Sonya Clark
African American artist (born 1967)
Sonya Clark (born 1967, Washington, D.C.) is an American artist of Afro-Caribbean heritage. Clark is a fiber artist known for using a variety of materials including human hair and combs to address race, culture, class, and history. Her beaded headdress assemblages and braided wig series of the late 1990s, which received critical acclaim, evoked African traditions of personal adornment and moved these common forms into the realm of personal and political expression. Although African art and her Caribbean background are important influences, Clark also builds on practices of assemblage and accumulation used by American artists such as Betye Saar and David Hammons.
Biography
Clark's father was a psychiatrist from Trinidad while her mother was a nurse from Jamaica. Clark was influenced by the craftspeople in her family, including a grandmother who worked as a tailor, and a grandfather who was a furniture maker.
Education
Clark graduated from the Sidwell Friends School in 1985. She then received a BA in psychology from Amherst College in 1989. She went on to receive a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1993, where she studied with the artists Nick Cave (performance artist), Anne Wilson, and Joan Livingstone. In 1995, Clark received an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sonya Clark” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.