This article was selected as a finalist in the 2013 DC Student Arts Journalism Challenge, an annual competition designed to identify and support talented young arts writers.

Hair. It’s chaotic, it’s ordered. Clean and messy, it is a sense of frustration and joy.

In Sonya Clark’s solo exhibition at Contemporary Wing, AHEAD OF HAIR, Clark uses hair as a medium to represent race, class and culture.

“I’ve been combing hair since I was a child,” said Clark who has been working with hair as a medium in both hairdressing and fine art for over twenty years.

One of Clark’s more recent works, Pigtails, is evocative of youth. Resting on a wall-mounted shelf, a young girl’s braided pigtails are woven from tactile black thread. Though the work suggests innocence, a hairstyle removed from the human head challenges the viewer to consider the means in which a young woman’s hair was taken. When hair is so deeply attached to one’s personal identity, a hairstyle without an owner begins to lose its character, lose its playfulness, and becomes limp and empty. The effect is intensified when the viewer must look down at the work. Mounted at hip-height, the object’s relationship to the viewer shifts from passive to active, as one feels implicated and responsible for subjugating the hair and its anonymous human counterpart.

“Hair is basically a piece of someone’s body. It’s a very intimate experience of selling a piece of someone’s body to someone else,” said Lauren Gentile, Contemporary Wing founder and director.

The emotions evoked by the oldest work in the show, dating from 2003, complement with the powerful notion of stolen youth in Pigtails. Long Hair confronts the viewer with age. The brilliant, life-like digital print of a single dread lock is rich with depth and texture. The viewer cannot help but to yearn to reach out, to touch the hair fibers clearly pulsating with life. Astonishment and disappointment converge when the illusion is realized. 30 feet long, the print work represents the length of a dread grown for 30 years.

“At first, I thought it was strange to use someone’s DNA and then sell it, with the history of selling bodies in this country,” said Clark who is inspired by the infinite hairstyles that became available to black women after the Africa Diaspora.

Unbreakable fashions together black fine-toothed combs branded “Unbreakable” in a composition that is inherently broken. The moderate-sized work demands the viewer to consider the societal and cultural pressures associated with issues of straight hair. Cotton to hair is immediately recognized as an object of relegated beauty—flowers tinged with bronze are forever preserved behind glass. However, the work with antique undertones quickly becomes mystifying and somewhat uneasy, when one considers the implications of merging cotton and African American hair. The ties to slavery are inescapable and uncanny.

Though the subject matter in AHEAD OF HAIR compels the viewer to engage in dialogue, and to contemplate one’s personal notions of race, class and culture, the work would not be as emotive or successful without Clark’s extraordinary craftsmanship and fine attention to detail.

“When you see her work, there is something so elegant and subtle and thoughtful,” said Gentile, “The craftsmanship is always going to be perfect, the concept is always going to be well-thought out.”

To execute Quadroon, Clark revitalized the 1990s art of stitching, by fashioning cornrows into one fourth of a square canvas. The other three quadrants contain a heavy mass of thread, stitched together to resemble dense, straight, hair fibers. The cornrows and straight threads are pulled together at the very center of the work, forming a ponytail that extends and cascades naturally into the viewer’s immediate space.

Quadroon is exemplary of Clark’s extraordinary ability to deeply engage with her subject, while maintaining exceptional hold on her medium and craft. A reference to race classification, Quadroon has roots in an experience traveling through Ghana, where Clark, an African-American, was called “bruni,” the Ghanaian word for a white person. Clark explained that in the context of African culture, because Clark has a white grandparent, she is considered white, whereas in the United States, Clark being three-quarters African American, is considered black.

As Clark said, “I’m the same color in either place but the context is different.”

Albers Study captures this question within an art historical narrative, using Josef Alber’s canonic text on color theory, to take five colors and make them appear as six. Clark achieves her desired effect by wrapping colored thread around the individual teeth of “Unbreakable” combs, creating compositions that resemble Alber’s Homage to the Square. Hanging on the wall opposite the gallery entrance, Albers Study underscores each unique work in Clark’s exhibition. Designed to elevate her signature stitch from craft to fine art, the smallest works in the exhibition validate the artist’s grandest statement: “Hair holds the place where race resides.”

Roxanne Goldberg is a rising third-year art history student at The George Washington University, where she is a Curator and the Public Relations Director for the student-led arts gallery, Gallery 102. Roxanne has interned at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and International Arts & Artists. She currently enjoys her position as a Creative Writer for ArtSeeDC. After graduation, Roxanne aspires to earn a Ph.D. in art history and dreams of one day writing arts criticism for the New York Times.

This article was selected as a finalist in the 2013 DC Student Arts Journalism Challenge, an annual competition designed to identify and support talented young arts writers.

