Sonya Clark (Photo courtesy Virginia Commonwealth University)
Artist Sonya Clark tells stories through textiles, including those waved on Monument Avenue yesterday.
Away on sabbatical this school year at Amherst College, her alma mater, the VCU Craft and Material Studies Department chairwoman leaves us with an impressive legacy of controversial and important work.
Some of Clark’s most notable works include pieces connected to the Confederate battle flag. She says the flag, which gained notoriety with the Ku Klux Klan, has always been a contentious symbol and it remains in national dialogues because of the negative connotation it’s associated with.
"People who talk about it in terms of historical use, if you trace that back, it goes right to notions of white supremacy," she says. "It had other uses, but this is the one that causes the contention.”
In an effort to address those notions, Clark, 50, has produced numerous works, but two gained a lot of attention: “Unraveled” and “Unraveling.” She created both in 2015 in reaction to the violent deaths of black men and boys around the country.
“Unraveled” featured a purchased, well-made Confederate flag that Clark and her studio assistants took apart thread by thread, dividing the pieces into red, white and blue piles. “Unraveling” used a similar high-quality flag, but invited folks to stand shoulder to shoulder with the artist as they worked together to slowly pull it apart, again, thread by thread. The work received national attention after a shooting at Charleston, South Carolina, church was connected to an individual that identified with the flag.
“There’s a sense of understanding how complex cloth is to weave and then taking a hell of a long time to undo it,” she says, connecting the flag’s structure to the complex nature of racism.
In 2010, she created a “Black Hair Flag,” which has been exhibited at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, weaving black thread in Bantu knots and cornrows atop a Confederate flag to form the U.S. flag’s stripes and stars. She also collaborated with Richmond hairstylists on “The Hair Craft Project” in 2014.
Clark traces her earliest creative inspiration to two sources: her Jamaican grandmother, affectionately known as “Chummy,” and to her childhood neighbors, 14 kids of the then-ambassador from the West African nation of Dahomey, now the Republic of Benin.
Sonya Clark's “Cornrow Chair,” silk thread on a reupholstered found chair, from the 2014 “Same Difference” exhibition at Reynolds Gallery (Photo courtesy Reynolds Gallery)
“Hair is a thread, it’s a fiber,” she says, “but it’s also connected to songs that weave, a code structure, and in hair there is a genetic code. It’s not only who I am, but it’s a part of our bodies that’s easy to disembody, and in it is all of the legacy of who came before us.”
As a child she was a frequent guest at the ambassador's household in Washington, D.C., where hair braiding was an important part of cultural identity.
“Here I was, a little kid in the ’70s, and I had these really beautiful, hand-crafted hairstyles,” Clark says. “Even though we were in D.C, it was like a little West Africa, with people turning my body into art, the art of hairdressing.”
As for Chummy, she was a trained seamstress and milliner, and while her visits were infrequent, they were impactful.
“She would sew my sister and me clothes. We’d point at something and tell her we liked it, and she’d just make it,” Clark says. Chummy would also tell stories that stick with the artist to this day.
“That put this idea of … textiles and storytelling, or the text in the textile, together from a very young age,” she says.
The artist spent her college years studying psychology before taking a trip to West Africa, where she realized her life was better spent pursuing crafts as a professional artist. She worked and returned to school, graduated and taught her way through various departments before arriving at VCU in 2005.
In February, the artist received an $8,000 fellowship from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Clark says she plans to use the grant to create new artwork based on her study of the U.S. Civil War and Italy’s unification, while spending time as an affiliated fellow at the American Academy in Rome.
Clark will spend nine months at Amherst College before coming back to VCU. After her return, she says she plans resume her deep dive into Richmond's wealth of historical museums, working with VCU students and continuing to make work that “delves into our history to make sense of our present.”
She continues to show at multiple galleries across the country year-round. You can see more of her pieces at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, where her work is part of its permanent collection, and on her website, sonyaclark.com.
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