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-five years and has been the recipient of several grants, including the Artadia grant in 2019, and was a nominee for the 2023 United States Artists Fellowship award.

Her work is held in numerous collections, including the High Museum of Art, Art in Embassies, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.   James has 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.  James was included in the Atlanta Biennial in 2024.

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Cloth and fiber hold the gift of memory.  Textiles are central to the human experience.  I am intrigued by a single thread becoming warp and weft and forming something whole.  Cloth carries the remembrance of the body and takes the form of the human it held.  It is part of our daily lives.  We wear it next to our skin.  Cloth is always touching us.

My practice is supported by textiles and sourced from my own personal archive of found objects and hand-woven cloth.  I work in series and patterns with each project and collection, examining new frameworks that range from personal memory, exploration of ancient and modern systems, and the marking of time as a process of mending and connection.

Through weaving and meticulous layering of diverse materials, my work explores the threshold between the physical and the mythic.  The woven forms reflect the results applied to string, like music. These constructions have a mathematical beauty and internal structure based on repetition and variation.

Raised and living in the American South, I use materials from the region, including cotton and Georgia clay.  I intuitively merge different fiber techniques into new imagined stories and structures - their multiple references engage with my personal narrative and lived experience.

My newest work has continued to expand the use of horsehair.  Through weaving with horsehair - a material that holds both strength and vulnerability - I create sculptural textiles that serve as tapestries for memory, instinct, and transformation.  The horse is one of the most symbolically charged animals.  The animal world and the spiritual world draw on mythology and folklore.  They suggest the interconnectedness with everything and one another.  Horsehair, once a part of a living body, carries an ancient intimacy.  These forms are not abstract to me - they are lived, embodied, and carried forward through gesture and repetition.  Each thread becomes a strand of myth; each knot, a symbolic binding of the unconscious and the visible world..