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What do you want to know: american artist Chakaia Booker– widely recognized for her extensive use of recycled rubber tires in her work – is currently the subject of a solo exhibition with David Nolan Gallery At New York, “Chakaia Booker: Public Opinion.” On view until June 23, 2023, it is the artist’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery and features a wide range of iconic Booker sculptures made of rubber tire, from room-covering pieces to works the size of a pedestal and fixed to the wall. A native of New Jersey, Booker first studied sociology at Rutgers University for her BA in 1976, before receiving her MFA in 1993 from City College of New York. She has been a vital facet of the New York art scene since the early 1980s, where she is still based while maintaining a studio in Allentown, Pennsylvania. During his career spanning more than four decades, the artist has been the recipient of numerous major public commissions, including Shaved partscommissioned by the Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center and currently on display at the Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis, as well as grants and awards, such as the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Why we love it: By selecting recycled rubber tires as the medium of choice in his sculptural pieces, Booker’s work takes on an inherent degree of tactility and immediacy – where the viewer’s closeness to the artwork evokes the sensory sensation of the material. Rubber tyres, however, are far from a choice of mere materiality or convenience, but rather are a medium steeped in conceptual and historical significance; returning to modernist theories of specificity of the medium, the material itself is a means for Booker to communicate and comment on ideas and points of view centered on society, culture, history and the human condition. This exhibition highlights the artist’s unique skill and technique in manipulating and making the composition of rubber tires in a myriad of forms – from mammoth and intricate detail Manipulate fractions (2004) on the wall, banded Self-absorbed (2023). The elements of the tyres, notably their varied tread and the way the different treads are juxtaposed, recall the patterns found in traditional body scarifications or the designs of African textiles. Presented alongside works from Booker’s explorations in other media – she maintained a practice of printmaking, particularly chine collé, for more than a decade – “Chakaia Booker: Public Opinion” offers both followers and those new to his work the opportunity to explore the scope and breadth of this singular artist’s work.
According to the Gallery: “As an abstractist, the essential elements of materiality, modularity and movement are key elements in all of Booker’s works, regardless of medium. The pieces assembled for “Public Opinion” include bronzes, ceramic constructions, paintings, prints, as well as sculptures made up of Booker’s now iconic rubber tires. Booker’s work is often site specific and site responsive. Manipulate fractions, last exhibited in Booker’s solo survey, “The Observance,” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, in 2021, has been reassembled and reinterpreted in response to the architecture and volume of the gallery . The longstanding themes or meditations on human desire, struggle, perseverance, restrained hope, and realized hope present in Booker’s earlier works in rubber and steel, such as Raw Attraction (in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art), continue with new works, Conflicting issues, And Minimum wage.
Booker’s main material, rubber tires, is conceptually charged, addressing issues of environmental destruction, socio-economic disparity, and access to technology as it relates to modes of transportation. Curators and critics have often linked the material to the artist’s African-American heritage, which Booker acknowledges, adding that the material also speaks to the resilience necessary for the survival of Africans in the diaspora, citing the difficulty of get traction to move forward and up in relation to rotation. in circles. —Phil Sanders
See the works in the exhibition below.
Chakaia Booker, Conflicting issues (2023). Courtesy of David Nolan Gallery, New York.
Chakaia Booker, Self-absorbed (2023). Courtesy of David Nolan Gallery, New York.
Installation view of “Chakaia Booker: Public Opinion” (2023). Courtesy of David Nolan Gallery, New York.
Installation view of “Chakaia Booker: Public Opinion” (2023). Courtesy of David Nolan Gallery, New York.
Installation view of “Chakaia Booker: Public Opinion” (2023). Courtesy of David Nolan Gallery, New York.
“Chakaia Booker: Public Opinionis on view at the David Nolan Gallery, New York, through June 23, 2023.
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