Sonya Clark: We Are Each Other is a mid-career survey of the artist’s work with a focus on her community-centered and participatory projects. Over her twenty-five-year career, Clark has been committed to issues of history, race, and reconciliation. Clark often undertakes this exploration through everyday fiber materials—hair, flags, found fabric—and craft practices. In Clark’s work, craft and community are intertwined, and the resulting projects facilitate new collective encounters across racial, gender, and socioeconomic divisions. We Are Each Other will highlight her community-centered projects, large-scale installations, and a range of her photographs, prints, and sculpture.
Sonya Clark: We Are Each Other
Sonya Clark, Edifice and Mortar, 2018. Mixed media including embossed bricks, hair, plexiglass, and steel, 39 x 72 x 15 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
Sonya Clark: Monumental Cloth, Many, 2019. One hundred hand-woven linen cloths and madder dye, 18.5 x 36 inches. In collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA. Installation view: DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA. Photo: Mel Taing 2021.
Sonya Clark, Monumental, 2019. Woven linen, madder dye, and tea stain. 180 x 360 inches. In collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA. Photo: Carlos Avendaño.
Sonya Clark, The Hair Craft Project: Hairstylists with Sonya, 2013. Eleven inkjet photographs, 29 x 29 inches each. Museum of Fine Arts Boston. The Heritage Fund for a Diverse Collection, Frederick Brown Fund, Samuel Putnam Avery Fund, and Helen and Alice Colburn Fund.
Sonya Clark, Hair Craft Project: Hairstyles on Canvas, 2013. Silk threads, beads, shells, and yarn on eleven canvases, Nine at 29 x 29 inches; Two at 33 x 33 inches. Museum of Fine Arts Boston. The Heritage Fund for a Diverse Collection, Frederick Brown Fund, Samuel Putnam Avery Fund, and Helen and Alice Colburn Fund.
“The terrific range of project proposals we receive each year speaks to the mobile and porous disciplinary boundaries of contemporary art practice, and to the rich and inventive ways writers approach art today. They are alert to the urgent need to expand the conventions of art history and criticism with ideas from other discourses, such as black studies, transnational and diaspora studies, gender and women’s studies, and LGBT studies. The work of lesser known and overlooked artists and art communities continues to be mined, with writers articulating new ways to counter the striking imbalances of race, class and gender that continue to affect the arts and the culture industry.”