Work samples
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HAIR CLUB at MoMA Salon 33: HAIR (October 2019)From the Museum of Modern Art R&D Salon 33 on Hair (October 2019):
"Introduction: Paola Antonelli
Emma Tarlo
Dan Choi
Carmelyn P. Malalis
Ebonee Davis
Lindsey Day
Video Contribution: HAIR CLUB
Video Contribution: Raffaele Mollica
Video Contribution: Studio Swine
Video Contribution: Tina Lasisi
Video Contribution: Noliwe Rooks
Video Contribution: INFRINGE
Video Contribution: Simon Skinner
The average person loses about fifty to one hundred hairs every day. When detached from the human head, hair transforms into many things – as waste, relic, sacred offering, or even a commodity. On a global scale, hair is a billion-dollar industry that includes everything from conditioning and styling products to the organic material itself, connecting consumers with scientists, designers, stylists, growers, buyers, traders, and wig-makers across Brazil, Cameroon, China, Europe, India, Myanmar, Nigeria, Senegal, Vietnam, and the United States. Serving many needs across our globalized world, hair is a tool of soft-power for maintaining tradition and reflecting regional cultures. A powerful symbol of identity, hair is both profoundly personal yet a universal transcultural symbol that reveals our nuanced understanding of beauty, fashion, health, sex, gender, race, religion, status, and mortality.
Some of the questions we strived to answer: If there is a politics of hair, how can we tease out alliances and break common ground? How does hair function as a structure of identity, for an individual and for a community? To what extent is hair care a tradition? Material culture? A physical form of oral history? Can hair tell a nation’s history? Can styling act as a tool to bridge generations? To bridge cultures? How is style a symbol of status? Is hair care a form of self-care or rather a necessity? Can hair styling be masochistic? Is hair dyeing personal expression, a political act, or even a tool for social mobility? In what ways are different hair textures different languages? Can one achieve fluency across textural and cultural boundaries? Can one’s hair ever be truly natural? In an immigration context, to what extent is hair a potential for either assimilation or a marker of cultural pride? To what extent is hair a raw material to be harvested? A commodity? An affirmation? A sign of beauty? Of pride? Of shame? Of power?"
About Suzanne

HAIR CLUB
HAIR CLUB is an ongoing interdisciplinary, research-based scholarly collaboration between artists Kelly Lloyd, Suzanne Gold, and Michal Lynn Shumate. Over the past seven years, HAIR CLUB has consolidated individual research vectors via collaborative, public-facing events into archives of hair stories, and distilled this research into a teaching curriculum that we have shared internationally. Most recently, HAIR CLUB shared research at the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago, IL (2020) and MoMA's Salon Series on Hair (2019). HAIR CLUB's methodology was also featured in the volume Socially Engaged Art History and Beyond: Alternative Approaches to the Theory and Practice of Art History (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020). Research on hair takes on an expansive, associative methodology, one that is rooted in multi-disciplinarity. A discussion of hair might lead us marching alongside the spiky leg hairs of the second-wave Feminists, or guide us candlelit, along the darkened hallways of mourning jewelry, woven from a dearly departed loved one’s locks in the Victorian era. A discussion of hair might bring us to culturally-determined beauty standards, the global hair market, and the history of shaving and the origins of hairlessness. Hair as a material is implicated in science, genetics, history, art history, material culture, popular culture, newsmedia and advertising. It touches upon expressions of gender, sexuality, identity, religion, fetishism, beauty, and politics. By honoring the mark of the anecdotal, the oral storytelling or social media sharing around hair, we welcome in newly embodied forms of archiving into scholarly discourse. By acknowledging that the personal is political, we advance intersectional feminist and anti-racist platforms. Share your hair story here: https://www.hairhairhair.club/hair-stories.
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Hair Salon at the London Conference in Critical Thought (London, UK, 2022)In July of 2022, HAIR CLUB presented a conference stream at the London Conference in Critical Thought hosted by School of Law at Birbeck College, University of London. The LCCT is a free, inter-institutional and interdisciplinary conference in critical thought that operates within a non-hierarchical framework and features academic and artistic work annually that centers collaboration and inclusivity. For the Hair Salon stream, HAIR CLUB featured presentations by artist-scholars Ginevra Ludovici, Matthew de Kersaint Girardeau, and a film by Sophie Mak-Schram. HAIR CLUB also hosted a Hair Salon, a conversation event surrounding the issues of hair and identity embodied in a cultural context.
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Museum Panel at the Smart Museum of Art // Material Stories: Hair (May 2020)From the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago event page:
"Weaving a soft architectural structure with hair sourced from around the world, gu wenda’s united nations: american code is a monument to a utopian ideal of peaceful human coexistence.
Join Lori Tharps, author of Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America, and the members of multidisciplinary artist group HAIR CLUB, for a conversation about hair as a material carrier of identity and social meaning. The conversation will take gu wenda’s work as a starting point, while also touching upon the status of hair in our current circumstances, both through a consideration of the meaningful social ramifications of the crisis, and through a lighthearted look at how our hair care has changed in isolation." -
HAIR CLUB at MoMA Salon 33: HAIR (October 2019)From the Museum of Modern Art (NYC) R&D Salon Series 33 on Hair website:
"Introduction: Paola Antonelli
Emma Tarlo
Dan Choi
Carmelyn P. Malalis
Ebonee Davis
Lindsey Day
Video Contribution: HAIR CLUB
Video Contribution: Raffaele Mollica
Video Contribution: Studio Swine
Video Contribution: Tina Lasisi
Video Contribution: Noliwe Rooks
Video Contribution: INFRINGE
Video Contribution: Simon Skinner
The average person loses about fifty to one hundred hairs every day. When detached from the human head, hair transforms into many things – as waste, relic, sacred offering, or even a commodity. On a global scale, hair is a billion-dollar industry that includes everything from conditioning and styling products to the organic material itself, connecting consumers with scientists, designers, stylists, growers, buyers, traders, and wig-makers across Brazil, Cameroon, China, Europe, India, Myanmar, Nigeria, Senegal, Vietnam, and the United States. Serving many needs across our globalized world, hair is a tool of soft-power for maintaining tradition and reflecting regional cultures. A powerful symbol of identity, hair is both profoundly personal yet a universal transcultural symbol that reveals our nuanced understanding of beauty, fashion, health, sex, gender, race, religion, status, and mortality.
