Artists Merryn Omotayo Alaka and Sam Frésquez have created an immersive exhibition titled "Your Birth is My Birth" at Jane Lombard Gallery in New York, featuring large biomorphic sculptures made entirely from Kanekalon synthetic hair. The artists steamed, cut, and sewed the hair by hand, clamping it to welded metal structures to form a fantastical "Kanekalon forest" that continues their ongoing Hairland series begun in 2017. The show includes works such as "Listening Roots" (2026), "Stacking Pearl (Adolescent)" (2026), and "Hearing Bells" (2026), which evoke communal hair care traditions and explore queer, gender, and racial identity.
The exhibition matters because it transforms a humble, culturally significant material—synthetic hair commonly used in Black and Latine communities—into a medium for speculative world-building and intimate sculpture. By foregrounding the labor-intensive, handcrafted process, Alaka and Frésquez challenge distinctions between the synthetic and the organic, while celebrating the regenerative power of care and communal memory. The show offers a rare example of how contemporary art can center marginalized craft traditions and identity politics within a gallery context, inviting viewers to reconsider the boundaries of sculpture and material culture.