Provided/Johnson Museum

"Bouffant Pride," a 2004 collage by Ellen Gallagher, is included in the History of Art Majors Society exhibition on hair at the Johnson Museum.

Hair – long, beautiful hair. Facial hair. Big hair. Scary hair. Body hair. No hair. Hair is a signifier, an expression of individuality – or conformity. Hair is big business.

“Hair: Untangling Roots of Identity,” a new exhibition at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art curated and organized by students in the History of Art Majors Society, examines hair’s political, social, cultural and artistic contexts.

The society’s annual exhibition project involved 12 undergraduate history of art majors, who did research, searched the museum’s collections, arranged for the loan of a video by Marina Abramović, raised funds, designed merchandise and created a catalog.

The students also organized free public programs including a film and an artist’s talk with iona rozeal brown, a faculty symposium April 27 and gallery talk with student curators, May 2 at noon.

“Once we decided on a theme, we went through all the available works” on the museum’s LUNA database, said Kathryn Kremnitzer ’13, president of the society, “and we met weekly in the museum, to be close to the work. … We really wanted to showcase the geographic and chronological breadth of the collection. We’re looking at hair as a social object, as an extension of the body, and as a mediator of meaning.”

The symposium, April 27 from 1-4 p.m. at the museum, will focus on hair as an artistic medium and mediator of individual self-expression, communal conformity, religious identity, gender distinctions and ambiguity.

Faculty presenters include visiting associate professor of art Bill Gaskins, associate professor of history of art Kaja McGowan, visiting assistant professor of history of art Lisa Pincus, assistant professor of anthropology Lucinda Ramberg and associate professor of Africana studies and feminist, gender and sexuality studies Noliwe Rooks.

Topics include hair’s place in contemporary African-American culture, “magical hair” in postcolonial India, body hair in early modern Europe, the materiality and sensuality of hair in Southeast Asia, and hair as an artistic subject.

“Hair is both universal and intensely personal,” Rooks said. “The students should be commended for choosing it as a topic – despite the fact that we all have daily reasons to think about the presence or absence of hair in our lives, it remains a complex and tricky topic for exhibition. Art and artists can expand and deepen our understanding of the personal and the familiar; in the ways exhibited here, the use and power of artistic production helps us to see the familiar, and ourselves, more clearly.”