Sonya Clark is a visual artist and professor of art at Amherst College. Her body of work focuses on fiber arts and craftwork. 

Clark’s critically acclaimed piece Comb Carpet is part of the traveling exhibition RugLife, on view at the Weisman from Oct. 11, 2025 - Dec. 28, 2025. As an accompaniment to the exhibition’s opening, the Weisman hosted Clark for an artist talk, prior to which she agreed to be interviewed by Lisa & E. Gerald O’Brien Curatorial Fellow, Raya Bryant-Young.

I first heard of Sonya Clark in an undergraduate art history course on Black portraiture, for which we conducted a visual analysis of one of her better known pieces, Unraveling. Though my studies of her work at that time were brief, her vision and process helped spark my interest in Black diasporic art histories. Despite Clark’s remarkable standing in the art world, our paths did not cross again until this past September, when I began my fellowship at the Weisman.

Clark came to town in October for an artist talk hosted by the museum, marking the opening of the season’s featured exhibition, RugLife. I was lucky enough to sit down with Sonya Clark and chat about her work during this visit. I entered our discussion (my first professional interview, I find it important to note) nervous, but equipped with lots of questions rooted in my own academic studies, excited for the chance to learn more from her directly. I hope you find the following conversation as inspiring as I do. 

To Educe?

I begin with a question that always comes to my mind when I sit with her work: “Do you intend for your art to play an educational role for those who experience it? More generally, do you feel like there are certain expectations placed onto you, as a Black artist, that your work should assume such a role? If so, how do you navigate these expectations?”

Sonya takes a moment to consider my question, her hands busy pasting pieces of paper together for a project with an imminent deadline. Somehow, both this work and I share equal parts of her full attention.

She responds, “I do think that our work itself has a space and, perhaps, even a responsibility to educe—that's the word that we get educate from.” She goes on, “Some people would say, ‘Well, then does artwork have to be didactic?’ For art to hold a thought, generate a question, or fill a void that has been erased: these are all acts of education. And that is a responsibility I have, as an artist.”

I hope that some of the artworks that I make outlast my lifetime, as the artworks of others have outlasted their lifetimes. This is the art that continues to feed me and make me think. It helps us reflect who we are as a community, as a culture—as multiple cultures—and as human beings. My main responsibility is to add to the ancestral archive, the groundwork laid by people who came before me—craftspeople, artists, creatives—and whatever contributions they made. Their efforts continue to feed my current creative endeavors. My ancestors live within me; I'm here because of them. Literally—bones, blood, DNA, here—they're living within me. Art is the fabric of that endeavor, what I am doing in concert with them towards the next thing.

We, the audience, are more than just onlookers; we are her students, to whom she offers not just her life’s work but also that of her ancestors, whose life’s work has coalesced with hers into this present moment. In past interviews, Clark has credited her maternal grandmother, a tailor, as a significant influence for her appreciation of craft. I ask, “How has your relationship with craft, and this ancestral archive, evolved throughout the different stages of your career, within and outside academia?”

I teach my students in my classes how to thread a needle the way that my grandmother, who we all call ‘Chummy’, taught me how to thread a needle. That's an example of her legacy, literally embodied in me, getting transferred into my students.” She says the notion that art and craft, mind and body, are inherently split is “absolutely a Eurocentric notion. There is bodily intelligence: my feet understand gravity in a way that my brain will never, and that is true intelligence.

This mind-body split is not interesting to me at all; nor is the divisiveness between art and craft. Usually, what happens is people from the southern parts of this world are deemed as ‘craft people,’ working primarily with their bodies. People who are from the northern parts of the world are deemed as ‘artists’ making something intellectual with their minds [as if makers, of any kind, don’t use both]. It is a distinction I find difficult and, frankly, racist. My ancestors, who were African, were brought to this part of the world through chattel slavery, human trafficking, and valued for their skills, but not for their intelligence. But their skills were part of their intelligence. And this country is built on those ingenuities and skills, literally built on them. It denies their humanness, their intelligence, to argue such talents rely on bodily strength alone, without acknowledging the mastery, skillfulness, and insight at play as well. So, when I'm making something and proudly say that I'm using craft, it's with all of that in mind.

Consider the object history of a comb. On the surface, it is just a mundane household item, but for many Black Americans, the comb contains a long history of self-care, a reclamation of ancestral heritage and community building. The comb is essential for braiding Black hair, a lengthy affair that requires not just the dexterity of the braider, but also, and arguably more importantly, intellectual mastery. This is the context in which Comb Carpet is best understood. The rug’s repeated comb is not just a symbol of Black culture and heritage—it’s a testament to the presence of Black creativity in fine art spaces.

