Sonya Clark Edifice and Mortar, 2018
Hand stamped bricks, human hair, glass, steel
39 x 72 x 15 inches
Courtesy of Goya Contemporary Gallery. Presented at The Armory Show, Booth 422. (This work is installed in the Armory Show Sculpture section, directly across from the gallery's main booth.)
Sonya Clark describes Edifice and Mortar as "a wall, a flag, and a document"—three forms that carry profound historical and symbolic meaning. Through this work, Clark poses a foundational question: Who built the United States? By transforming familiar national symbols into a physical structure, she reframes the nation's founding through the labor, bodies, and lives that made it possible.
The work is constructed from hand-cast bricks, each impressed with a traditional mason's maker's mark on one side and a single word on the other. Read together across the wall, the words form an excerpt from the United States Declaration of Independence. Fragmented across individual bricks, the text emphasizes that both the nation's founding ideals and its physical construction depended upon human labor. Phrases such as "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" become structural elements rather than abstract principles, prompting reflection on how these promises have been unevenly realized throughout American history.
Rather than conventional mortar, Clark binds the bricks with tightly packed African American hair collected from salons in Richmond, Virginia. Hair, a material intimately connected to identity, ancestry, and the body, introduces a deeply personal presence into the architecture of the work. It evokes the generations of enslaved Africans and their descendants whose labor underpinned the nation's economic and political development. Serving as the material that literally holds the structure together, the hair becomes a powerful metaphor for the often-unacknowledged role Black labor has played in sustaining the United States. Its compressed form also suggests the enduring weight and pressures of systemic racism while underscoring resilience and endurance.
Each brick is additionally stamped with the word schiavo, the Italian root of the common greeting ciao. Meaning "slave," the word reveals how histories of enslavement can persist within everyday language, often unnoticed. Clark transforms the traditional mason's mark—a symbol of authorship and skilled craftsmanship—into a meditation on ownership and possession, recalling the branding and commodification of enslaved people.
A reflective blue glass panel incorporated into the installation draws viewers into the work by capturing their own image. This reflection collapses the distance between past and present, suggesting that the structures examined here are not solely historical but continue to shape contemporary society, today. Viewers become participants rather than observers, implicated within the enduring legacy of the nation's foundations.
Edifice and Mortar functions simultaneously as monument and critique, memorial and inquiry. Through brick, hair, language, and reflection, Clark reimagines the architecture of nation-building as a meditation on history, labor, memory, and belonging, inviting audiences to reconsider whose stories are embedded within the foundations of the United States.
-This text was developed by Amy Raehse in collaboration with Sonya Clark through a series of conversations and correspondence between 2019 and 2022.
