2020 Recipients
Sophia Wallace
Sophia Wallace, a mixed media artist, is changing the way we think about female pleasure through her art. She holds a BA in Political Science from Smith College and an MA in Photography from New York University & The International Center of Photography.
Best known for her viral project CLITERACY, Wallace is interested in the ways that people assigned female at birth are denied self-determination through the weaponization of their genitals. Through diverse materials and approaches, including large text, sculpture, installation and performance, Wallace’s art seeks to establish the clitoris in visual representation; a vital part of our understanding of the body. Her work is shown widely in the US and internationally including Spain, Austria, Mexico, Italy, Nigeria, Australia and the UK. She was recently featured in the documentary The Dilemma of Desire by Maria Finitzo, a film that initiates overdue conversations about the social negation of the right to sexual pleasure according to sex and gender. Wallace’s vital work challenges the visual tropes that venerate the phallus and perpetuate the myth that vagina, not the clitoris, is its homologue.
Exhibitions of Wallace's art have been held at Kunsthalle Wien Museum, Samek Art Museum, Leslie-Lohman Museum, Aperture Gallery, Taschen Gallery, Blueproject Foundation, and Newspace Center of Photography among others. Her works are in the permanent collections of Agnes Scott College, The Leslie-Lohman Museum and The Vescom Collection. Critical recognition of Wallace's work on gendered body knowledge includes The New York Times, The Atlantic, PBS, ARTE, The Guardian, Art in America, Teen Vogue, New Yorker, Time, VICE, and Huffington Post among others.
Her TED talk, 'A Case For Cliteracy' has been viewed 596,891 times while her multi-collaboration with Huffington Post, ‘The Overdue, Under-told Story of the Clitoris’, received 3.5 million views and was translated in 3 languages. Wallace has been honored with the Griffin Museum’s Critic’s Pick Award, and PDN’s Curator Award. She was a 2012 recipient of the Van Lier Fellowship, and a 2019 "Artist On Our Radar" with Creative Capital. She was a 2019 Artist in Residence at the Project For Empty Space Feminist Incubator and an Artist in Residence at Vermont Studio Center.
Artist Statement
My work aestheticizes an embodied possibility for othered subjects. I focus in particular on the ways that gender and sexuality are weaponized to maintain patriarchal dominance. To create my artworks, I draw from diverse media including text, sculpture, photography, installation, printmaking, street art and performance. Over the last eight years, I have focused on a single project: to establish the clitoris in visual representation in its true and unknown form and as a symbol of power. While the phallic obelisk is seen from national monuments to somber burial sites, representation of the clitoral violates an unspoken code of silence – that the genitals of people assigned female at birth are of marginal, rather than universal, significance and are never appropriate for public discourse, let alone display. Each work I make is an attempt to place an unseen subject into art history, so that it may participate in our collective understanding of what it means to exist.