No Sunflowers

As we talk, I mention a quote I remember from Camera d’Afrique, a documentary about African cinema. At one point, the interviewer asks director Ousmane Sembène if his films are understood in Europe, and Sembène responds: “Let’s be very clear. Europe is not my center. I’d like them to understand me, but it makes no difference. Why be a sunflower and turn toward the sun? I myself am the sun.” So, I ask her, does this quote reflect or connect to your body of work and the topics you deal with?

Clark says,

That’s what I’m saying. Who gets centered? I do not remember who said it, but I remember this quote: ‘When you're marginalized, you can see everything from the margins. When you center yourself, all you're doing is busy thinking about keeping yourself in the center.’ It’s not that people necessarily want to be on the margins but, if you are, it’s arguably a better vantage point from which to see the whole.

It reminds me of when Toni Morrison was asked in an interview, ‘Will you ever write white characters?’ And in her molasses-rich voice, dark and slow and sweet and full of history and protein, Morrison says, ‘You don't even understand how impossibly racist that question is. You're basically just trying to center yourself.’ 

Morrison then explains that she's simply not thinking about white people. They aren’t her concern. She may be calling out whiteness, but she’s doing so in the interest of writing from the fullness of Black people's humanity, what she sees in us, drawing from her experience, from things that interest her.

One can certainly say: ‘If you find yourself in the margin, look at that space and everything you can see. Look at those people who are fighting to stay in the center.’ But there is another approach too, saying: ‘I'm not marginalized, because I'm whole. And if you can't find yourself in my stories and my work, that’s a you problem and not a me problem.’ Both are valid and important ways of thinking, and there's a lot of space in between.

We switch gears, and I ask her whether her creative process and practice is moved more by discipline or by moments of inspiration. Clark laughs, “I can hear my husband joking, ‘Just answer the question,’ but my urge is to push back at why discipline and inspiration are even separated.” 

Eyes Open

There’s the discipline of walking through the world, senses and eyes open, to let the muse come in, with a kind of openness to connecting things, seeing things, hearing things, eavesdropping. When you’re eating, and you hear a conversation over there and you think, ‘Oh, that’s good. Is that going to become a piece?’ My writer friends do this all the time. When I'm in residency, often something will be said, and you notice everyone getting still—ears big, looking around, like, is someone going to take that? You know what I mean? Like: Is that going to end up in your book, your book, or in my book? Did anybody else hear it? 

That’s what it is to walk through the world as creative beings, like conduits, trying to take it in to do something with it. That's a discipline. It may not be sitting down at your typewriter saying, ‘I'm going to write five pages before noon,’ which might be the kind of discipline that you're talking about. But there's discipline in an open way of being that I think is important to my practice. I can do it in my studio, sure, but I can also make my studio right here, anywhere.

She gestures to her hands, which have remained busy with that project she’s working on throughout our conversation, saying, “I can just bring my artwork with me.” And sometimes, she says, part of the research for a project is what happens in community with others, making something together.

Black knowledge traditions around braiding run throughout Clark’s practice, as does weaving and textile work, more generally. She’s especially interested in the communal aspects of this work.  “I think about women weaving sweetgrass baskets together.” 

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Sonya Clark at her artist talk at the Weisman, "From Hair to There," on October 11, 2025. Photo by Jayme Halbritter for WAM.

What you learn from the person who's doing this, or a person who's doing that—there’s this rhythm, like when musicians are playing together, and you can tell that they're also breathing together. You might be gossiping, you might be focusing on the work at hand; or, you might be the quiet one, just taking it all in. When research lives in this space of communal collaboration, it gets outside of the realm of singular genius, which is often elevated in Western canonical structures. The beautiful thing about being in a community is that there's always going to be someone who is excellent at one thing or another thing or another thing. Collectively, that's good research. But only if you have all your antennas out.

Let’s go back to those sweetgrass baskets: Maybe you're looking at what the quiet one over there has done, while the loud one, who's joking over here, is giving you joy. Then you notice the quiet one has split the reed in a certain way. You might ask, ‘How are you doing that so fast?’ And then they say, ‘Let me just show you.’ That’s bodily intelligence, shared from one to another—it’s community and craft and deep research, all at the same time.