Sonya Clark (born 1967, Washington, D.C.)[1] is an American artist of Afro-Caribbean heritage. Clark is a fiber artist known for using a variety of materials including human hair and combs to address race, culture, class, and history.[2] Her beaded headdress assemblages and braided wig series of the late 1990s, which received critical acclaim, evoked African traditions of personal adornment and moved these common forms into the realm of personal and political expression.[3] Although African art and her Caribbean background are important influences, Clark also builds on practices of assemblage and accumulation used by artists such as Betye Saar and David Hammons.[3]
Biography
Clark's father was a psychiatrist from Trinidad while her mother was a nurse from Jamaica.[4] Clark was influenced by the craftspeople in her family, including a grandmother who worked as a tailor, and a grandfather who was a furniture maker.[5]
In 2011, Clark was honored with Cranbrook Academy of Art's first Distinguished Mid-Career Alumni Award.[6] She has been a recipient of four honorary doctorates. In 2015, she received an honorary doctorate from Amherst College.[7] In 2021, she received two additional honorary doctorates from Maine College of Art in Portand, Maine[8] and Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.[9] In 2023, she was the commencement speaker [10] and received another honorary doctorate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.[11]
Clark cites professor Rowland O. Abiodun, Amherst College as an early influence in her studies of the connection between her Caribbean culture and Yoruba culture, which was further enhanced by a post-graduation trip to the Ivory Coast, where she learned to weave on a hand loom. Clark also cites Nick Cave as instrumental in furthering her investigations in fiber.[12]
Professional academic career
Clark is a professor of art in the department of Art and the History of Art at Amherst College. Between 2006 and 2017, she was chair of the Craft/Material Studies Department[13] and was honored as a Distinguished Research Fellow. In 2016, she was awarded a university-wide Distinguished Scholars Award[4] at the highly acclaimed School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University[14] in Richmond, VA. The department is ranked by U.S. News & World Report as one of the top in the nation. Prior to her appointment at VCU, she was Baldwin-Bascom Professor of Creative Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison,[15] where she received tenure with distinction and an H.I. Romnes award.[16][17]
Art career
Much of Clark's work utilizes humble materials and objects, like combs, seed beads, coins, threads, and strands of hair. Through the use of these materials, she explores the ways people assign function and connotations to things. “Objects have personal and cultural meaning because they absorb our stories and reflect our humanity back to us. My stories, your stories, our stories are held in the object,” says Clark.[18]
Clark is perhaps best known for artwork that honors contemporary craftspeople, like hairdressers, and notable African American figures. She has studied with craftspeople in places like Australia, Brazil, China, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, India, and Indonesia, where she learned about their mediums, tools, technique, and cultural associations.[18] In her work, craft and community and intertwined; many of her projects involve participation and promote collaboration across racial, gender, and socioeconomic lines.[19]
One of Clark's artist statements describes her work as follows:
I use craft and materials to investigate identity. Simple objects become cultural interfaces. Through them I navigate accord and discord. When trying to unravel complex issues, I am instinctively drawn to things that connect to my personal narrative as a point of departure: a comb or a strand of hair. Charged with agency, simple objects nave the mysterious ability to reflect or absorb us. I find my image, my personal story, in an object. But it is also the object's ability to act as a rhizome, the multiple ways in which it can be discovered or read by a wide audience that draws me in. To sustain my practice, I milk the object, its potential, its image, and its materiality. I manipulate the object in a formal manner to engage the viewer in conversation about collective meaning. If we unravel a cloth together, what do we learn in the process? What is the connection between combs, hair, and textiles? Can a strand of hair tell a life story or a whole cultural history? I trust that my stories, your stories, our stories are held in the object. In this way, the everyday "thing" becomes a lens through which we may better see one another. A visual vocabulary derived from object and image forms a language ranging from the vernacular to the political to the poetic."[20]
Hair Craft Project
The Hair Craft Project is a series of photographs and canvas works that were made in collaboration between the artist and Black hairstylists, who Clark sees as practicing their own form of textile artistry. Each hairdresser demonstrated their skills and expertise by working on Clark's own hair, using her head as a canvas. The resulting hairstyle was then photographed, and paired with a complementing canvas work.[21] On each canvas, the hairstylists duplicated the hairstyle done on Clark's hair using silk thread. This project breaks down barriers between craft and art, salon and art institutions, showing that both spaces are sites of skill, improvisation, aesthetic sensibility, and commerce.[19]
