Unbraid: Hair, Clay, and Craft

Hair is a potent carrier of meaning in our everyday lives. It marks identity and heritage, signifies health and age, and is a form of personal expression. In “Unbraid: Hair, Clay, and Craft,” three contemporary artists have found hair a rich medium for experimentation across media.

Adebunmi Gbadebo embeds locs from friends and family into vessels she makes, using materials gathered at the site where her ancestors were enslaved. In video and ceramics, Jennifer Ling Datchuk uses hair as a metaphor to interrogate gendered stereotypes of women and girls, especially those of East Asian descent. Sonya Clark, who has long incorporated hair across her varied practice, invokes it here in indigo-saturated lithographs depicting cornrows and plaits, hairstyles closely associated with Black identity.

All three artists use hair to disentangle knotty histories and interweave familial and cultural inheritances. Their works ask us to consider this ordinary-yet-powerful material whose form and significance shape us in profound ways. As Clark says, “hair is power … it is a fiber that you can tell a story with.” It is, she tells us, “the fiber that we grow.”