Join us for an inspiring conversation between Lowery Stokes Sims, historian and curator emerita at MAD, and Sonya Clark in celebration of the artist’s solo exhibition, Sonya Clark: We Are Each Other, on view Mar 23–September 22, 2024. The two close friends will discuss Clark’s thirty years of artmaking dedicated to the Black experience in America, touching on themes of the politics of hair in the United States, the communal artmaking that forms the heart of Clark’s pioneering practice, and Clark and Sims’ past collaborations and long association with MAD.

About the participants

Sonya Clark is an artist and educator renowned for mixed-media works that address race and visibility, explore Blackness, and redress history. She is the Winifred L. Arms Professor of Art and Humanities at Amherst College in Massachusetts. Previously, Clark was honored as a Distinguished Research Fellow in the School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she served as chair of the Craft/Material Studies Department for over a decade. Prior to that appointment, she was the Baldwin Bascom Professor of Creative Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she taught for nine years. Clark earned an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and was honored with their Distinguished Alumni Award. She has a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her first college degree is from Amherst College, where she also received an honorary doctorate. In 2021, she was awarded additional honorary doctorates from Franklin and Marshall College and Maine College of Art.

Lowery Stokes Sims served on the education and curatorial staff of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1972-99), as executive director and president The Studio Museum in Harlem (2000-2007) and retired as Curator Emerita from the Museum of Arts and Design (2007-2015). Over the last few years, Sims has been an independent curator and consultant for the Caribbean Cultural Center, the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Craft Contemporary, Grounds for Sculpture, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Center for Art, Design & Visual Culture, University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She was Visiting Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University (2018-2020) and the 2021-22 Kress-Beinecke Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.