Sonya Clark: Tatter, Bristle, and Mend by Nell Painter

Textile and social practice artist Sonya Clark (b. 1967) is renowned for her mixed-media works that address race and visibility, explore Blackness, and redress history. This exhibition—the first survey of Clark’s twenty-five-year career—includes the artist’s well-known sculptures made from black pocket combs, human hair, and thread as well as works made from flags, currency, beads, sugar, cotton plants, pencils, books, a typewriter, and a hair salon chair. The artist transmutes these everyday objects through a vast range of fiber-art techniques. By stitching black thread cornrows and Bantu knots onto fabrics, rolling human hair into necklaces, and stringing a violin bow with a dreadlock, Clark manifests ancestral bonds and reasserts the Black presence in histories from which it has been pointedly omitted.

The exhibition catalogue features texts from an exciting group of prominent scholars and curators, including Nell Painter, distinguished historian, writer, and visual artist, in conversation with Sonya Clark. Includes new poetry by Nikky Finney, winner of a National Book Award, and essays by Bridget R. Cooks, curator and associate professor in the Department of Art History and the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine, Tiya Miles, writer and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor in the Department of History at Harvard University, Salamishah Tillet, writer and Henry Rutgers Professor of African American and African Studies and Creative Writing at Rutgers University, and Curators Kathryn Wat and Hannah Shambroom of the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Fully illustrated with an emphasis on themes and mediums that Clark revisits throughout her work.