Savonnara Alexander Sok is a visual mixed-media artist based in Providence. At the time of the interview he was painting a large mural at The Avenue Concept, a place where street artists can work on their craft at their leisure.
Sok shares his experiences with art, his Cambodian heritage and how he connects to Providence through street art.
RIPBS Staff:
Tell us about your journey as a visual artist.
Savonnara Alexander Sok:
I started off really young, born and raised in California. There was a lot of street art going on when I was growing up. My grandfather would teach me how to draw a lot of his prayer books and animals and flower. And I was super into comic books, so I was very into trying to take what I saw in comic books and portray it. And as I got older, it got into my concepts of trying to be a street artist.
RIPBS Staff:
Could you tell us how did you find your voice or your style?
Sok:
When I was moving from California, I moved around a lot to the Midwest where it was a big culture shock. It was predominantly just a lot of white people. And then when I came here to Providence, it was a multicultural melting pot. Once I started meeting and interacting with a lot of people it just started inspiring me a lot more and I wanted to come up with a concept where I can represent not only myself and my personalities, but just the people that I meet, the people in the city of Providence. A lot of the pieces that I do, they’re just a portrait of our people, of our community basically.
RIPBS Staff:
Can you tell us a little bit about what street art means to a city?
Sok:
It’s like a voice for artists. I feel like, at least for myself, it is something for me to communicate when I can’t find the words to communicate what I’m feeling. It’s also a way to convey messages and peacefully protest. Our city needs it.
Sometimes we see certain street art and we look at it as ugly. Or some people will say graffiti is just defacing property. Whereas in my opinion, I think all of that type of art is just a voice for people who aren’t heard and marginalized communities that aren’t being seen. A visual is just a more peaceful way to convey what we’re trying to say, because not all art is positive. We need that as a platform for us.
RIPBS Staff:
Do you have a memory or can you tell us a story of seeing a piece of art in the city and really thinking “this is what’s pointing me to be here”?
Sok:
I would say the piece that stood out to me when I first came to Providence would be the Andrew Hemp piece. He does a lot of portraits or a lot of cultural pieces of Cambodian people kind of just going through the feels and the emotions of, in my opinion, being either survivors of, I guess in the Cambodian history, especially Cambodian Americans, our families are refugees from the Cambodian genocide. So a lot of his pieces kind of portray, I would say, newer Cambodian generations and how they’re dealing with that generational trauma or how they’re overcoming it. It’s a piece where a little girl is sitting against the tree. She looks not happy, but not sad. I think she’s just in very much a deep thought about what is going to happen next or contemplating what to do, or she’s just resting.
RIPBS Staff:
Some of your portraits are missing a square patch in their heart.
Sok:
Some of them will have hearts, and then sometimes I like to portray some of them with an “X” through it. Just so I can remind people that there’s still people whose hearts are growing or there’s still people that are healing and don’t have that sense of wholeness yet. It’s an open thing though, but everybody can see that X like, oh, I relate to that because I just broke up with somebody, or somebody just dumped me last week. I always do a lot of my faces with the third eye open, and some of them have an X on the third eye because maybe you thought you had a third eye and you’re just still learning.
That’s what I say to my apprentices. “You’re going to be great artists one day, but right now you’re just practicing. Your concepts are very great, but they’re not ‘you’ yet.” For artists, you got to learn from your mistakes. That’s the only way that you’re going to learn about the things that you’re actually learning.
RIPBS Staff:
Can you tell us about a specific mistake you made where you learned a lot?
Sok:
I was not the best kid. I wasn’t good to my mom at the time. I just took everything for granted. So I think when my grandfather passed away, it was a rude awakening of how life is going to be in the future for me. One of the boys from the family has to go into the temple to become a monk and help give your lost one to the other side. So I had to become a monk. I stayed at the temple for the summer that my grandfather passed. I felt like I came back and something switched.
RIPBS Staff:
What was becoming a monk like?
Sok:
There’s a ceremony, you shave your head, you shave your eyebrows, you shave everything. It’s kind of like a rebirth of you. The monks strip you of your clothes, and then they dress you in your robes. You can’t touch anybody. You’re not allowed to be within 20, 30 feet of a woman. So it was hard for my grandfather’s funeral because I wanted to go and hug my grandmother. I wanted to hug my mom. I couldn’t do that. I had to just stay in a certain space.
The time at the temple, I ended up learning how to meditate a lot. Every morning we woke up at five in the morning, started meditating till seven. I could only eat little fruits and stuff like that when I woke up, and then we would have to fast all the way until we started praying with the community. The community would come, they’d bring food for us to eat, but we would have to pray and do the ceremonies first, and then we’d be able to share food with the community. Then after that, we’d fast the rest of the day again, and we do that every day. I read a lot of books, kind of taught myself how to speak Cambodian again. I think when I left California, I lost a lot of my culture.
RIPBS Staff:
Was there a moment where you were hit with this revelation that changed your perspective or attitude?
Sok:
I was trying to talk to my grandfather every night thinking that maybe if I pray, since I’m a monk, it’ll bring me closer to being be able to talk to him. I felt like there was a moment where, without saying anything, he just reminded me to kind of continue in his footsteps of being a forgiving person, being a compassionate person, being understanding. He was like, “reflect with yourself right now and tell me if that’s what you really want to be when you get out of here.” Even though I was there for him, he was still there for me. I was still learning, and he was still teaching me even though he was gone.
You can watch a full interview with Savonnara Alexander Sok in the “ART inc.” episode below:
