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Sonya Clark

@sysclark

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Free 🇵🇸 🇸🇩 🇨🇩
Guggenheim Fellow
Professor/artist who believes art and education impact change.
Child of Caribbean folks. @marigirlsproject

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The blue bird brought me this small amazing book yesterday. Thank you @womeninthearts!!! What an honor to be in the book with all my art heroes
Also, my works are on view:

Museum of Craft and Design @museumofcraftanddesign in SF @objects_usa Object USA through @randcompanynyc Thank you 🙏 @mindysolomongallery for coordinating it.

Second body @johnsonlowegallery in Atlanta
Thank you for coordinating this show @derekellergallery

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🌟 5 DAYS 'TIL 🌟 "States of Being: recent prints made at Tamarind Institute" - "States of Being" is a group exhibition featuring prints made between 2013 and 2025 by contemporary artists in collaboration with Master Printers at Tamarind Institute at the University of New Mexico Albuquerque. Stay tuned for programming announcements!

📆 On view October 16-November 14, 2026
🕰 Reception: October 16, 6-8 pm
📍Fort Worth Contemporary Arts, 3050 Waits Ave, Fort Worth, TX

Featuring artsits Ellen Berkenbilt, Jarvis Boyland, Nick Cave, Sonya Clark, Lucy Fradkin, Jeffrey Gibson, Harmony Hammond, Ellen Lesperance, José Antonio Suárez Londoño, Nikki Maloof, Liliana Porter, Robert Pruitt, Brian Rea, Maja Ruznic and Paula Wilson.

The selection of 31 works showcases a range of lithographic techniques to embody broad themes and compositions that draw attention both to intimate details and idiosyncrasies and to grand scales of color and form. Some works welcome personal consideration whereas others gesture more broadly to social and cultural structures. Works selected for States of Being probe the quality of layered traces—such as the way limestone remembers mark making, layers of ink on paper that make an image and the ideas conveyed within the objects themselves—as a way to understand the transfer of information and representations of lived experiences.

"States of Being" was curated by Sara-Jayne Parsons, Kay Seedig and Scott Sherer and will tour to the University of Texas at San Antonio for presentation at the Main Art Gallery, January 27 – February 27, 2027.

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612 events. Hundreds of communities. One weekend of creative resistance.

Across the country and beyond, artists and communities came together in theaters, galleries, streets, classrooms, bookstores, museums, and concert venues, making their voices heard through a collective act of creativity, solidarity, and resistance to fascist rule.

And it happened because you showed up.

Art matters. Courage is contagious.

#FallOfFreedom #ArtMatters #CreativeResistance #Artivism #ArtistsForFreedom

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“Morrison is a literary artist of the first rank. She delves into the language itself, a language she wants to liberate from the fetters of race. And she addresses us with the lustre of poetry.” - Nobel Foundation, 1993.

On this day, October 7, in 1993, Toni Morrison became the first Black woman to win a Nobel Prize in Literature.

In honor of this historic anniversary, help Indigo Arts Alliance’s 2021 Mentorship Resident Sonya Clark commemorate one of the most enduring aspects of Toni Morrison’s work: the way she saw Black girls and Black women’s depth, clarity, and tenderness.

Add your image to a growing archive that celebrates Black girlhood across generations! If you identified as a Black girl in your youth, we invite you to contribute a childhood photo of yourself between the ages of 9 to 11. Clark will incorporate these images into an artwork inspired by Morrison’s book “The Bluest Eye” and its young protagonists Pecola, Claudia and Freida.

You can submit an photo 3 ways: 1. Send us a DM on instagram to @marigirlsproject. 2. Email us directly at marigirls@indigoartsalliance.me. 3. Fill out the google form linked in our bio. 🔗

The final artwork will be unveiled in 2028 as part of an upcoming exhibition.
—
Image: Toni Morrison receiving her Nobel Prize from H.M. King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden at the Stockholm Concert Hall on 10 December 1993. Nobel Foundation. Photo by: Lars Åström

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Seeing @sysclark ‘s Edifice and Mortar (2018) at The Armory Show felt a little like seeing an old friend after many years. I first really came to know Clark’s work while I was at the Museum of Arts and Design, so encountering this piece unexpectedly on the fair floor brought me right back to Sonya Clark: We Are Each Other, the extraordinary 2024 exhibition that surveyed thirty years of her practice.

Clark has an incredible ability to take materials that feel familiar—hair, cloth, flags, books, bricks—and reveal the histories embedded within them. Edifice and Mortar is a particularly powerful example. The bricks carry language from the Declaration of Independence, while African American hair gathered from Richmond salons forms the mortar holding the wall together. The work makes literal the contradiction between the ideals on which the United States was founded and the people whose labor built and sustained it while being denied those very promises.

That tension between material, history, labor, and memory is what has always made Sonya’s work so impactful to me. At MAD, We Are Each Other brought together projects including The Hair Craft Project and Unraveling, showing how she can transform acts of making—braiding, weaving, unraveling, building—into ways of asking much larger questions about race, citizenship, community, and whose histories we choose to carry forward.

