Sonya Clark. The Hair Craft Project: Hairstyles on Canvas, 2013; silk threads, beads, shells, and yarn on canvas; 29 x 29 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and the Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, VA.

The exhibition is structured around a series of nine collaborative pairings, which mark the shared personal and artistic bonds between Clark and her hairdressers. In The Hair Craft Project, photographs of hairstylists and their intricate creation with Clark’s hair sit above a painstakingly sewn pattern on a blank canvas below. Oscillating equally and productively between the applied practice of hairdressing and its appropriation into a fine art object, these dual images encourage the viewer to make linkages between the traditional techniques of fiber arts, such as weaving and embroidery, and the complicated patterns and improvisational designs that elegantly swarm the head of the wearer. The modest smiles that each hairdresser displays in the photographs belie the crisp accuracy and intense manipulations their materials succumb to under their discerning eyes, and reaffirm a historical continuum between the artist and her collaborators. Each braid and twist is a sacred act, bound up with rituals, traditions, and ancestral worship that structure the traumatic history of Black aesthetics. As Clark has stated, slaves removed from Africa “may have arrived empty-handed, but in fact their hands held memories of particular ways of working, making, and moving materials” that they took with them to the “New World.”[2] Thus, these images remind us of the historical continuum that undulates within these embodied material processes.

Sonya Clark. The Hair Craft Project: Hairstylists with Sonya (Jamilah Williams), 2013; inkjet photograph; 28 x 28 in. Courtesy of the Artist and the Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, VA.

Alongside Clark’s commitment to making the work of these hairdressers visible is a poetic attention to the tools used to gather hair into submission—specifically, fine-tooth combs. The most arresting of these works is Toothless (2014), made up of hundreds of black combs linked together horizontally, stretching wide across a segment of the gallery wall like a tapestry or quilt. As the eye descends from the top to the bottom of the work, the black combs become increasingly “toothless”—the thin black teeth disappear in a staggered rhythm as the work unfurls towards the ground, finally gathering in a shallow pool on the floor. Combs pull at the roots of hair, stretch out kinks, displace knots, and move strands to new positions. In this way, combs are utilitarian, but they also shape and interrupt hair’s “becoming”—its unfurling into space and time. Thus, they resonate as objects that carry forth transformation and creative possibility when used by an experienced practitioner. It is this connection between creativity and becoming that Clark stages in these comb-sculptures, turning these simple objects into metaphors for Black identity, pride, and aesthetic tradition.

Sonya Clark. Toothless, 2014; combs; 75 x 65 x 8 in. Courtesy of the Artist and the Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, VA.

The climax of the exhibition is Pluck and Grow (2015-present), Clark’s homage to hair as expressed through a participatory installation. The piece invites the viewer to share and reflect upon their own “hair stories,” and to think thoughtfully about the role that hair plays in shaping identity. “For hair is a material that links humans genetically” and is thus inherently bound up with notions of heritage and individuality.[3] Silkscreened stories and poems—some decipherable, some not—are written on brown paper, which are then twisted into hair forms and inserted into the wall. Pluck and Grow invites the exhibition-goer to take a follicle from the wall, read the story, and then replace the “strand” with their own memory about hair written on a white scrap of paper. Over time, the piece becomes “older and wiser” as more brown strands are replaced with new, white ones, carrying within their twisted folds the memories, secrets, and frustrations of all who pass through Clark’s piece. These paper hairs stand in for the follicular foundations of textile work as well as the permutations inherent in one’s own subjectivity—the threads that tie, bind, and link us to our histories and identities, both biological and constructed.

Sonya Clark. Pluck and Grow, 2015-present; dyed paper; 72 x 48 in. Courtesy of the Artist and the Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, VA.

Follicular: The Hair Stories of Sonya Clark will be on view at the Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, Virginia through May 14, 2017.

[1] My thanks must go to Dr. Amy Moorefield (Deputy Director of Exhibitions and Collections), Ms. Eva Thorton (Curatorial Coordinator), and Ms. Sunny Nelson (Deputy Director of Marketing and Communications) at The Taubman Museum of Art for all their help and support in the writing and researching of this article.

[2] See Dr. Namita Gupta Wigger’s exhibition catalogue essay, “Sonya Clark: Corporeal Materiality,” for the exhibition Sonya Clark at the Southwest School of Art in San Antonio, Texas, 2011, pg. 11.

[3] Quote pulled from curator Amy Moorefield’s short essay for the Taubman Museum of Art’s exhibition guide to Follicular: The Hair Stories of Sonya Clark.

Peter Voulkos. Ceramic Pot (Steel Pot), 1968; stoneware (thrown and shaped); 32.5 x 11.5 in. Courtesy of the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft.

