HOUSTON, TX.- Houston Center for Contemporary Craft and the Houston Museum of African American Culture are co-presenting “Sonya Clark: We Are Each Other,” a major exhibition of the pioneering fiber artist that showcases her large-scale, community-centered, and participatory projects, including “The Beaded Prayers Project” (1998-ongoing), “The Hair Craft Project” (2014) and the “Monumental Cloth” series (2019).

The Houston presentation of “We Are Each Other,” hosted within both HCCC’s and HMAAC’s galleries, extends the traveling exhibition’s tour, which was co-organized by the Cranbrook Art Museum, the High Museum of Art, and the Museum of Art and Design. Clark’s work centers on race and Black experience, and the exhibition is rooted in both audience and context, as each organizing institution is located in American cities with substantial populations of residents with a lineage to the African diaspora, and each is dedicated to celebrating and collecting contemporary art and craft traditions.

Organizing curators, John Guess Jr., Founding CEO of HMAAC, and Sarah Darro, Curator + Exhibitions Director of HCCC, commented, “We are honored to extend the tour of this significant survey exhibition to Houston, a city with a rich cultural and social landscape that has been shaped by the African diaspora. For Sonya Clark, craft and community are intertwined, and we hope that this iteration of the exhibition reflects the relationship between legacies of craft and the African American experience in the United States. Presenting ‘We Are Each Other’ across our institutions, which are devoted to African American culture and contemporary craft practice, respectively, embodies the collaborative spirit that defines Clark’s oeuvre.”

Clark is acclaimed for using everyday fiber materials, such as hair, flags, and found fabric, as well as a range of textile techniques, including weaving, braiding, quilting, and beading, to examine issues of history, racial injustice, cultural legacies, and reconciliation. “We Are Each Other” shows how her community-centered projects facilitate new collective encounters across racial, gender, and socioeconomic divisions. In addition to her large-scale installations, the exhibition will feature a range of her photographs, prints, and sculpture.

The ethos of Clark’s participatory works is embedded in the exhibition title, inspired by the Gwendolyn Brooks poem, “Paul Robeson” (1970), about the civil rights activist, which closes with, “we are each other’s harvest/we are each other’s business/we are each other’s magnitude and bond.”

Clark said of the exhibition, “I am a collaboration, as is each artwork. A collaboration, a generational connection, a tie between us. From the ancestral substance that makes up my bones and blood to the engagement with community, all of it functions as a means to do the necessary work.”

Clark holds a Master of Arts from the Cranbrook Academy of Art and is the recipient of a United States Artists Fellowship, a Pollock Krasner Award, an 1858 Prize, an Art Prize Grand Jurors Award, and an Anonymous Was a Woman Award. Her work has been exhibited in more than 350 museums and galleries around the world. She is a professor of art at Amherst College in Massachusetts and previously served as chair of the craft/material studies department at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia.