Jayoung Yoon discovered human hair as an artistic medium while studying at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills. Seventeen years later, that discovery just earned her one of New York's most competitive artist awards.
Yoon, who completed her MFA in Fiber at Cranbrook in 2009, has been named a 2026 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Craft/Sculpture, according to an announcement published by Cranbrook on Tuesday, July 28. The fellowship carries an $8,000 unrestricted cash grant.
The award is administered by the New York Foundation for the Arts in partnership with the New York State Council on the Arts. This year's recipients were selected from 3,985 applicants across five disciplines, Artforum reported. In total, $903,000 went to 132 artists statewide.
Hair as medium
Yoon, now based in Beacon, New York, hand-knots and weaves strands of her own hair into semi-transparent sculptural forms. The pieces draw on Buddhist, Christian, and other spiritual traditions to explore perception, time, and the body.
Hair "[is] intimately corporeal and focuses the viewer's attention on the body," Yoon said in the Cranbrook announcement. "As it grows, hair represents the accumulation of time."
In a February 2024 interview with the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Yoon described how she arrived at the material: she was searching for something that could "visualize cleansing my thoughts through materiality and process" and found that human hair could embody both mind and matter. She weaves and knots each strand into structures that are "mostly air," making her sculptures resemble, as she put it, "ineffable thoughts and memories."
Her sculpture "The Portal," made entirely of her own hair and measuring 5½ by 5½ by 120 inches, is installed horizontally so viewers can stand at the open end and look into the funnel shape.
Cranbrook connection
It was at Cranbrook that Yoon first began working with human hair, a choice that has defined her career since. The Bloomfield Hills school's graduate-only Fiber program gave her the studio environment to experiment with unconventional materials.
Yoon's work has appeared at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, and the Museum of Arts and Design, and has been featured in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Hyperallergic. She is also a 2023 Joan Mitchell Fellow and holds an artist residency at the Museum of Arts and Design for 2025–2026.
The NYSCA/NYFA fellowship program has run for 41 years and has awarded more than $37.4 million to over 5,700 artists since 1985, according to Cranbrook's announcement.
Yoon is the second Cranbrook alumnus spotlighted for a national honor this month. As we reported July 24, 3D Design graduate Melih Meriç was selected for a national exhibition from 400 applicants.
