The Weisman's fall exhibition, RugLife, brings together contemporary explorations of the rug—not just as a functional object—but as a platform for cultural storytelling, resistance, memory, and identity. On the exhibition's opening day, nationally celebrated, interdisciplinary artist Sonya Clark will visit the Weisman to speak about her art and practice working across media—hair, beads, combs, textiles, and performance— centering African American narratives through craft-based practices.
This event is free and open to all, but RSVP is required, since space is limited.
Sonya Clark’s Comb Carpet (2008) is one of the exhibition’s anchor works and a striking example of how ordinary materials can carry extraordinary meaning. Composed entirely of black plastic combs—everyday tools closely associated with Black hair care—Comb Carpet transforms a domestic object into a layered statement about race, beauty, and belonging.
Born in Washington, DC to Caribbean parents, Sonya Clark is the Winifred Arms Professor of Arts and Humanities at Amherst College in Massachusetts, USA. Clark honors her Jamaican grandmother, Chummy, a tailor who taught her to sew when she was a child, as her first art teacher. Throughout Clark’s travels to over 30 nations, she commits to learning from experts in nonacademic settings including studying netting with a local fisherman, Souleyman Diop, in Dakar, Senegal.
Her work has been exhibited in over 500 museums and galleries in the Americas, Africa, Asia, Europe and Australia. In 2021 the National Museum of Women in the Arts in DC presented her first major museum survey, Tatter, Bristle, and Mend. In 2023-2024, a second museum survey, We Are Each Other, focused on her collaborative and community engaged projects and traveled to Cranbrook Art Museum, The High Museum in Atlanta, and the Museum of Arts and Design in NYC, and in 2025, an edited version at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft.
Known for her use of materials, hair, combs, textiles, and flags, Clark’s work has been spotlighted in the media on BBC World News, PBS, NPR, the New York Times, Sculpture, Art in America, American Craft, and Nka. She is the recipient of a Trellis Art Fund Fellowship, Rappaport Prize, United States Artist Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, Art Prize Grand Jurors Award, and an Anonymous Was a Woman Award. Nationally she has been an artist in residence at the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship in Washington, DC; Knight Foundation at McColl in Charlotte, NC; Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, NY: and Indigo Arts Alliance in Portland, M, Museum of Glass in Seattle, WA, among others. And, internationally she has done residencies at Red Gate in China, Civitella Ranieri in Italy, Camargo in France, the American Academy in Rome as an Affiliated Fellow, the Rockefeller Bellagio Residency in Italy, Black Rock in Senegal, and the Bogliasco Foundation Residency in Italy, among others.
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