Hair and Braid Patterns: Paintings by So Yoon Lym
by Izabel Galliera
While hair braiding originates in Africa where it has been
practiced for centuries, the black actress Cicely Tyson
popularized braided hairstyles in the United States in the late
1960s.i Writing retrospectively about the 1980s, Byrd and Tharps
argue that while the white women’s choice for braids and cornrows
centered on fashion trends, the same styles for African American
women and men were directly influencing the wearer’s
sociopolitical position and acceptance in society. In 1981 Renee
Rogers, a ticket agent for American Airlines was fired for
wearing cornrows. In 1987 Pamela Walker, a doctoral student, who
worked part-time at the Chicago Regency Hyatt, was likewise fired
for wearing the same style. In January 1988 Pamela Mitchell, a
part-time employee at the Marriott Hotel in downtown Washington,
was fired because of her “extreme, cornrowed hairstyle,” and in
March 1988 Cheryl Tatum, restaurant cashier at the Hyatt Regency
Crystal City in D.C., was let go because of her braids.ii These
braids-in-the-workplace controversies attest to the inherently
discriminatory practices in predominantly white corporate
America, which emphasize disproportionately cornrows and braids
as specifically Black cultural features that do not comply with
company dress code.
In her meticulously detailed rendition of a wide variety of hair
and braid patterns in acrylic on paper paintings, Korean-born and
New Jersey-based artist, So Yoon Lym subtly pays tribute to this
cultural legacy with its socio-politically-charged attributes
embedded in the fashioning of cornrows. At the same time, her
work emerges from within a specific locality. Ten out of eleven
works of her, exhibited in the A Social Geography of Hair,
feature aerial perspectives of different braided hairstyles worn
by students in the urban public John F. Kennedy High School
(Paterson, New Jersey), where Lym was an educator for nine years.
The paintings are part of her series of braid patterns titled The
Dreamtime, which was the name of her solo exhibition at the
Paterson Museum in Fall 2010. In the current exhibition, the
color photograph with the same title shows an aerial view of
agricultural fields in Leaf River, Illinois upon which a bowed
head with braids is made visible through a tractor drawn contour
line. The photograph visually communicates Lym’s stated interest
in The Dreamtime concept, which corresponds to the belief of
Australian Aboriginal people in the connectivity of all things
living and dead. While it suggests a worldview based on the
close interconnectivity between humans and the planet, “the
specific myths of the dreamtime will vary from one place to
another, and are often named for that place, they are shared
communally, and represent the accumulation of narratives and lore
and knowledge for that group of people.”iii Lym’s painted hair
and braid patterns act as links between the specificity of local
communities, as represented for instance by her students, and the
planetary condition that incorporates us all.
The paintings’ titles, such as Anthony, Juan, Chaquasha, Deneen,
Hector and Ronay-jah feature the students’ real names,iv each
expressing their individuality through their unique, hand-crafted
designs of urban hairstyles and braid patterns. Recalling
satellite images of our planet with its swirling geography, the
styles are depicted with near microscopic precision. They are
characterized by intricate geometrical arrangements achieved
through zig-zagging patterns, lines and circles. Braids are
sectioned off in rectangles with their ends collected in a bun at
the back of the head as seen in Ronay-jah. Inverted cornrows (or
“right-side” cornrowing), done with an overhand motion with its
ends twisted into strands that stick out like spikes that recalls
the Onigi style of Yoruba origin, are seen in Anthony.
Lym started to create her paintings in 2008 from snapshots she
took of students in the high school’s hallways beginning in 2001.
Since then she has amassed close to two hundred photographs.
Coming from ethnically diverse backgrounds, v the high-school
students at the John F. Kennedy are depicted with bowed heads
that elude their personal facial features, allowing their braids
to be the principal communicator of their individuality. The
painting names reveal the gender and ethnic identity of the
individuals. Concomitantly, their cornrowed patterns become
powerful connectors across space and time, bypassing ethnic and
socio-economic divides and uniting the styles’ ancient western
African origin with its more recent 1980s socio-political
history. It is this position between collective portraits and
individualized expressions that Lym’s pictorial representations
of cornrows have the potential to probe social norms and
expectations. She inverts the negative and marginalized
condition typically associated with them by faithfully rendering
each of the uniquely crafted braid styles as a way to inspire and
empower new forms of self-determined representations.
i
It has been argued that the white actress Bo Derek starring in the 1979 movie 10 popularized braids in the mainstream
American media when she wore a cornrowed hairstyle that became known as “Bo Braids.” See Ayana D. Byrd and
Lori L. Tharps, “Politically Incorrect – Black Hair’s New Attitude: 1980-1994” in Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of
Black Hair in America. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), 101-104
ii Ibid., 101-109
iii So Yoon Lym, “The Dreamtime: Artist Statement,” provided to the author, June 2011.
iv For the most part the titles are based on the students’ real names. In some cases the artist had to rename them either
because she could not recall retrospectively all students’ names or in in one case, she had to change a student’s name
because of legal reasons. Based on the author’s email correspondence with the artist, May 2011.
v African American, Latin American, from Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Columbia and Peru, Bengali and
Middle Eastern and mixed. Author’s email correspondence with the artist, May-June 2011