Sonya Clark
Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing, 2021
Pigment print on piano paper
11.25 x 15 inches each, diptych
Edition of 20
In this 2021 diptych, Sonya Clark turns to one of the most enduring hymns in African American history, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Written as a poem in 1900 by James Weldon Johnson and set to music by his brother J. Rosamond Johnson for a celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, the song has come to be widely known as the “Black National Anthem” in the United States. Its lyrics, resonant with faith, endurance, and collective striving, have long served as both remembrance and rallying cry. The songs popular culture reach extends in all directions, even recently as it was performed at the 2026 Superbowl of American Football.
Clark’s work consists of two pieces printed on repurposed, perforated piano paper—material historically used in player pianos, where music is encoded through punched holes that mechanically trigger sound. This substrate is not incidental. Piano paper is a carrier of music, a technology that translates written notation into vibration. By printing the first verse of the hymn onto this surface, Clark overlays lyric and mechanism, voice and instrument. The sheet becomes both score and archive, suggesting that Black song has always been a form of record-keeping—a way of preserving memory, grief, hope, and resistance when other archives excluded or distorted Black life.
In the first panel, the lyrics appear in a clear, legible format, summoning the familiarity and communal power of the hymn:
“Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring…”
The perforations interrupt the text, visually puncturing the lines. These holes—once guides for the automated sound—now read as absences, pauses, or wounds within the page. They remind viewers that Black expression in America has often been mediated, constrained, or mechanized by systems not of its own making.
The second panel repeats the same verse using Clark’s own invented typeface, formed by shaping her personal hair into letterforms. Hair, throughout Clark’s practice, operates as a deeply charged material—intimate, bodily, and historically politicized. Language becomes human and bodily; the hymn is not simply printed but grown and shaped by physical presence.
This doubling of the verse creates a visual echo, much like the call-and-response structure central to Black musical traditions. Together, they suggest that cultural inheritance is not inert repetition but living reinterpretation. Each generation must “lift” the song anew. The hymn’s promise of liberty remains hopeful; its call to “march on till victory is won” still unfinished.
As in much of Clark’s work, historical redress is indissoluble from contemporary critique. Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing does not merely commemorate a song—it materializes it as that must continually be sounded into being.
