Artist Spotlight: Sonya Clark

The materials really matter in this piece. It’s made out of human hair, which happens to be my hair, the artist’s hair, an African American woman’s hair. It is both personal and collective. It is my hair, but it stands in for the hair of all people of African descent who have been forcibly migrated or whose ancestors were forcibly migrated to this part of the world.

On the other part is cotton, a cotton ball that was plucked directly from a cotton plant. And then the bronze makes up the stem of this cotton plant. Bronze is usually used for big sculptures and monuments.

Here, we have a subtle monument to the labor of African Americans, the labor that we provided to this nation, and the labor that we provided globally to increase the economics of nations around the world during the transatlantic slave trade route. This is a monument to our labor. This is an acknowledgment of our humanity.

With this piece, I wanted to collapse 1860s and the 1960s, to think about what it meant for the great emancipator to meet the Black liberators. And Afro Abe was born.

We know that Abraham Lincoln made an economic decision, as well as, one might argue, of course, a moral decision, when he was freeing people who had been subjugated and made unfree. But I’ll tell you this—these five-dollar bills, these Afro Abes, they’re much more valuable with those afros. Not a one of them has sold for five dollars.

Clark’s photograph depicts the artist’s hands cradling a mound of her mother’s white hair. The title, Mom's Wisdom or Cotton Candy, references her maternal family’s Jamaican ancestry and the island’s history of sugar production.

This piece is an homage to my most recent ancestor, my mother, Lilleth Ruby (McHardy) Clark, who passed away in 2018. She routinely saved her hair for me, and I would separate the dark strands from the white to preserve her wisdom. Much in the way that the Yoruba people say that when one’s hair turns white, it’s an example that your soul has become truly wise.

It’s a funny thing, words. What you’re standing before is a neon sign flashing the word “SCHIAVO,” which might not be a word that you’re familiar with unless you speak Italian. But you’re probably more familiar with the word “ciao,” a little cosmopolitan way of saying “hello” and “goodbye.”

Unraveling is a performative piece. I would ask people to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with me as we would pair together, and with our hands, we would undo, thread by thread, this symbol of hate: the Confederate battle flag, popularly known as the Confederate flag, though there are many. This is just the one that became most popular, most well-known, because of the Ku Klux Klan.

We would stand together, and people would come to understand how this cloth was made in the unmaking of it. They would also understand what slow work it is to actually undo it, but necessary work, satisfying work, work that must be done.