b. USA; Textiles, Sculpture
Born in Washington DC to a psychiatrist from Trinidad and a nurse from Jamaica, Sonya Clark’s work draws from the legacy of crafted objects and the embodiment of skill. As an African American artist, she uses materials as wide ranging as textiles, hair, combs, and text to honor her lineage and interrogate history. Clark is a professor at Amherst College. Prior, she served as professor and Chair of the Craft and Material Studies Department at Virginia Commonwealth University for over a decade. She held the title Distinguished Research Professor in the School of the Arts and was a Commonwealth Professor at VCU. Formerly she was Baldwin-Bascom Professor of Creative Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and she was awarded their first Mid-Career Distinguished Alumni Award. She received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2015 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from her alma mater Amherst College where she received a BA in psychology. Her work has been exhibited in over 350 museums and galleries in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas. She is the recipient of several awards including an Anonymous Was a Woman Award, Art Prize Grand Jurors co-prize, a Pollock-Krasner Grant, a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, a VCUarts Affiliate Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, a Black Rock Senegal Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowship in Italy, a BAU Camargo Fellowship in France, a Red Gate Residency in China, a Civitella Ranieri Residency in Italy, a United States Artist Fellowship, and an Art Matters Grant. Her work is in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Art, among several others. Her works have been favorably reviewed in publications such as the New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Forbes Magazine, Sculpture Magazine, Huffington Post, Time Magazine, Artnet News, Hyperallergic, and several others.
