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, one of the artists featured in the exhibition, will visit the Weisman to speak about her art and practice.  

Sonya Clark is an artist and educator who creates installations, performances, and objects that utilize the language of textiles, politics of hair, and often the power of text to celebrate culture while also interrogating, historical imbalances, inequity, and injustice.

This event is free and open to all, however advance registration is now closed as we are at max capacity. Walk-in attendance is possible, as space allows after registered guests are seated.

Born in Washington, DC to Caribbean parents, Sonya Clark is the Winifred Arms Professor of Arts and Humanities at Amherst College in Massachusetts, USA. Previously, she held the title of Commonwealth Professor and was a Distinguished Research Fellow in the School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University where she served as a chair of the Craft and Material Studies department for twelve years. Prior to moving to Virginia she was a Baldwin Basom Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she worked for nine years. She earned an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and was honored with their Distinguished Alumni Award. She holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was bestowed an honorary doctorate in 2023. Her first college degree is a BA from Amherst College where she received an honorary doctorate in 2015. In 2021, she was awarded additional honorary degrees, one from Franklin and Marshall College and Maine College of Art.  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. 

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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. 

Image credit (Top): Sonya Clark, Comb Carpet, 2008, combs, cable wire, 20 3/4  x 28 1/2 x 19in. Image courtesy of Taylor Dabney.

This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. Additional general operating support is generously provided by Ameriprise Financial. Special thanks to the KHR McNeely Family Foundation, Kevin, Rosemary, and Hannah Rose McNeely, for their support of the Weisman's exhibitions and exhibition-related programming.