Sonya Hammons Art

The museum store is still open, where this galavanized steel bucket of felted soaps awaits to console and brighten weary hands and bodies.

And the rest of my body of work for along with just so happens to be visible when you enter the museum to get to the store. Including the sheet metal/wool felt piece that inspired the soap display.

Soaps also available on my website. Wherever your place may be, may you be peacefully nestled.

Little boxes.

The museum is closed again so let’s do a tour of .

These boxes look similar to each other in shape and each have a handmade felt exterior, but their core materials differ: oak and aluminum. Clasp them in your hand and in this intimate connection their strikingly different weights and tactile sensations reveal themselves.

The materials are from my local industrial neighborhood, where small-town-politics-as-microcosm-of-broader-issues rage about how and where and why to develop housing.

I’m thinking of the song - based on homogenous housing developments in the Bay Area. And also exploring how things look similar on the outside and can be inherently, internally different in their unseen origin story.

📷Steve Nuzzo

Want to rub a sculpture all over your body and keep covid at bay?
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I do. That’s why I made ridiculously beautiful soaps to match my artwork in the exhibit at
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Not your average craft fair kind of soap. We’re talking 10 different kinds of hand dyed wool and silk meticulously crafted into a thin layer of just-the-right-balance-of-soft-and-exfoliating felt over lusciously moisturizing unscented coconut oil glycerin soap.
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Felted soap is like a soap/washcloth combo, with just the right weight for sloughing off what needs to shed. It makes the soap last a really long time, prevents it from becoming a gooey mess, avoids the plastic packaging of body wash, and is easy (not slippery) to hold in your hand.
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And super beautiful. These little guys look like precious gems, honoring the coveted treasure that soap became in 2020.

Available online in my shop and in person at the MarinMOCA museum store.
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Folks have arranged these sculptures differently every time I’ve visited the gallery . They are salvaged pieces of steel, aluminum, oak and shorea 3 dimensionally felted with wool and silk. I like how they look like precious gems, sourced from my neighborhood gems of remaining industrial businesses.