[MUSIC PLAYING]
We're in Richmond, Virginia today
to talk to the artist Sonya Clark.
Sonya is a textile artist, but I mean
that in a very wide way, for she applies
the mentality of textile work to a broad range of materials.
She's used human hair as thread, calling it the fibers we grow,
and thread as hair, putting to use embroidery
and braiding techniques to mimic the way cornrows
and Bantu knots are created.
She's also deployed the common fine tooth
comb in a number of works, weaving, and stacking,
and assembling, the ready-made items into configurations that
lead us to consider how hair, hairdressing, and its tools
are a reflection of who and what we are.
For Clark, the head and hair are not
only the site where we present and express ourselves,
but also a place where we negotiate race.
Other recent works include "Unraveled,"
for which she dismantled a battle flag of the Confederacy
thread by thread and presents its remains,
and "Unraveling," for which she displays a partially unraveled
that the audience is invited to help take apart.
Sonya's insightful approach to histories
is going to be our focus today.
And we're going to consider how we process histories,
how we measure them, and how we represent them to the world.
Hi, I'm Sonya Clark.
And this is your "Art Assignment."
So I'm going to tell you a little bit of a story
because that's what I do.
I wanted to make a self portrait.
And I was using hair as a self portrait because it already is.
But it's also not a-- it's not just a portrait of the self,
it's a portrait of long, long, long legacies.
Anyway, so I decided to save all the hair
that I combed out of my brush.
And I made-- I felted it into a dreadlocks.
I've never had dreadlocks, but I felted it into a dreadlock.
And I decided that this dreadlock would
make a perfect self portrait because not only does it
contain my DNA, but I was going to make it
my height, 67 inches.
And I also happened to be born in 1967.
And when my photographer and I were
working on documenting the piece and we realized that the detail
the real piece, then I shifted from a sort
of very logical measurement that had to do with me and my height
and what year I happen to be born in
and et cetera to thinking about, well,
how long would a dreadlock be if it
didn't measure someone's height but it measured a lifetime?
If someone started growing a dreadlock from when
they were a child, from infancy, until, let's say, they live
to 90, how long would that be?
And so I calculated that.
And I made this piece called "Long Hair," which is actually
a digital print of that original dreadlock
that I made that was this thick.
So I digitally printed that, and reproduced it, and stitched it
together so that it would be a continuous gridlock of 30
feet long.
Because 30 feet is how long it is
if someone grew a dreadlock from infancy
until about 90 years, which is quite incredible to measure
a life that way.
It's hard to imagine what a lifetime would feel like,
but we can measure what a lifetime might be like in hair.
So this is the way in which measurement becomes
a way for us to understand things
that numbers help us understand things that we can't understand
in other ways.
So there are two parts to this assignment.
The first part is probably the most difficult part.
I want you to spend some time thinking about something
from your personal history, your own cultural history, something
that you want to share, something
that is almost hard to imagine, something hard to conceive of,
something that you're going to help, in the second part,
your audience understand because you're
going to pick a material that is going
to help quantify, measure, bring to fruition,
actualize what that history is.
Or you could do the reverse.
And that is to take an action, something that you normally
do in your studio, and the materials that you
are most comfortable working in and do something for as long
as you possibly can and then measure it.
And figure out what that measurement lines up
with in terms of something from your own personal or cultural
history.
John, I'd like to emphasize with this assignment
that the history you address doesn't need to be something
huge or monumental.
I think it can be something small or personal that still
has importance, like William Anastasi who would
take a subway ride every day.
He would hold pens or pencils and kind of let
the subway move him to and fro to create
this scribbly drawing.
That was a way of measuring that ride.
Yeah, I think a lot of art is about
trying to process history in both personal and monumental
ways.
In the context of this assignment,
I kept thinking about this quote from James Joyce's "Ulysses"
where Stephen Dedalus says, "history
is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake."
Yeah.
I actually think this assignment is really difficult,
but it's important.
And I think that you need to spend a lot of time thinking
about what your history is going to be that you're
going to think about and also what the materials are
that you're going to use.
Yeah, I mean, you could use anything
for chewing gum to corks from wine bottles to candy.
SARAH GREEN: In 1991, Felix Gonzalez Torres
made a series of works informed by the minimalist strategies
of artists like Carl Andre, who made simple arrangements
of everyday units like bricks.
But Gonzalez Torres instead spilled wrapped candies
onto the ground, sometimes spread
into geometric shapes and other times mounded into corners.
And it was always a specific amount.
For "Untitled" (Portrait of Ross in LA),
Gonzalez Torres specified 175 pounds of candy corresponding
to the ideal body weight of his longtime partner who
died of AIDS-related complications that same year.
He could have chosen 175 pounds of a lot of things,
but he chose candy, which he invites the audience
to take and eat.
The candy is a stand-in for Ross's body,
which was gradually depleted by a devastating illness.
By taking a piece, the audience savors
something sweet and ephemeral, opening up allusions
to so many things, to the millions of lives
abbreviated by AIDS, to the drugs used to treat it,
to the body of Christ, to fears of contagion,
and to our own complicity in the continuing AIDS epidemic.
You choose how to read this piece.
And that's the beauty in how Gonzalez Torres chose
to measure a history both personal and monumental.
But there are darker parts of our history,
our collective histories, our cultural histories,
our global histories that also seem unfathomable to me to try
and understand.
And so I started thinking about Richmond
as the seat of the Confederacy and Ghana
as being one of the places where people were enslaved and then
brought to the Americas.
And so I measured that distance, which
is a little over 5,000 miles.
How to measure that?
So I decided to measure it in gold.
Now, Ghana used to be called the Gold Coast
because that's where gold was and that's
what the colonizers wanted.
They got gold, and then, they got people.
And I made gold wire, over 5,000 inches of it,
and spun it around this spool of-- this core of ebony.
Now it's hard to imagine what 5,000 miles is.
And it's still hard to imagine what 5,000 inches is.
But to imagine a spool of thread every inch
counts for every mile that someone's body was
put in the base of the ship, shackled to other people,
and then traveling across the ocean
is some way of quantifying something
that, to me, still seems unfathomable.
If you do this assignment, you're
going to learn more about yourself,
and you're going to find something about yourself
that you can extend to others.
And I actually think that's the only reason to make art.
So as an artist, I understand things a little bit more
when I measure them.
But then when I put them out into the world,
they become a way for us to understand something together.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I should have been a mathematician.
That's the thing everybody thought
I was going to be because math came easily to me.
And often you don't do the thing that comes easily to you.
Art is actually very hard for me.