Sonya Clark, Untitled (Cornrow Chair), 2011, found chair, thread, 36 x 20 x 20 inches

Once I got to the gallery, the works that gripped me were the more personal and edgy–pieces made of real hair and an intimate drawing of her husband’s closely cropped head viewed from above, in which delicate, controlled ink marks repeat the growth pattern of the tiny stubble.

Clark’s central subject at Snyderman is African hair, and its social and financial implications in American society.

Sonya Clark, Untitled (Drawing of Darryl's Head), 2009, pen on paper, this is a detail of the paper, which was 32 x 24 inches tall.

The small pieces made of real hair balled up to make pearls and abacus beads, and also stitched to give Abe Lincoln on five-dollar bills an afro, have some of the voodoo power of human excrescences. These pieces also create value and worth using that which society has historically scorned.

Sonya Clark, Heritage Pearls, 2010, found box, human hair and silver

Issues of value also come up in an enormous portrait made of 3,000 small black combs. The scale reflects the subject, the enormous persona of Madam C.J. Walker, who started her life in slavery and ended up the richest self-made woman in America, perhaps the world, thanks to the hair products she made and sold to the African-American market.

Sonya Clark, Madam CJ Walker (large), 2006, combs, 132 x 96 x 12 inches. Rick Snyderman said African-American gallery visitors all knew who she was, but not the white visitors.

Clark, who as been awarded numerous grants and awards, including a Pollock-Krasner grant and a Rockefeller residency, is chair of Virginia Commonwealth University’s Craft/Material Studies Department. Her MFA is from Cranbrook, her BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago.

Sonya Clark, Madam CJ Walker, detail of combs with and without teeth.

Hair is not Clark’s only subject. The 2008 show Taboo to Icon at the Ice Box in 2008 for instance included an array of stitched and beaded tiny talisman bags and charms. In this current show, there are also a pair of loafers and a kente-cloth-technique flag that hint at her wider practice and breadth of interests.

Sonya Clark, Beaded Prayers (detail from an array of 120 mixed media objects, as shown at the Ice Box in Taboo to Icon in 2008

On the evening of Clark’s talk at the Philadelphia Art Alliance, she spent a couple of hours being gracious to all comers at Snyderman.

Sonya Clark and Christopher Amundsen, exec director of the American Crafts Council, posing at Snyderman Gallery

After visiting the work around the gallery, I asked Clark some questions about hair and race, and here are some of the things she said:

“When I traveled to Ghana I was identified as a white person, and I said, Whaaaat???”

Sonya Clark, Mom's Wisdom or Cotton Candy, 2011, photograph, 36 x 24 inches; the hair is the artist's mother's, but Clark isolated the white hairs from the mixed mass of black and white

She said she straightened her own hair until she was about 20. When she let that go, she saved $60 per hairdresser visit–and suddenly realized that the hairdresser had an investment in how Clark wore her hair. With her new natural do, she found that  black women came up to her on the street, proud of the unstraightened style.

Sonya Clark, Abacus, 2010, wood, human hair and metal, 5 x 5 x 0.5 inches

“This is when I realized my hair is not my own. Hair is collective. One strand has my whole DNA in it. My little girls [that's what she called Malia and Sasha Obama] go to the same school I went to. When one of them wore cornrows to school, the cornrows got criticized as inappropriate–by white and black people. Hair is collective.”

In affirmation, I mentioned that Hillary Clinton also got criticized for her hairdo when Bill Clinton became president.

Sonya Clark, Gele Kente Flag, 1995, handwover and embroidered silk and cotton, 15 x 72 inches

Then she started talking about how slavery had disrupted the knowledge base of how to care for African hair. The slaves worked so hard and had such long days, she said, that they didn’t have time to instill hair-care information in the next generation.

