2021: Spring Everyone Can Craft Solidarity

In her collaborative performance piece Unraveling, Professor of Art and the History of Art Sonya Clark ’89 asks viewers to help pull apart a Confederate flag. In Twist, she fashioned a typeface based on the curl pattern of her own hair. And now, the former psychology major is inviting the Amherst community to ponder solidarity and community through the Solidarity Book Project. Commissioned by the College for its 2021 Bicentennial, this project also honors the five-year anniversary of the Amherst Uprising student protests and the 50th anniversary of the Black studies department.

What inspired this project?

I was on leave, at the American Academy in Rome, and a publisher friend there gave me a copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, written in Italian. Now, I don’t speak Italian. I am never going to read this book in Italian. I thought, “This is going to become an art project.” I had altered books before. In my work Being invisible and without substance, I punched multiple holes in a copy of Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. I decided to turn this copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X into a solidarity fist and give it as a birthday gift to another Italian publisher friend, to honor books, our friendship and the work he does as a white man to elevate the work of writers of color. The solidarity fist is a symbol about fighting against oppression. There’s the power of many of these solidarity fists coming together.

How does the solidarity fist play into Amherst’s Bicentennial?

My beloved alma mater has done a lot of work. In terms of the student body, Amherst is a completely different, more enriched space than when I was a student. The work of solidarity can extend to so many places, but if I’m going to start as a Black person and talk about solidarity, then I also need to say who else I am in solidarity with, and that means starting with how our Indigenous brothers and sisters were first robbed of rights and land and sovereignty, and on whose land Amherst College sits. Then to ask other people who might not be Black or Indigenous: How are you also extending solidarity to these communities?

How would you place this project in the context of your other art?

It hits a number of pulses. I’m interested in craft-based mediums, in practices that sometimes get denigrated in a false hierarchical notion of what is and is not art. I was trained as a textile artist. People know textiles with their bodies. You are wearing textiles now. I am wearing textiles now. People are also familiar with books. Here is a common object with capacity to hold who we are, and to shape who we might become. That parallels very much with what I do working with textiles or hair, unpacking how powerful familiar things might be.

What is it like for people to craft the solidarity fist in a book?

It might take as long as it would take to read the book. There is something about slowness I’m interested in. The communing with materials, the slowing us down enough to consider what is happening, thinking about this book that has filled you with knowledge or made you question things. Solidarity work itself is slow and intentional. Slowness helps in the learning.

How does your own Amherst experience speak to the project?

It means a lot to me to start this project here, where I started my thinking about being the artist and teacher that I am. It’s about the complexity of community. There is not one Amherst; there are many Amhersts. How do we wrap our arms around all that Amherst is at its best? How do we call out the things that are not Amherst’s best and make sure we don’t replicate those things, but learn from those things? To learn ways to make
Amherst better—that is in fact an act of solidarity.

Photo courtesy Sonya Clark