Lecture. September 13, 2019- “Wet Hair: Visual Culture of the Mermaid” @ Centre for Port and Maritime History Annual Conference

Michal Lynn Shumate presented her paper “Wet Hair: Visual Culture of the Mermaid.”

Table & Workshop. November 18, 2018- Merkin Making Workshop @ Spiral Bound Art Book Fair

Suzanne Gold and Allison Crowley debut new products and new designs out at HAIR CLUB’s table at the Inaugural Spiral Bound Art Book Fair organized by the Curatorial Studies graduate students at the Maryland Institute College of Art. They also hosted a Merkin Making Workshop to great success ! Many marvelous merkins were crafted and many more conversations about body hair and body image were mined!

Lecture. September 22, 2018- COMBS @ Baltimore Jewelry Center

HAIR CLUB was invited to give a lecture at the Baltimore Jewelry Center’s 2018 annual symposium. The theme was “The Body Altered/Adorned” and Suzanne Gold represented HAIR CLUB delivering a lecture on COMBS across time and location in history.

Salon. July 23, 2018- HAIR SALON @ ICA Baltimore

Please join HAIR CLUB for a free-flowing discussion around HAIR and the hairy publications that were contributed to Up like a sun, down like a pancake. HAIR CLUB is an interdisciplinary research-based initiative whose work is centered around the multi-valent topic of HAIR in culture. Co-founded by Suzanne Gold, Kelly Lloyd, and Michal Lynn Shumate, HAIR CLUB is a platform for discussion, dialogue, research, exhibition, and production that has received grants from the Shapiro Center for Collaborative Research and the Propeller Fund in Chicago, IL, and has taught courses on HAIR at Ox-bow School of Art in Michigan, and Humboldt University of Berlin in Germany. The HAIR SALON is a place to tease out a discussion of what it means to have hair in the world, to share hair memories, and to find patterns in how hair is cropping up in culture. We look forward to hearing your hair stories!

Course. May/June 2018- HAIR @ Humboldt University

How is ritualized shaving practiced in religions as diverse as Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism and Christianity? What can our natural hair tell us about our ancestors, and what climates and environments they encountered? How can we better understand the election of Donald Trump and the defeat of Hillary Rodham Clinton by looking at their hair?

This discussion-based seminar focuses on hair as our object of inquiry. Moving through such disciplines as art history, literature, genetics, religion, social psychology and popular culture studies, we will examine how hair is simultaneously so powerful that it can serve as a beacon to other people from a sub-culture, so representative that we must wrestle with our identity while we straighten, tease, perm, curl, cut and style it, and so basic that we can all relate to “bad hair days.”

This course approaches hair in a manner that is actively intersectional. Through an interdisciplinary methodology, this course aims for an inquiry that is expansive, generous, and non-exhaustive. Because hair is heavily coded in gender and race terms, one of our objectives is to deconstruct this and look at the subsequent performances of identity through an actively feminist and anti-racist lens.

Broadcast. May 25, 2018- HAIR CLUB w/ PAPER CUTS @ Washington Project for the Arts

Join us for the next PAPER CUTS / LIVE conversation, curated by artist Christopher Kardambikis and featuring Suzanne Gold of Hair Club, Alanna Reeves of HUE, and Alex Vice. The conversation will be recorded and archived as a PAPER CUTS podcast. This is part of an ongoing series of conversations related to Bookshelves: PAPER CUTS / LIVE which is on view through July 5.

Course. June 2017- HAIR! HAIR! HAIR! @ Ox-bow School of Art

This interdisciplinary studio/seminar, led by the collective HAIR CLUB, explores hair as a lens through which to examine a diverse array of contemporary issues, events and experiences. The first week will focus on hair as cultural content with lectures, readings, and discussions around how hair carries expressions of power into gender, politics, and consumerism. The second week will delve into hair as material subject in writing, fashion and visual culture. Through these generative discussions, students will create responses that can take any form of the students' choosing, as book or anthology, as object or garment, as narrative sequence in two dimension or as performance in space and time. HAIR CLUB is committed to outward facing-research and collaboration and will invite participation from the wider Ox-Bow hair community.

Workshop. April 2, 2017- Merkin Making Workshop @ PMF

Hair Club would like to invite participants to use a variety of materials to construct their own merkin, or pubic wig. Merkins were originally worn by sex workers, but are now used as decorative items by people of all genders, and for “modesty” purposes by actors. During this event, while constructing our merkins with a variety of materials including sequins, fringe, felt, faux-fur, yarn, ribbon and glitter paper, we will engage participants in a discussion around body hair, specifically pubic hair, looking at the vilification of women’s body hair and the portrayal of pubic hair in pop culture. This workshop will explore a humorous DIY strategy to processing culture’s dictates about where hair should and should not be, while Kate Bush plays in the background.

Table. November 12, 2016- D.C. Art Book Fair

Suzanne Gold and Allison Crowley debut new products and new designs out at HAIR CLUB’s table at the D.C. Art Book Fair.

Book Launch. July 21, 2016- ATG Book Launch @ Uncharted Books

ATG is a thrilling tale of friendship via one guy's investigative reporting-style exposé of his roommate's particular hair habits. Featuring signature, deadpan prose by Nathanael Jones and accompanying illustrations by Suzanne Gold, ATG presents a world where the gauges of hair clippers and the tapering of a fade become the landscape upon which the friendship of two men play out.

Book Launch. April 5, 2016- Book of Hair Launch @ Comfort Station

HAIR CLUB's The Book of HAIR features 20 artists and writers whose work centers on hair as theme, material, organizational structure or motif.

