RICHMOND, Va. ― Comb through the life story of Sonya Clark and it’s easy to see how she came to craft works of art themed around hair, a provocative and politicized thread of identity.
Her maternal grandmother was a tailor in Jamaica who taught her to sew and gave her an appreciation for things handmade. As a young child, she possessed weak eyesight and a keen sense of touch. Her childhood home in Washington was across the street from that of the Beninese ambassador, whose teenage daughters practiced intricate African hairstyles on young Sonya.
At Amherst College in Massachusetts, she took classes under a foremost African art historian, Rowland Abiodun. At the Art Institute of Chicago, she studied under a noted fabric sculptor (Nick Cave) and a visual artist (Anne Wilson) who stitched with human hair.
“It’s all just confluence. We’re the sum of our experiences, right?” said Clark, chairwoman of the Department of Craft/Material Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of the Arts. She learned Braille “because I’m interested in tactile things. I’m interested in hair as a language. So why not go to a tactile language?”
Clark’s sense of touch—and her appreciation of hair as a connective fiber through which narratives can be spun—recently won her the Juried Grand Prize at ArtPrize 2014, an international art competition in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Her winning entry, “The Hair Craft Project,” enlisted about a dozen local hairdressers to style her hair, which was photographed along with the hairstylists. Clark also provided them with a canvas hand-stitched with silk thread and asked the hairstylists to braid the thread using their skills and techniques.
