Why subscribe to Pull out your own Hair?

Do you have hair? Does it get in your way, or tell its own story? If you asked your hair to speak for you, what would it say? Has anyone tried to touch your hair recently?

In this newsletter we aim to answer the question: How does meaning attach itself to hair? through as many lenses as possible, in an ever-expanding field of multi-disciplinary inquiry. Whatever the answer, you’re welcome to join the conversation.

Get tangled up

Don’t worry about missing a thing ! Your *free* subscription gets you:

• Monthly newsletters heading directly to your inbox

  • Short essays on hair maintenance and culture, scientific explorations of the cilia of microorganisms, the soft hairs of a supermassive black hole, the function of eyelashes. Hair at every scale, across culture and over time form the fodder for these ruminations on hair in art and culture.

• “Hair Moments” in pop culture and round ups

• Discussion Questions / QUESTIONHAIRS

• Guest posts from other scholars, writers, and artists whose work centers or touches upon hair as subject, theme, or material

• Formal written analyses of depictions of hair in fine art, including art that uses physical hair specimens

• BRAIDED ESSAYS: each member of HAIR CLUB answers the same hair-related question, parsed and edited into essay form

What do I know about about hair?

I’m Suzanne Gold, a queer artist, scholar, educator, high school Art History teacher. I come to this conversation with a decade’s experience facilitating deep, scholarly, and vulnerable conversations about hair with my international art collective HAIR CLUB. HAIR CLUB is an interdisciplinary research-based art collective whose work is centered around the multivalent topic of hair, committed to generative, associative academic inquiry in concert with the indelible mark of the anecdotal. HAIR CLUB was co-founded over a five hour coffee with dear friends and artist-scholars Kelly Lloyd and Michal Lynn Shumate in graduate school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014. Since then, we have put on hair-themed public-facing events and initiatives, curated exhibitions, edited publications, and consolidated years of research into a teaching curriculum we have taught at the undergraduate and graduate level internationally. In 2021, HAIR CLUB was published in the peer-edited volume Socially Engaged Art History and Beyond: Alternative Approaches to the Theory and Practice of Art History (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021) as a case study for socially-engaged art historical praxis. Additionally, our research has been shared at the MoMA Salon series in NYC (2019), at the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. (2019), and at the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago, IL (2020).

We like to describe HAIR CLUB’s approach to scholarship and writing as:

Join the Hair Salon

In HAIR CLUB, we believe in the power of storytelling. Hair is deeply personal and the personal is often political. Your own hair and its stories are welcome here. You can join us in the comments section of every post, as well as monthly chat sessions you can access here on the web or through the substack app. Or, you can share Hair Stories in our live QuestionHair anytime.

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