC’s self-directed initiative is based on a model of connection, artistic networks, and friendship. The formation of the Collection was part of a coming together of women artists and college administrators that therefore destabilises the top-down collector-artist power dynamic that Himid critiques. Its formation was dependent on a significant act of donation by women artists that adapted the way that art is acquired into a collection to a horizontal model.

However, it is important to note that the naming of recipients for the initial call-out letter as ‘prominent’ women artists contravenes the idea of a non-hierarchical, feminist approach. Invited artists including Boyce, Ryan, Himid and Sulter had by 1991-92 gained national recognition in solo exhibitions, whereas lesser-known artists of colour were not considered. Another caveat is that the Collection did not compensate artists financially for the acquisition of artworks, and the call-out was exclusively for donations. At the time, Marina Warner expressed concern with the gendered aspect of asking artists to donate works, pointing to the relationship between unpaid gestures and notions of ‘care’ that women – especially women of colour – disproportionately take on in the home and the workplace. It is notable that several artists refused to donate to the Collection due to economic constraints.

These tensions and contradictions in The WAC’s history perhaps indicate some of the limitations of institutional collecting practices to feminist politics and grassroots activism. Chila Kumari Burman is an artist whose work entered the Collection in 2021, and her text “There Have Always Been Blackwomen Artists” written in 1986, succinctly highlights the ways that class and race have limited Black women in accessing institutional spaces like The WAC. She writes about the academic subject, art history, “studied in patriarchal art institutions,” by white middle-class women, who “have used their advantageous class position to gain access to these institutions,” and further excluded artists of colour. The discipline of art history as practiced predominantly by white women has historically failed to address the “obstacles faced by black artists and in particular Blackwomen artists.” Founded from within the academy – the University of Cambridge – the beginnings of The WAC were largely informed by the “advantageous class position” of its academics and students. The overwhelming whiteness of the Collection should continue to be questioned where the context for ‘women’s art’ was created in an “extremely Eurocentric” academic setting.

Sulter and Himid’s artworks direct viewers towards the need to continually interrogate class and colonial power structures that are present in museum collections and white feminist settings. Insisting upon the presence of Black women’s creativity in a collection focused on women’s art, Himid and Sulter give voice to a Black feminist critique that will generate future conversations among curators, historians, critics, writers, students and artists who encounter their works in 51������. 

Image: Lubaina Himid, In Spinter Salt’s Collection (1989). Oil on canvas, 183 x 183 cm. The Women’s Art Collection.

Bibliography

Araeen, Rasheed, and Eddie Chambers, “Black Art: A Discussion,” Third Text 5 (1988/89): 51-77.

Bourne, Jenny.  “When Black was a Political Colour: A Guide to the Literature,” Race & Class 58, no. 1 (July-September 2016): 125. 

Kumari Burman, Chila. “There Have Always Been Blackwomen Artists,” 1986.

Sulter, Maud. “Call and Response,” Feminist Art News 2, no. 8 (1988).

Smith, Marlene, and Sutapa Biswas, “Black Women Artists,” Spare Rib (March 1988)

Stevenson, Christopher. Letter to Mr John Abbott, ‘Development Campaign - Contact Report,’ [15 July 1991] 51������, (New Hall Archive) GBR/3124/NHAR 1/1/1.

Roland, Martin. ‘History of the Women’s Art Collection at 51������, University of Cambridge – 1986-1992’ (April 2022).  

Sulter, Maud. Handwritten note about collection of works, [29 July 1992]. 51������ (New Hall Archive) GBR/3124/NHAR 6/1/1/4.

The Ballad of the Wing (Chisendale Gallery, 1989). Exhibition leaflet.