A Letter Sent, Waiting to be Received: Queer Correspondence, Feminism and Black British Art

Abstract

This article examines what the published letter does as a form that is both intimate and public, and how it is particularly resonant when dealing with the silences and absences around queer and feminist artist of colour histories. Connections are made between three letters published in feminist and queer journals and books, written for readers who may include the writers’ loved ones, friends, contemporaries, and future readers. These three letters are contained within the following publications: Surviving Art School (2016) by the group Collective Creativity, a QTIPOC artist group who made the publication as part of a wider project examining the history of Black British Art (members are: Evan Ifekoya, Raisa Kabur, Rudy Lowe and Raju Rage); a special issue of FAN (Feminist Arts News) edited by Lubaina Himid and Maud Sulter in 1988, the precursor to the more well-known collection Passion, edited by Sulter in 1990; ending with Himid's recent reflections on her curation in the 1980s through a series of ‘Letters to Susan’ published in the 2011 catalogue for the exhibition Thin Black Line(s) at Tate Britain. Through close examination of these examples, this article explores the particularities of the letter form, asking if it allows feminist and queer artists of colour to present their experiences in a manner that encourages all their readers to take part in the conversation, whilst prioritizing calls for other people of colour to respond. The article proposes that the published letter form keeps feminist histories alive and creates a counterpublic that speaks to and for a community that is imagined as both geographically and temporally diffuse.

Keywords:

• contemporary art
• artists of colour
• published letters
• feminist histories
• queer counterpublics

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank those who have exchanged emails, conversations and research with me over the course of writing this article. In particular, Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski, Evan Ifekoya, Nazmia Jamal, Ella S. Mills and Raju Rage have helped me greatly, as did Laura Guy in coming up with a subtitle that was more concise than I could manage. I would also like to sincerely thank Victoria Horne and the anonymous readers for their insightful comments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The group describe themselves as aiming ‘to create radical, grass roots space for queer artists of colour to interrogate the politics of art, in relation to queer identity, institutional racism, and anti-colonialism’. Raisa Kabir, Surviving Art School, np.

2 Lubaina Himid took part in a conversation with Griselda Pollock at the ICA to launch the collection Framing Feminism. In the recorded session, there is an intense debate around the way in which race and artists of colour are presented in this book, with Maud Sulter asking questions from the audience. See Pollock and Himid (1988).

3 The only other example of an editor's letter being accompanied by a photograph that I could find was in a special issue entitled ‘The Real Missing Culture’, on Women and Disability Arts, edited by Elspeth Morrison (FAN Spring 1989). Here her image acts in a similar manner to that of Himid and Sulter—to make visible an often marginalized identity.

4 Raju Rage explained that they had initially come up with this term, and it had been discussed and used collectively (Rage 2018). Rage describes how ‘“un-archive” is a term I use for releasing work from the conventional archive and relating to it beyond the archive. Unarchiving becomes a tool for creating conversation and building a relationship with the archive, connecting the past and the present moment, releasing the content from just being buried in the archive but activating and applying it to the current contemporary moment’ (2019).

5 This call is also found in the project Black Artists and Modernism, led by Professor Sonia Boyce, which has researched works by artists of African, Caribbean and Asian heritage that are in British public collections (Boyce et al. 2015).

6 The title of the publication, Surviving Art School: An artist of colour tool kit, brought to mind a text by Sara Ahmed, published in 2017 in Living A Feminist Life. In her short concluding essay ‘A Killjoy Survival Kit’, she lists the things she would put in a feminist survival kit, as well as describing feminism itself as a form of survival kit for feminists.

7 Thanks to James Boaden and Gabby Moser for reminding me of Warner's important argument. Whilst Warner distinguishes between public and community, in my mind a community is not bound by the current members that are recognized as part of the group, as Warner would have it, and so I have not distinguished between these two terms in the way that he does.

8 All the quotes from their Issue Editorial are on page 3 of the issue.

9 Blackwomen is the term that Sulter uses during this period to represent women of colour. This political use of the term Black to refer to all people of colour was common in the UK in the 1980s, although it was contested. See footnote 10 and Mills 2016).

10 In the UK context the first Black lesbian conference, held in London in October 1985, was named Zami I, as well as various other events and organizations (Mason-John and Khambatta 1993: 14; 58–9). Here the term ‘Black’ is used to refer to people of African-Caribbean and Asian descent. See ‘Black: whose term is it anyway’ for a discussion of the contentions around this political use of the term (Mason-John and Khambatta 1993: 32–37).

11 At Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, the Women of Colour Index Reading Group has been an important focus for exploring women of colour in the Women's Art Library, including Himid and Sulter. There are many other initiatives, including ‘Eat at the Same Table’ and Thick/er Black Lines, who draw on some of the same histories discussed here.