While the objects in this exhibition do not seem to share any formal or technical common denominator, they nevertheless coalesce into a narrative about the development of craft, particularly as it came into being in the United States during the postwar period. The work of Peter Voulkos seems to offer one of the many beginnings to this story. Voulkos’ practice arose out of a significant moment in American art: At the same time that critic Clement Greenberg was tracking the self-critical development of modern art to the Abstract Expressionist painters, the G.I. Bill was transforming university art education. Fine-art departments expanded and often combined with applied art programs to hold the thousands of new students who entered into the American university system. With their gouged surfaces and weighted compositions, Voulkos’ works embodied his rejection of the traditions of refinement and “the beautiful” that structured academic craft—rejections that allowed him to foreground the significance of time and process as opposed to high levels of finish and completeness. Voulkos’ emphasis on the fertility of experimentation, improvisation, and the ambiguous relationship between intention and chance ignited a dialogue between ceramics and postwar aesthetics of spontaneity as practiced by affiliates of Black Mountain College, turning him into a leader of the West Coast craft movement of the postwar era and his studio into one of the most important pedagogical sites for the development of ceramic art. Looking at the earthy thicknesses and slashed membrane of Voulkos’ 1969 Ceramic Pot (Steel Pot)—its verticality and sculptural monumentality subverted by its humble stoneware form—one can see the beginnings and possibilities of a more open field of making coming into being and pulsating across the other pieces in the galleries. Thus, Crafting a Continuum works to map the resonance of Voulkos’s generation on contemporary craft, and to give voice to a radical spirit of technical and conceptual freedom that drives the field today.

Matthias Pliessnig. Brace; 2012; white oak and copper; 17 x 88 39 in. Courtesy of the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft.

While the objects selected for this exhibition find a rich historical grounding in the older generation—Voulkos, Ed Moulthrop, and Dorothy Gill Barnes to name just a few—it is the contemporary work that ignites important conversations about the definition of craft and its role in today’s high-tech world. Most interesting are the ways in which contemporary craft artisans have come to terms with the genre’s root in mass production, commercial markets, and design industries such as interior decorating. Matthias Pliessnig’s breathtaking works in wood—which combine his knowledge of 3D software, furniture design, textile traditions, and the cask-making processes used in the construction of boats—make compelling arguments for the use of technology as equal to more artisanal processes and handiwork. Known for his body-hugging benches, sofas, and chairs made of interwoven strips of white wood steamed into patterns and shapes made by digital imaging, Pliessnig expands traditional notions of craftsmanship by allowing digital procedures to act upon more subjective experiences of making original things. Brace, a bench commissioned by the Arizona State University Art Museum in 2012 that mimics the curves and undulations of the human body, asks the viewer to revel in every aesthetic decision, manipulation of material, and technical risk initiated by the artist as well as the computer. By reimagining the parameters of handmade and mechanical processes, Pliessnig’s objects add to current conversations about the roles of originality and technology within craft culture.[2]

Sonya Clark. Thread Wrapped in Blue and Brown, 2008; combs and thread; 45 x 1 x 60 in. Courtesy of the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft.

In addition to the exhibition’s goals of expanding the historical and technical understanding of contemporary craft, Crafting a Continuum cannot help but draw the viewer into the social and political underpinnings of the craft tradition, namely its association with radical forms of protest against gender and racial inequalities, war, and other crimes of the patriarchy. However, as Susan Luckman rightly points out, despite craft’s commitment to forms of anti-imperialist ideologies, consumer capitalism, and feminism, “the contemporary design-craft economy…remains marked by its whiteness.”[3] Sonya Clark’s contribution to this exhibition, Thread Wrapped in Blue and Brown (2008), offers up a powerful response to this cultural and racial homogeneity. The artist’s embrace of traditional aesthetics and the visual vocabularies of craft art provide compelling strategies to inflect her work with personal forms of identity and racial politics (Fig. 3). Made from a carefully hewn web of interlocking hair combs and silken cord, Thread makes a provocative statement about skin color and cultural differentiation. Using the combs as a compositional tool, Clark reworks the canon of craft to open up space for thoughtful conversations about the wefts and weaves of community, institutional racism, and the making of meaning.

[1] Thanks must go to curator Elizabeth Kozlowski for her generosity of spirit and tremendous patience as storm damage, flooding, and traffic took hold of the opening of this exhibition at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft and the production of this article.

[2] For more on craft traditions and the role of technology, see: Amit Zoran and Leah Buechley, “Hybrid Reassemblage: An Exploration of Craft, Digital Fabrication, and Artifact Uniqueness,” Leonardo, Vol. 46, No. 1, 2013, 4–13.

[3] See Susan Luckman, “Squirrels, Foxes, Hares, and Owls: Race, Ethnicity, and the Aesthetics of Contemporary Design Craft,” in Craft and the Creative Economy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 37.