Sonya Yong James (b.  Knoxville, Tennessee) lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia.  She received a BFA from Georgia State University where she focused on printmaking and sculpture.  James has exhibited nationally and internationally for the past twenty years and has been the recipient of several grants including the Artadia grant in 2019 including being a nominee for the 2023 United States Artists Fellowship award.

Her work is held in numerous collections including Art in Embassies and has been exhibited in galleries and museums such as MOCA GA, The Minnesota Museum of American Art, UAB’s Abroms-Engels Institute for the Visual Arts and the Ogden Museum of Art in New Orleans.  James has received grants for residencies at the Atlanta Contemporary and Mass MOCA.  She has upcoming residencies in Mexico City for 2024.

Cloth and fiber can sometimes hold the gift of memory.  Textile art can provoke a desire to touch, thus awakening multiple senses at once.  Color and texture can be heard like a sound while the desire to experience art by physically touching it is using the eyes of the skin.

James is a multidisciplinary artist that works with thread and repurposed cloth for the references that they hold such as mending, repairing and connecting.  This ubiquitous material is central to the human experience.  Cloth is always touching us.   She uses string, sewing, and weaving as well as found objects to construct new worlds of imagination.  Adapting age-old techniques and traditional materials, she seeks to create environments and sensory experiences that vary in scale from the large and public to the small and intimate.  For many, fiber art is synonymous with women’s work.  Knitting, crochet, weaving, and sewing are historically associated with domestic work- clothing the body, providing warmth, adorning space - and speak to the strength as well as the exploration of female labor in the artist’s work.

Her current work speaks to a fascination and reverence for the natural world.  James has been exploring narratives that speak to collectively shared mythologies and folk tales. Myths and fairy tales spin and weave stories of relationships, power and morality. These once familiar stories are then fragmented and conflated with another to form new clusters of meaning and are a perfect medium for modern allegory and what it means to be alive today.  The work seeks to join together the points where these stories and systems overlap and where sources of sexuality, memory, and death construct meaningful relationships and dialogue.