The Museum of Modern Art currently has on display a wonderful, compact installation titled simply “Johns and Rauschenberg.” Featuring art culled from the museum’s permanent collection, “Johns and Rauschenberg” focuses on works painted by each artist during the mid to late 1950s, using Robert Rauschenberg’s recently acquired Canyon as a centerpiece. The introductory placard describes the two artists as being “in dialogue with one another,” explaining how their works from this period led the way “beyond Abstract Expressionism” and toward Pop Art. At the heart of the installation is the relationship between the two men, an intensely collaborative yet highly competitive connection which pushed each artist toward his own artistic triumph.

It’s a nice narrative, as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go nearly far enough. Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns were lovers during this six-year period of collaboration, and their relationship had a profound impact on their art. For years, the art world ignored this vital component of the Johns/ Rauschenberg story, while the artists themselves kept mum on the matter. But 2010’s exhibition Hide/Seek at the National Portrait Gallery broke the silence, openly exploring the artists’ sexuality as it intersected with their work—the first ever gay-themed exhibition at a major American museum. That was over two years ago. Now, in 2013, MoMA is sending Johns and Rauschenberg back into the closet.

This is puzzling. Were MoMA a publicly funded museum, it might be concerned about offending its state patrons—that concern may sound very 1999, but the censorship issue reared its head again during Hide/Seek’s run, when Congressional Republicans threatened to cut the National Portrait Gallery’s funding over a gay-themed, allegedly “blasphemous” work of art. (The museum quickly removed the offending piece.) MoMA, however, is privately funded, and accepts no government cash. So why the dodge on Johns and Rauschenberg?

Most likely because art museums, even seemingly progressive ones like MoMA, remain more closeted than you might think. Textbooks and survey courses have only recently begun examining this dimension of art history, even though it is a fundamental aspect of movements like Pop Art. And while queer theory has allowed art historians and critics to incorporate artists’ sexuality into interpretation of their works, orientation is rarely noted in museums. (The MoMA’s profile of gay icon Andy Warhol fails to mention that he was gay.)

Sometimes that’s fine—most of Warhol’s work, for instance, does not merit mention of his sexuality (though leaving it out of his bio altogether is a bit much). But in the case of Johns and Rauschenberg, ignoring orientation amounts to curatorial malpractice. As the curator ofHide/ Seek Jonathan Katz explains, Rauschenberg’s guilt and turmoil over their relationship is explored in some of his greatest works, including Canto XIV. Johns’ work In Memory of My Feelings – Frank O’Hara is an obvious eulogy for the relationship. The title is a reference to a poem by O’Hara, who was himself gay, which begins:

My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent
and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets.
He has several likenesses, like stars and years, like numerals.

The painting contains one of Johns’ famous Americans flags reversed and coated in thick, dark paint, occluding the iconic image with gloomy tones. Johns painted his first American flag soon after meeting Rauschenberg, and completed In Memory during their break-up. Accordingly, the piece is often interpreted as an illustration of a relationship tarnished, smothered, and increasingly obscured by the passage of time.

While those two works are not on display in “Johns and Rauschenberg,” several of the installation’s paintings could be rewardingly subjected to similar analysis. MoMA gives us no such gifts, though, skating over the true nature of the two men’s relationship and, at one point, actively denying it, really, by referring to Johns as Rauschenberg’s “friend.” Issues of offensiveness aside—gay people have fought for decades to have their partners recognized as more than mere “friends”—such bowdlerization is intellectually dissatisfying. Even a brief reference to the artists’ sexuality could clue savvy viewers into keener investigation of these droll, elliptical works—or, even better, complete the installation’s narrative. MoMA tells us that Johns’ and Rauschenberg’s collaboration led them away from abstract expressionism, but it fails to explain how they discovered Pop Art. That genre, birthed by these two artistic giants, was built upon rejection of societal norms including hyper-masculinity and heternormativity. Its gay dimension was present from its genesis, yet a casual visitor to “Johns and Rauschenberg” might think Pop Art merely sprung out of two buddies’ wacky experiments.

In an attempt to justify this re-closing of the artistic closet, MoMA’s press office first informed me that Johns and Rauschenberg “wish to be described” as just friends. (Rauschenberg died in 2008; Johns is 82.) When I asked whether the artists specifically requested such a label, the museum’s representative walked back the claim, instead stating that they “have been referred to that way [as friends, that is] historically,” but the rep would not say whether the artists themselves insisted on the “friends” phrasing. Neither would the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, which officially had “no reply” to the question, or the Matthew Marks Gallery, Johns’ dealer, which failed to respond to repeated inquiries.

The artists’ preference, whatever it may be, is hardly the only factor to consider here. Museums have a responsibility to acknowledge and consider the sexuality of artists in their collections when it is relevant to the work they are displaying. That’s the real tragedy of “Johns and Rauschenberg”: not that it puts gay artists in the closet, but that it keeps viewers in the dark.

Mark Joseph Stern is a graduate of Georgetown University, where he double majored in History and Art History. During his time at Georgetown, Mark was a frequent contributor to Slate Magazine. His work has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal and the Denver Post. Next year, Mark will be attending law school at the Georgetown University Law Center.