Clark mentioned that there is an assumption that if hair is unkempt and uncombed, it isn’t clean. Then she went off into a discussion of fine-tooth combs and head lice. She said straight hair is more susceptible to lice. Hair that is combed straight with a fine-tooth comb (like the kind used to remove head lice and nits) looks hygienic. And so the ideal of finely combed, straight hair was an example of an aesthetic thing coming from a hygienic thing.  Her implication was that a white value was being transferred to people to whom it didn’t apply. (For more info on lice and hair types go to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln head lice FAQs and check out question #17. It’s full of juicy information!)

Sonya Clark, Afro Abe (Peacock), 2010, 1 of 44, only one with feathers; five dollar bill with stitched peacock feathers, 4 x 6 inches

Then we talked about how everyone is of some mixed race, somewhere along the line. Clark herself has a white great grandfather, and is of Caribbean and Scottish descent. “If you have hair like me, and there are no black barbers in town, I will look for a Caribbean or an Arab or an Italian barbershop,” because many people in those groups have inherited African hair.

The show at Snyderman–his first solo show of her work– comes down after Saturday (Nov. 19, 2011), after which it will travel to the Southwest School of Art in San Antonio, TX (Dec. 8 to Jan. 12). The show catalog, Sonya Clark (2011), was produced by the school with support from Snyderman.

Among my favorites are two pieces about America’s long-term contentious issue–race. One is from a white artist, one from an African American artist, and as always, the subject is loaded with feelings.

The African American artist, Sonya Clark, has stitched a growing series of afros onto the Abraham Lincoln etching on five-dollar bills in her wry piece Afro Abe Progression. (I’m sure this is illegal, but it’s a darned good use of money). The afro grows until it becomes a black shrub that dwarfs Angela Davis’. There’s the obvious relation to Ellen Gallagher’s visceral pieces of pomade-like goop for hair, but Clark uses a light touch here. Plus she gets in loads of content, from population shifts to financial power to black power. Abe stays Abe and does not morph into our current president, although I imagine Obama was part of the inspiration for this. The piece hovers between triumph and wariness.

Whereas Clark keeps her serious subject light, Stephen Beal, a white guy, does not, although both use needle work to make their points. Here’s the back-story behind Beal’s monumental piece: He discovered, via Google, that his great-great grandfather Rittenhouse Nutt was a slave holder. The Rev. Samuel Turner Jr. of Memphis, Tenn., it turns out, had the same great-great grandfather. Turner, who is a lawyer, discovered a document in a Mississippi courthouse that confirmed his family’s oral history–that his grandmother Frances Nutt was both a slave and a granddaughter of Rittenhouse Nutt. The two great-great grandsons met via Google. And Turner showed Beal the document, which itemized the estate of Fauntleroy Plantation owner Rittenhouse Nutt. Turner’s 16-year-old grandmother Frances Nutt was listed in the estate inventory.

Beal cross-stitched the deed text onto three somber rectangles, forming a sort of grave stone. He also cross stitched prayer flags in red, white, yellow and blue for each of the slaves named in the inventory, draping them over his memorial. Slaves and livestock are included with their monetary value in the inventory, including Old Millie, at 76 valued at zero, i.e. less than a table or a chair, let alone a hog. The piece is stark, unbeautiful (although meticulously crafted), and deeply moving.

A third piece about race is by Joyce Scott, who is always excellent and is the only other African American artist in the show. Her grotesque, small beaded sculptures, which combine comic and outsider aesthetics, are pointed and ambiguous all at once. The one here is no exception.

Identity is a big theme (isn’t it always), in other works as well. Mary Bero’s self-portrait, a stuffed and stitched head–puzzling, expressionist and 3-D all at once–gets at an unusual, arresting self-image. In contrast, Kate Anderson’s sweet little knotted house, also 3-D, uses stylized kitsch imagery to express identity and emotions. Pat dipaula Klein’s grid of hearts floating on a watery firmament gathers momentum from the turbulence of the stitching–a starry night of survival.

