Hair Power: Culture, Materiality, Politics of Hair in Contemporary Art

This panel considers how contemporary artists engage with human hair in their studio practices. In Textures: The History and Art of Black Hair, artist Sonya Clark is quoted: “Hair was the first fiber that people manipulated for aesthetic and functional reasons.” Hair has a relationship to sexuality, age, race, social class, health, power, and religion. Ethnicity, race, and gender intersect within hair as reflections of identity. Entanglements between ethnicity, gender, and race differences affect the visual constructions of hair artworks. The artist’s technical ability to manipulate hair strands is impacted by the ethnicity and race of the sourced hair. Transformation of hair into artwork is repurposed materiality. Materiality of hair coincides with feminism at the point it speaks to issues of body image, femininity, and identity. Hair can carry forward historical meanings associated with religion and mythology. Due to its correlation to material culture, hair may reflect political agency. In 2022, women filmed themselves cutting their hair; ordinary actions became acts of protest. ‘Hair for Freedom’ showed solidarity with Iranian women and protested the death of Mahsa Amini. Crafted hair in contemporary artwork can be interpreted as exoticizing women, ritualistic movements, critical gendered commentary, or multidimensional stories. This panel solicits scholarly analysis of artworks around this theme from art historians, artists, and curators. It welcomes papers that take intersectional approaches to the topic and represent various geographical locations.