According to Clark, "Hairdressers are my heroes. The poetry and politics of Black hair care specialists are central to my work as an artist and educator. Rooted in a rich legacy, their hands embody an ability to map a head with a comb and manipulate the fiber we grow into a complex form. These artists have mastered a craft impossible for me to take for granted."[22] She claims, "hair is power," and, "as carrier of DNA, hair holds the essence of identity."[23]
"I grew up braiding my hair and my sister's hair, so in one sense, like many black women, I had been preparing to be a textile artist for a very long time."[24]
Clark further considered the hair strand as a tool for communication and worked with graphic designer Boquin Peng to create an alphabet based on the curl pattern of her hair called Twist.[12]
Flag Project
Clark's explorations with flags began with her thesis Kente Flag Project in 1995.[12] This work is a mixture of elements from African and Western/American culture.[25] Clark specifically utilized Kente patterns for strength and endurance, advancement and achievement, and prosperity.[25] The traditional Kente patterns, an African weave structure, were woven on a European loom, and combined with American flag imagery--the result being fabric that contained symbols of identity and cultural pride that reached across two cultures.[26]
Since 2009, Clark has created serial projects surrounding the Confederate Battle Flag.[25] She has performed Unraveling in June 2015 at the now-defunct Mixed Greens gallery in New York City and then at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, in October 2016.[27] Her presentation of the exhibit in Louisville Kentucky in 2017 "was the first performance under the [Trump] administration and since the country has found itself embroiled in debate over the presence and ramifications of Confederate imagery in the wake of the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, this past summer."[27] "The act is now a part of a larger movement through which state and local governments are dismantling these objects out of a sense of civic duty."[27] During the exhibition, members of the audience are encouraged to join Clark one at a time in the unraveling of a confederate flag while she explains her vision and demonstrates how to pull the strands of the flag apart. According to Goodman, "Clark stands side-by-side by participants, shoulder-to-shoulder as they pull each strand of the flag and confront the reality it represents".[27] In April 2018, Clark returned to her alma mater, Amherst College, to perform "Unravelling" at the Mead Art Museum.[28]
In 2017, Clark created a hand woven linen cloth reproduction of the white dish towel used by a Confederate soldier to surrender at the Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. This piece is known as "Monumental Cloth (sutured)". It is the artist's hope that this flag of truce becomes as well known as the Confederate Battle Flag. Both "Unravelling" and "Monumental Cloth (sutured)" were on display at the Mead Art Museum from April 5, 2018, to July 1, 2018.[29] Clark reproduced the Truce Flag with the intention of drawing attention back to the flag that brokered and to the Civil War, questioning why symbols of white supremacy, such as the Confederate Battle Flag, are memorialized in favor of symbols of peace. A larger immersive outgrowth of the project "Monumental Cloth: the Flag We Should Know" was made in collaboration with and exhibited at The Fabric Workshop and Museum[30] Her 450 square foot enlarged replica of the truce flag used for the Confederate surrender at Appomattox, Virginia, "Monumental", is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Renwick Gallery.
The Hair Craft Project: Sonya Clark, eds. Melissa Anderson, Sonya Clark, Meg Roberts and Leigh Suggs, Exhibition Catalogue, 2015
References
^ abSavig, Mary; Atkinson, Nora; Montiel, Anya (2022). This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World. Washington, DC: Smithsonian American Art Museum. pp. 228–238. ISBN9781913875268.
^Reginald F. Lewis (2011). Material Girls: Contemporary Black Women Artists (1st ed.). Baltimore, Md: Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture. ISBN9780615436142.
^"Sonya Clark". Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art. Archived from the original on October 5, 2011. Retrieved February 1, 2014.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
^Holt, Steven Skov; Skov, Mara Holt (October 1, 2008). Manufractured: The Conspicuous Transformation of Everyday Objects (1st ed.). San Francisco: Chronicle Books. ISBN9780811865098.
^Material girls : contemporary Black women artists. Wilkinson, Michelle., Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture. Baltimore, Md.: Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture. 2011. ISBN978-0-615-43614-2. OCLC753956575.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
^Schoonmaker, Trevor (2023). Spirit in the land: Exhibition, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, 2023. Durham, North Carolina: Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. ISBN978-0-938989-45-5.
^"Spirit in the Land". Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Retrieved February 28, 2024.