logo for HAIR CLUB, an interdisciplinary, research-based arts initiative co-founded in 2014 by artist-scholars Suzanne Gold, Kelly Lloyd, and Michal Lynn Shumate

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.

In 2021, in collaboration with HAIR CLUB, editors Clay Hickson and Liana Jegers of The Smudge magazine presented an entire hair-themed issue, featuring essays by Kelly Lloyd ("There is no platter") and Suzanne Gold ("She's Got Pluck").

In 2021, in collaboration with HAIR CLUB, editors Clay Hickson and Liana Jegers of The Smudge magazine presented an entire hair-themed issue, featuring essays by Kelly Lloyd ("There is no platter") and Suzanne Gold ("She's Got Pluck").

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."

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 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."

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."

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.

The Hair Lexicon is an ongoing list of words and phrases related to hair's maintenance, embodiment, visuality and presence in popular culture, global cultural heritage, and across time.

ALLTALK, book of poems and illustrations, published by Meekling Press, Chicago, IL (2022). ALLTALK is spiral-bound and printed in a limited edition on an offset press.

ALLTALK features a wraparound cover printed in four color layers and double-sided on an offset press.

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

ALLTALK excerpt, forthcoming from Meekling Press (2022)

ALLTALK excerpt, forthcoming from Meekling Press (2022)

ALLTALK excerpt, forthcoming from Meekling Press (2022)

ALLTALK is the product of many years of writing, ordering, reordering, and illustrating, shown here with a glimpse of the final book project in the corner.

Illustration proofs for the micro-poems and illustrations featured in the final book.

Corner Surfacing (2018), large scale screenprint on hand-dyed canvas

The Way Out (2018), large scale screenprint on hand-dyed canvas, featured in S U R F A C I N G at ok-no gallery in 2020

Deep Dive, sixteen-panel site-specific installation at WAS Gallery in Washington, DC (2018)

Friend or Foe (2018), three-color risograph print, 9in. x 12 in.

Green Pool (2015) large scale screenprint on canvas, 36in. x 84in.

Green Neon (2020), part of a series of digital paintings which have been used in contemporary book designs. This digital painting was used as the cover of Kate Wyer's Girl, Cow & Monk (Meekling Press, 2020).

Step off the Path (Meadow) (2020), multi-layered dye and mono-screenprint on canvas, 36in. x 24in.

Portcullis (2018), three-color risograph print on paper, 9in. x 12in.

alcohol-based marker on paper, part of a series of interiors and liminal spaces of looking in or through transparent surfaces during quarantine in 2020.

a four-color risograph print of my own reflection in the bathroom tile. a lot of my work with HAIR CLUB has to do with exploring embodied realities of having and maintaining hair. The bathroom is an important space of ritual hair removal and preparation.