Salon. February 20, 2016- HAIR SALON @ The Sub-Mission

THE SUB-MISSION presents a Hair Salon by HAIR CLUB, in conjunction with our current exhibition, “Gift Baskets by Occasion” by Kelly Lloyd, which runs through February 27. Hair Salons are casual conversation events; previous topics of discussion include Hair Myths + Cautionary Tales, Hair + Death, Hair as Material in Art, Hair as Form, and Hair + Fashion.

HAIR CLUB is a growing community of artists, writers, and scholars whose aim is to conduct a collaborative inquiry into the multi-valent topic of HAIR in our wider culture via conversation, publication and meaningful programming, and organizing HAIR-centered work across medium and discipline into thematic publications, exhibitions and events.

Broadcast. September 6, 2015- HAIR CLUB on Aquabahn Radio

HAIR CLUB is an ongoing Chicago-based research collaborative project of Suzanne Gold Michal Lynn Shumate and I, looking at the multivalent topic of hair. Prompted by Stephanie Graham's question, "Why say blondes are dumb? What does a blonde person feel about that?" HAIR CLUB was able to have a conversation with the Råberg family (Bruno Råberg, Melissa Howe, Erika Råberg, Liana Råberg and Jonathan Råberg), a family of all blondes, where we picked apart what exactly is going on with the stereotype of the "dumb blonde."

Lecture. April 23, 2015- Hair + Fashion with Caroline Bellios @ SAIC

Lecture. April 16, 2015- “Wet Hair//Granny Hair” @ SAIC

Workshop. April 3, 2015- Hair Film Festival and Merkin-Making Workshop @ SAIC

Hair Club will present a series of hair-related clips from the movies, Blowdry, The Reader, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. These films feature female characters who wear merkins—a prosthetic hairpiece used in theatric and filmic settings to cover the pubic area—in daring nude scenes. While the clips play, we will make our own merkins in a Merkin-Making workshop, combining craft with lively discussion on the subject of hair portrayal in film.

Panel. April 2, 2015- “Collaborative Research” Shapiro Center Research Symposium, SAIC

A brief presentation on Hair Club, followed by a conversation on the process of collaborative research. The student research group will discuss how inquiry on a subject can move forward in the stewardship of multiple separate minds. Topics include: documenting a dialogue, the act of archiving, synthesizing results, fostering an ongoing conversation, planning meaningful, and public-facing events.

Salon. March 9, 2015- HAIR SALON @ SAIC

Exhibition. February 2015- Hair Club Presents…

Was there a hair heyday? Has it passed? After a professor called a moratorium on works containing hair, I wondered, beside it being something funny to say, was it true?

Walking around Open Studio Night, it became clear that hair is still a material in circulation. How is it that hair, and artists who use hair, must negotiate the tension between hairoften being displayed (and therefore available for codification), and hair ultimately reflecting what is deeply personal?

This exhibition seeks to collect recent work from the SAIC community to explore the current use of hair as material in art. The exhibition of small works will be installed in the Flaxman Library Exhibition Case from February 2nd to February 28th, 2015.

Salon. December 11, 2014- HAIR SALON @ SAIC

Lets wrap up this semester by assembling, snacking and talking about hair.

we''ll bring the snacks

you bring the hair
and hair related thoughts

Party. December 7, 2014- HAIR BALL with artwork by Tegan Brace

Lecture. October 30, 2014- HAIR + DEATH with Caitlin Doughty @ SAIC

“A girl always remembers the first corpse she shaves… The hands of time will never move quite so slowly as when you are standing over the dead body of an elderly man with a pink plastic razor in your hand.”

So begins “Shaving Byron,” the first chapter of the first book by death-theorist-activist-writer-mortician Caitlin Doughty. And so it’s probably not surprising that we are **absolutely thrilled** to be hosting her next week!

Event. October 6, 2014- Hair Myth and Cautionary Tales @SAIC

Join us for a fantastic evening of Storytelling, Artist Books, and more!

HAIR CLUB's first thematic event rotates on the exciting topic of Hair in myth, folktale and storytelling. Hair forms a rich and woven symbol in stories throughout time and across cultures. It is a fierce literary image within which tangled and often conflicted meaning resides.

At HAIR MYTH & CAUTIONARY TALES, We will hear some original poetry from voices in the MFAW program, as well as some tried and true tales retold through revision. We will also have the opportunity to explore a variety of amazing Hair-related artist books from the Joan Flasch Special Collections. Books whose fibers are comprised of hair, books that are bound with hair, books whose subjects and illustrations include or involve hair as subject or object within the story.

!! Meet us in the BALCONY of the MacLean Ballroom for an evening of hairy myth and cautionary tales !!

Event. September 30, 2014- INTRODUCING HAIR CLUB @ SAIC

Come convene with HAIR CLUB as we unveil a year of programming, research, exhibitions, creative collaboration, readings, parties, and more!

For the next nine months, we are Hair Club, a research-based, durational collaboration exploring the multivalent topic of HAIR in our wider culture. Headed by SAIC graduate students Suzanne Gold, Kelly Lloyd and Michal Lynn Shumate and made possible by the 2014 EAGER Grant, we invite YOU to join us in collaborative exploration.

Incorporating practices in Writing, Painting, Art History, and Visual & Critical Studies, HAIR CLUB aims to high-five across disciplinary lines.

// Come fill out a QuestionHaire ! Tell us your Hair Stories ! Unearth your Hairy Mysteries ! Look at some art ! Eat some cookies //