A rave review of Sonya Clark’s (CRF 2012) exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, entitled Tatter, Bristle, and Mend, was recently published in Hyperallergic. The show closed on June 27th, 2021.
“The acrobatics and virtuosity [Clark] displays with mundane materials — hair, hair combs, beads, utilitarian cloth, and the occasional digital venture — belie our usual expectations of their possibilities and gnaw at the edges of conceptualism, sculpture, and performance… We are impressed with the underlying mathematical impulse of her work (as in the Wig Series of the 1990s, featuring caps of braided patterns based on Fibonacci sequences). Her roving intellect is furthermore manifest in scientific models of meticulously beaded chromosomes that [Bridget] Cooks declares ‘suggest a universality of Blackness as fundamental to human origin’…In its suggestion of an aching desire to make contact, the poignancy of this work is breathtaking, and coincidentally an apt metaphor for our times.” Read the full review here, and learn more about the exhibition here.
Sonya Clark: Tatter, Bristle and Mend was co-curated by Kathryn Wat and Hannah Shambroom. Pictured is “Afro Abe II” (2010) by Sonya Clark, five-dollar bill and thread, 4 x 6 in.; NMWA, Gift of Heather and Tony Podesta Collection (Photo © Sonya Clark; Photo by Lee Stalsworth).