In sociology, there is a concept called the sociological imagination. Introduced by C. Wright Mills, the sociological imagination is about an understanding of the relationship between the individual experience and the wider society. Making a connection with art, people draw on their individual identity and experiences to create art and engage in visual conversation. The messages they are trying to convey, the medium used, and the style used to connect in some way to the wider society.

Personally, hair and I have also been through a sort of journey with each other.  The first conception of my hair was sitting in the beautician’s chair having my hair washed and then braided with little beads being attached (sleeping in those were the worst, but they were fun). I have memories, like Clark, of sitting in between the thighs of older women while they twisted and plaited my hair. Memories of those barrettes, the bow-shaped ones and the ones with the ball on the end that snapped back into your skull. Memories of my grandma straightening my hair with a hot comb and me holding down my ears in an effort to keep them. Memories of trying to keep it straight in the hot, humid Georgia summers. The chemical smell of the relaxer and the burning of it (because as the saying goes “the more it burns the better is working”) as I waited for it to do its thing.  Memories of Blue Magic, Pink Lotion, and Softee Hair Gel. Memories of sew-in weaves, clip-on ponytails, micro-braids, box braids, and perms.

I went natural around 5 years ago now while I was a junior in high school. I started gradually with wearing sew-ins my freshman and part of my sophomore year of high school and then wearing my hair straightened for part of my junior year. In hindsight straightening my hair that much was not healthy, at least to the level I was in an effort to keep my hair straight my junior year. But, I was hesitant to wear my hair in its natural state out. After stalking natural hairstyle channels on Youtube and natural hair blogs, I made the step to stop straightening my hair. My junior year of high school I did my first twist out. It was new, it was a slight struggle figuring out what I needed to do, and I was apprehension to how people would react. That apprehension I felt is something I wanted to look deeper into. I was afraid of being looked at negatively and people reacting negatively. I was afraid of how my hair would change the people’s view of me.

But why? Hair is just hair, right?

The mixed bag of feelings toward my hair and in my natural hair journey is not something that applies just to me it seems. There are larger social, historical, and cultural forces at work and I want to know about them. I think Sonya Clark has tapped into a large reservoir when she started working with hair. Hair has collective meaning and memory. It is that collective meaning and that collective memory that I want to explore. It is from this standpoint that I chose Sonya Clark’s work and the standpoint from which I started my research.

There is just something about hair that is deeply personal, cultural, and social. Clark’s work with hair and her reasons for working with hair points to hair as an important factor in the lives of black women. There have been several questions I’ve been tossing around in my head:

• What are the implications of hair? In a social context? In a cultural context?
• What does hair say about us?
• How is African American hair historically and socially defined?

To try and even wrap my head around these concepts and themes I turned to history and anthropology/sociology. I’ve gotten a lot from my readings and I’ve managed to do a brain dump of the info. from several different articles. This was compiled over several days and sadly did not catalog the time specifically, but I have bibliography!

•  From a historical standpoint, the relationship between black women and their hair started in Africa and was transported, like the women themselves, to America into slavery.
• Hair for the Africans was a signifier of age, community, wealth, ethnic identity, religion, and much more. Hairstyling could take up to several days to complete.
• The grooming of hair was one of the focal points in Africa women’s lives not only because hair held the power to identify oneself, but also because hairstyling was an important bonding social activity for women (qtd. in Patton, 2006, 5).
• Hairstyling continues to be something social which is something Sonya Clark points out. Like Clark and others, I associate haircare with communing with other women. In contemporary times, that communion has also been moved onto the Internet.
• The negative light in which black women began to view their hair came from the practices of slavery. The type of hair and hairstyle that were worn by slave women typically determined where they worked and what type of work they engaged in. Slaves with straighter hair and characteristically Eurocentric features tended to work within the house, a job that was coveted among the slaves due to the lack of field work, and the slaves with kinky “African-like” hair and features tended to work out in the fields doing back-breaking work (qtd. in Patton, 2006,  6).
• Language, along with historical usage of certain words, acted as an unconscious factor of enculturation which teaches black generations to view their hair with disapproval. Terms often used to describe black hair such as “nappy”, “wooly”, “kinky”, and “frizzy” carries negative undertones and associations. In contrast, words used to describe white hair such as “smooth”, “flowing”, and “silky” invoke positive tones and images (qtd. in Johnson, 2013, 15).
•   “Beauty is subject to the hegemonic standards of the ruling class” (Patton,2006, 3).
• Through racial hierarchy practices such as assigning slaves that closely match the Eurocentric standard to less degrading work and other such discriminations, black women began to internalize the negativity associated with their hair. The internalization of such ideology remained through generations of black women and the black community as a whole.
• ” … harmful messages from enslavement about hair adornment, texture, and length are still conveyed to Black women (across the Diaspora) and even today this hampers choices and attitudes about Black hair” ( Johnson, 2013, 9).
• Paulette Caldwell in her article, “Hair Piece”,  describes her personal choice to wear braids within the law professional world. She describes a disagreement between her mother and herself regarding Caldwell wearing an Afro to her graduation from law school and she states, “I will graduate at the top of my class, receive more honors than I know what to do with…My hair undoes all of this…” (Caldwell, 1991, 19).
• Caldwell’s experience reveals lingering internal bias toward black hair, whether in its natural state or in an Afrocentric hairstyle, and the idea among African Americans that in order to succeed and secure prestige one must have straight hair.
• Black women, throughout the years, define themselves and each other by the way they style and groom their hair, and in conjunction, hair becomes a medium used by black women as a means of self-identification or self-expression (Johnson, 2013, 4).
• The experience of Stacia Brown (2015) in her piece, “My Hair, My Politics” where she writes, “One friend admonished me to avoid braid, suggesting I’d be replacing one stereotype (militant) with another (ghetto)” (1).
• “Because hair is an ethnic signifier, the choice of natural hairstyle can be read by the dominant culture as a troublesome sign” (Johnson, 2013, 1).
• In recent years there has been a rise of black women choosing to adopt natural hairstyles whether for the health of their hair or for a political statement. Either way, the decision to abandon white hegemony and go against cultural ideology in favor of a juxtaposing image challenges the monopoly of Eurocentric standards within America and repositions those standards.