It was wonderful to encounter Edifice and Mortar again, this time completely by chance in the middle of The Armory Show at the @goya_contemporary_gallery. Some works change when you return to them; others remind you immediately why they stayed with you in the first place.

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Last weekend, our September Mentorship AiR Aisha Seriki traveled to New York City to visit The Armory Show, reconnecting with friends and familiar work along the way. Swipe through for a few sweet moments from her visit, including the work of one of our near and dear alumni, Sonya Clark ’21 Mentorship AiR. 💙

To learn more about Aisha’s practice, join us on Thursday, October 1, at 6 PM EST for an Open Studio with her and fellow September Mentorship AiR Asha Tamirisa. Meet the artists, step into their creative spaces, learn more about their processes, and experience works in progress firsthand!

The event is free and open to the public and will be held at Indigo Arts Alliance, 60 Cove St. Studio in Portland, ME. Visit the link in our bio to register. 🔗
——
Images: 1. Aisha in front of Oluwasemilore Delano’s solo presentation, The Life of a Few, with Adegbola Gallery. 2. Aisha and fellow RCA graduate Thersea Weber in front of Weber’s solo presentation with Studio/Chapple. 3. Sonya Clark, “Edifice & Mortar,” 2018, presented with Goya Gontemporary. 4. The graphic for Asha and Aisha’s open studio.

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All are invited to participate in a simultaneous reading in the Marigold Garden in front of the Mead on Sunday, 10/4, at 2 pm.

Each participant will read from and receive a copy of Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” to keep. Divided into sections and read aloud simultaneously, the book will likely take somewhere between 8-24 minutes to read. Open to the public; for planning purposes please register in advance at the link.

Convene at 2 PM to read, press marigolds, and spend time in the garden and with each other. This event is part of Banned Book Week and the Fall of Freedom creative resistance festival. In the event of rain, the reading will take place inside the museum.

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VIA Partners, Grantees, friends and staff had a wonderful day at the VIP opening of The Armory Show (@thearmoryshow) We were thrilled to catch up with new and old friends and see artwork by many Grantees around the fair. Congratulations to all on view.

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Now on view at The Armory Show: new and never before exhibited releases by linn meyers (@linnmeyers) alongside recent works by Sonya Clark (@sysclark) and Ellen Lesperance (@ellenlesperance). ⁠
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Swipe to see: Indigo Between Cornrows by Sonya Clark; Sounding Piece by linn meyers; XOXOX (All Night) by Ellen Lesperance⁠
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🗓️ September 24–27⁠
📍Javits Center, NYC⁠
📌 Tamarind | Booth N3⁠
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DM us or email tamarind@unm.edu for the full checklist including works by Jordan Ann Craig, Jeffrey Gibson, and Rachel Perry.⁠
⁠
#tamarindinstitute #thearmoryshow

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Things that have been inspiring me artistically (idea by Rama Duwaji)
Visited The Blanton and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston

The Yellow Scale
František Kupka

Still Life with Fruit and Eggs
Eliza B Duffey

Last of the Tribes
Hiram Powers

The Japanese Footbridge at Giverny
Claude Monet

Vase of Chrysanthemums
Henri Fantin-Latour

The Repentant Magdalen
Philippe de Champaigne

Pair of ornaments in the form of ears of corn
Unknown artist from Central and South America

Untitled (broccoli)
Harry Bertoia

Shards from Moritzplatz Berlin necklace
Bernhard Schobinger

The Rings of Saturn
Bernhard Schobinger

The Offering of a Sentient Cry
Tuan Andrew Nguyen

San Gabriel Arcángel
Unknown

Among Women Only
Louis Fratino

The Broad
Ramiro Gomez

Madam C.J. Walker
Sonya Clark

Marcelle Aron
Édouard Vuillard

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The land bears witness. The body holds truths. Dendrochronology is an LP.

Sonya Clark’s (@sysclark) medallion featured in “Declare: A Civic Gospel” was inspired by her visit to Monticello to record the eyes of descendants of the people enslaved by Thomas Jefferson. She walked the grounds with folks whose embodiment of their ancestors manifests profoundly in the present.

At the ghost circle of the famous felled tulip poplar, a new tree emerged. Within the textured bark, its watchful eye holds this nation accountable for our past and what becomes of our future.

Learn more about “Declare: A Civic Gospel” at the link in bio. The publication was made in partnership with Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello (@tjmonticello).

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Book tour stop 3: returning to western MA, reading in the lovely @odysseybookshop with brilliant @jen_acker asking me perceptive questions about my short story collection. I especially loved the bathroom of @odysseybookshop with various authors’ signatures…and I got to add my name! Thanks to my friends for capturing these moments & for holding me, providing places to rest. Curious about ghosts, broken-down cars holding the spirits of dead mothers, rainbow squirrels speaking of intergenerational relationships, and more? 👀 👻 get a signed copy of LET ALL OUR GHOSTS DEPART @odysseybookshop, available in person and online. Next stop is Brooklyn, NY (Fri, Sep 25). I’d love to see you :)

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