Our latest Feature on the 2020-2021 NXTHVN Fellows centers on Allana Clarke. In this video, watch Clarke discuss her sculptural works built of cocoa butter and hair bonding glue, materials that are not only related to Black personhood, but have historically been used to force fragmentations of self as a means of subscribing to Western standards of beauty. As she stretches, pushes, pulls and molds the materials, freeing them from their traumatic origins, she concurrently offers a metaphor to free herself from the violent compartmentalizations of Black identity.
Works by Allana Clarke are on view at James Cohan, 48 Walker Street, in the exhibition Un/Common Proximity through August 13, 2021.
