Art Professor Displays Work in First Solo Museum Show

“On a dull Monday morning in Massachusetts, a Black woman awoke to find she had grown a person out of her hair.”

Thus reads the accompanying text for Samantha Modder’s new exhibition on the first floor in the Tampa Museum of Art in downtown Tampa. Her Hair Like the Sun and Clouds includes a series of large ballpoint pen drawings that greet visitors upon entry to the museum with grand, whimsical figures that immediately command attention.

The opening text continues:

“‘Care to go away for a whhhile?’ the hair whispered.

‘You know a place?’

‘I doo,’ it said emphatically. ‘One made up of just you and all you bring in.’”

Modder, assistant professor of art and design, described the collection of sketches as a fairy tale of a woman, Modder’s doppelganger of sorts, who is tired of the world she lives in and escapes to a fantasy land where she meets dozens of duplicates of herself. Modder drew the first piece of the series in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic while living in Salem, Massachusetts, and “spending a lot of time by myself,” she said.

The sketch was a self-portrait of Modder, whose natural curls grew upward and outward to create another face staring back at her.

“Looking at this image, my idea was like, ‘what comes next?’” said Modder, explaining how the first drawing expanded into a years-long narrative.

As she thought more about this character, she gradually formed the rest of the story. The concept became a metaphor for the things that Modder, as her ballpoint pen-rendered alter ego, was trying to work through at the time.

“Between a pandemic, a burning planet, and her Pilates instructor learning that racism was still a thing, she was so done with other people,” read the next lines of the museum text, written by Modder.

When fleshing out the protagonist, Modder dressed her in a nightgown and long striped socks. In the alternate universe that her hair brings her to, socks are the main form of currency for the inhabitants. Modder liked the idea of taking an item that isn’t very serious or important in the real world and turning it into something with high stakes. In this new world, everyone has two socks, and those who want more to improve their status have to pull the socks off of other people.

Some characters collect an abundance of socks, like the one in the “Sock Dancer” drawing pictured left. The imagery of the sock dancer is a reference to traditional Yoruba masquerade dancers, which was Modder’s way of paying homage to her and her mother’s Nigerian heritage. She also gives a recognizable nod to the stories of Dr. Seuss. The socks evoke the “thneeds” from The Lorax, while their bold striped pattern reminds viewers of The Cat in the Hat and Oh, the Places You’ll Go! Modder said that even though her drawings, usually of Black women, are realistic in terms of likenesses to bodies and faces, she leans into whimsy to make the predominantly black-and-white drawings stand out.

The scale of the museum exhibition is awe-inspiring, with Modder’s drawings covering the walls of an entire high-ceilinged gallery. Some pieces are more than 10 feet tall, and all of them were drawn with a single instrument: the humble ballpoint pen.

Modder grew up in Sri Lanka, where she said her childhood art teachers were creative and talented, but their school didn’t have access to many art materials. Because pens were the most common, that became her favorite sketching tool. She later came to the U.S. to study mechanical engineering and studio art at Dartmouth College, which only confirmed what worked best for her.

“When I took art classes in college, it felt like everyone else had so many years above me for things like painting,” said Modder. “But with pen and drawing, I felt like I had a lot of years over my peers.… It kind of felt like my superpower.”

She did, however, pick up digital collaging in her graphic design classes, which is now what she teaches at UTampa. For the pieces in Her Hair Like the Sun and Clouds, Modder first drew the figures on poster-size pieces of paper, then scanned them, collaged them together using graphic design software, then printed them back out.

Her Hair Like the Sun and Clouds is on view at the Tampa Museum of Art through July 4. The accompanying text closes with:

“‘What will you take with you?’”

“The woman looked down at her oversized nightdress and striped socks. ‘Just me,’ she decided. ‘Less chance of messing things up.’

And with that, she stepped out.

Leaving all this behind.”