Some of the questions we strived to answer: If there is a politics of hair, how can we tease out alliances and break common ground? How does hair function as a structure of identity, for an individual and for a community? To what extent is hair care a tradition? Material culture? A physical form of oral history? Can hair tell a nation’s history? Can styling act as a tool to bridge generations? To bridge cultures? How is style a symbol of status? Is hair care a form of self-care or rather a necessity? Can hair styling be masochistic? Is hair dyeing personal expression, a political act, or even a tool for social mobility? In what ways are different hair textures different languages? Can one achieve fluency across textural and cultural boundaries? Can one’s hair ever be truly natural? In an immigration context, to what extent is hair a potential for either assimilation or a marker of cultural pride? To what extent is hair a raw material to be harvested? A commodity? An affirmation? A sign of beauty? Of pride? Of shame? Of power?" -
Conversation Map (2017), hair in artConversation Map featured in the volume Socially Engaged Art History and Beyond: Alternative Approaches to the Theory and Practice of Art History (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020), documenting a conversation that took place at Ox-bow School of Art and Artist Residency in Saugatuck, MI in the summer of 2017 during the course of a HAIR CLUB event called a Hair Salon. Hair Salons are participant-driven conversation events that swirl around having hair in the world. This particular Hair Salon focused on a HAIR CLUB lecture called "Hair in Art and Culture."
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HAIR CLUB's Visual CV (excerpt)Part of HAIR CLUB's ongoing archive which we call a Visual CV--the artifacts, concepts, moments in popular culture and history that we are currently engaging with. HAIR CLUB's methodology is by nature expansive and associative, driven by the embodied experiences of hair that those we are in conversation with bring to the table. It is a conversation that is constantly unspooling across time and culture. We embody an approach we like to call neither "High Brow" nor "Low Brow" but somewhere in the vicinity of "Unibrow."
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HAIR CLUB's Visual CV (excerpt) - Hair Myth and Cautionary Tale (2015)HAIR CLUB exists to generate collaborative scholarship as well as public-facing lectures and events. Over the course of the past seven years, we have consolidated our ongoing research into curricula for graduate, undergraduate, and adult learning environments that focus on studio and lecture/seminar formats. "Hair Myths and Cautionary Tales" is one of our first lectures given on the presence of hair as a metaphor and a symbol in literature throughout history. This is an ongoing archive of references to hair that we continually update.
ALLTALK
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Suzanne Gold reads her new book ALLTALK!Recording of the launch event for "ALLTALK" on August 2, 2022, hosted by Meekling Press and featuring a conversation between the artist Suzanne Gold and poet Oliver Baez Bendorf.
Suzanne Gold is an multi-disciplinary artist and scholar living and working in Baltimore, MD. She received an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she honed an art practice that spans medium, material and expression—always searching for the right form to catch the idea. Her work and research with the international art collective HAIR CLUB has been featured in the MoMA Salon Series, at the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, and the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago. HAIR CLUB’s unique research methodology is featured in the volume Socially Engaged Art History and Beyond: Alternative Approaches to the Theory and Practice of Art History (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021). This is her first book of poems and illustrations.
Praise for ALLTALK
“here…a book beyond book, book bursting seams, book entering futures where ideas sprout legs. and we follow.” –Janet Desaulniers, author, What You’ve Been Missing
“I feel I am somewhere old for the first time in a long time. Calmed by instructions and slow unfoldings, satisfied by textures, I experience call and recall. I remember cobblestone, I hear a clear voice. On each page, I practice being present and letting go. Is this neuroplasticity? Leisure and laughter. Present tense. I bring my face to the wood grain and strain loosely toward further description. I have been here before.” –Oliver Baez Bendorf, author, Avantages of Being Evergreen
“It would be great if human existence sprung forth at the crescendo of a tidy speech, but it was likely more of an involuntary gurgle. So, uh, let’s hit pause on the eons-long conver- sation of what we see in the art and for a moment consider what it might see in us.” –Sammi Skolmoski, staff writer, The Onion
MINDSCAPES
By imaging the subjective internal spaces of her mind into a physical estate--with a moat, a meadow, high walls, a fortress--the images in Suzanne's work become metaphor: for blocked memories, and dead ends, for feelings of isolation and walled grief. The journey of self discovery begins in the protoplasm of the swimming pool. The pool is a real place situated in her deepest memory: a space of safety and comfort from the shifts of family tectonics in early life, but also more recently a mind prison, a place she returns to in periods of emotional heaviness. Being underwater, being separated from others, with wavy figures hovering just beyond the surface are unreadable as friend or foe. Bursting out of the surface of the water and up onto a vast meadow, a walled garden is visible in the distance. A lexicon of imagery emerges as new levels of self knowledge and new memories are unlocked. Imagined as a memory palace, doors open on long corridors. Eventually, it becomes easier to map the pathway of a thought as it travels the distance between experience and meaning.
A book of poems and illustrations detailing this journey--ALLTALK--was published by Meekling Press in 2022.