Brown, Stacia L. “My Hair, My Politics.” New Republic 246.11 (2015): 16. Advanced  Placement Source. Web. 13 Nov. 2018.

Caldwell, Paulette M. “A Hair Piece: Perspectives on the Intersection of Race and Gender.” Duke Law Journal, vol. 1991, no. 2, 1991, pp. 365–396. Web. 12 Nov. 2018

Greene, D. Wendy. “Black Women Can’t Have Blonde Hair … In The Workplace.” The Journal Of Gender, Race & Justice 14. (2011): 405. LexisNexis Academic: Law Reviews. Web. 12 Nov. 2018.

Johnson, Elizabeth. Resistance And Empowerment In Black Women’s Hair Styling. Burlington: Routledge, 2013. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 12 Nov. 2018.

Patton, Tracey O. “Hey Girl, Am I More than My Hair?: African American Women and Their Struggles with Beauty, Body Image, and Hair.” NWSA Journal, vol. 18, no. 2, 2006,  pp. 24–51. Web. 14 Nov. 2018

I found some videos of Sonya Clark giving talks about her work and her inspiration. This stretched out several days and goes over 6 hours (though I’m not complaining because I enjoy hearing her talk).

“Sonya Clark: Hair to There: Weaving Tales with Textiles”

Southern Symbols: Sonya Clark

Measuring Histories-Sonya Clark

So here are some of the essentail tidbits I got from each talk:

• The basis of her work centers around this quotation by Toni Morrison that delves into this idea of holding memory.
• She talks about finding your authentic obsession: Explore it, connect it, and never let it go.
•  Clark’s obsession and thesis centers around hairdressing being a “primordial” fiber art form, this connection between textiles and hairdressing.
• Clark started with textiles because of how material aids in dialogue–she’s interested in cloth and textiles and how they work in metaphysical ways.
• I find her interest in clothing and cloth are important in anthropology because it’s a gateway to understanding social structures, religious practices, and regional practices. It’s a physical, tangible representation of culture.
• She’s interested in how artwork engages in dialogue
• Cloth as DNA, as something that structures who we are.
• She’s interested in how the materiality contains memory and heritage.
• Textiles were a way to connect with her heritage.
• Questions that Clark’s work brings up: How do textiles have power? How do textiles carry cultural capital?
• Mixes textiles in a way that mixes meanings and narratives to create a certain truth
• The idea of the collective and collective memory
• The connection of hairdressing to ritual activity. An activity of love, of connection, of cultural practices, etc.
• Hairdressing as historical ritual processes that encompasses human interaction and creating within a specific group. It’s tangible.
• Triangle Trade = cornrows symbolic of African bodies moving through this human trafficking system.
• Clark tries to actively engage viewers in these themes and question she explores.
• Cloth as a monument
• “The personal becomes universal”
• Hair as who and what we are. Heavily contestd and heavily politized.
• Hair as a portrait of the self and of history

What exactly am I looking for and has anybody thought looked into it? Those were the questions I had when I began researching my topic. I was interested in several different combinations of concepts: the portrayal of the black body and blackness itself, the use of the black body in the Western canon, and the underlying meaning in works centered around blackness.

That is a lot to unpack and it is harder to nail down a single point of research. So I started by pulling out 5 images that really resonated with me, and tried to articulate why they did. Here I have streamlined (kind of) my interest in the images:

• The medium used and how it conveys meaning in itself
• The forms, symbols, and other visual elements each artist showcases
• The appropriation of artistic styles associated with high European art
• The differing representations of the black body and identity
• The naming of the pieces and how that interacted with the actual piece

By staring at the images and pulling out 5 of them from the Pecha Kucha, I found that I gravitated towards something that I did not expect to. Sonya Clark’s Triangle Trade stuck out to me because of its meaning and its way of capturing a complex subject in this neat triangle. It was the use of materials- the woven cotton fibers- that drew me even closer.

11/14, 1:00pm-2:00pm

I have decided that each week would be devoted to another facet centered around the work of Clark which is outlined below:

Week 1: Getting to know Sonya Clark and her inspiration

• Who is Sonya Clark?
• Why hair and why in this medium?
• Does she work in other mediums as well?
• Where is she drawing her inspiration? What is her thesis or hypothesis?
• How does she see her work and her process?
• What are the influences Clark is bringing in?

Week 2: History and Context of African-American hair

• What are the implications of hair? In a social context? In a cultural context?
• What does hair say about us?
• How is African American hair historically and socially defined?

Week 3: How does this all make sense?

• How does this connect to what African-American/ Black art tries to do in general?
• The sociological imagination in art?
• Textiles and materiality
• Why did I end up here?