Broader social themes appear in Adam Cohen’s Super Army Ant, which we saw at Pulse last year. He uses comicbook vocabulary and embroidered camouflage fabric to make a political statement. And Katie Henry’s whimsical Music Together embroidery of animal-headed girls strumming on a park bench captures a social truth framed in an embroidery ring.

The show includes some fabulous clothing, embroidery, quilting, applique, macrame, the works of expected materials. And then there are the less expected materials:

Pat Hickman’s stitched gut sculptures range from droopy to elegant symmetry, and evoke bodies and vulnerability–and Eva Hesse. Yvonne Bobrowicz’ frothy sculptures capture light with strands of monofilament. Amy Orr continues her credit-card quilt series, taking on China and the economy. C. Pazia Mannella goes for a pieced zipper boa (I had seen this one previously at Fleisher-Ollman) and paper take-a-number ticket leis.

In addition, there’s work here by other luminaries such as Lia Cooke and the fabulous Ed Bing Lee, who has pushed his wizardry even farther, finding new roughness and textures for his mineral series.

Philadelphia area artists in the exhibit include Lee, Henry, Klein, Bobrowicz, Manella,  Orr, Leslie Grigsby, Diane Koppisch Hricko, Mi-Kyoung Lee, Nancy Middlebrook, Lewis Knauss, Kathryn Pannepacker, Leslie Pontz, Sophie Sanders, and Deborah Warner.

The show, which was curated by Snyderman Gallery Director Bruce Hoffman,  will remain up through March 20.

We had to see some on an actual body or two to get the full effect. And so we asked Ruth Snyderman and Kat Moran to model for us. Ruth is wearing a brooch and Kat has the lovely Bleuet around her neck. The works not only begged to be touched, once they escaped their display cases. They also suggested touching the jewels was not quite enough.

Kat Moran modeling Bruce Metcalf's Bleuet, painted and gold leafed maple, 24k gold plated brass, holly, 13 x 13 inches, 2003

The amazing thing is how lightweight these objects are. We mistakenly thought that Metcalf, a pre-eminent metalsmith, had fashioned the works from metal, but no, they are painted and gold-leafed fine woods…maple, holly, etc. with metallic touches. And the individual wood pieces are hollow–so, light as a feather.

Ruth Snyderman sporting one of Bruce Metcalf's brooches

Metcalf, who is also a writer, embellished his installation with drawings on the walls to give the art historical context. The context we loved best was Hans Belmawr’s sex dolls! And Metcalf had drawn an example of one on the wall. We thought about the Calder jewelry that showed at the PMA last year, too. Calder’s too looked totally different in the case, where the constructions were forbidding and sharp-looking, but photographed on the women for whom they were designed, oooh la la.

Jewelry is of course sexy to begin with — body adornment with the purpose of attracting and seducing. And even though you’ve probably not seen anything quite like their aggressive and openly sensual beauty in a bauble, these works are firmly in the time-honored tradition.

Jeanne D'Angelo, Vegetable Lamb of Tartary, 16x20" archival print of casein emulsion paint on paper.

While we were in the gallery, we went downstairs to the Works gallery space to see Moran’s curated works on paper show. The curator, who is also an artist, has been organizing shows for Benna’s Cafe and B2, and here she rounded up many fine young Philadelphia artists, some of them working in exquisitely-detailed illustrational form.

We loved much of what we saw, from Jeanne D’Angelo’s oddly-named and horribly skewered lamb in a tree to Joslyn Newman’s paper-doll-like cutouts including a sassy grandma with a walker.

Hurry over to catch these two shows because they come down Saturday, Sept. 26.

John Eric Byers' pieces are all 49" x 59" and made with casein milk paint on panel, varnish and wax.

Next up at Snyderman is John Eric Byers’ milk paint universes. Instead of furniture, this time Byers will show wall pieces that look like chess boards, ancient mosaics or blow-ups of fabric patterns for upholstered furniture. Meditations on color and shape–and on time, the works look great in reproduction. Next month we all can see them in person.