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May 15, 2010 - August 29, 2010
Joyce and Edward Linde Gallery, James and Audrey Foster Galleries, Phyllis and Jerome Lyle Rappaport Roof Terrace, Sandy and Herb Pollack Family Terrace, Museum Entrance Plaza, Grand Staircase, 3rd Floor Lobby, Museum Terrace, 4th Floor Hallway, Sculpture Terrace
Over the past decade, Chakaia Booker has become one of America's most important contemporary sculptors. Chakaia Booker: In and Out is the largest and most comprehensive museum exhibition of this African-American artist's work to date, and represents the wide range of Booker's practice from the mid-1990s to the present. The exhibition includes monumental outdoor sculptures, indoor sculpture in a wide variety of formats and sizes, drawings, and photographs.
Chakaia Booker is best known for the material and process that characterize the majority of her work: cut-up automobile tires that are reassembled on wooden or steel armatures to create abstract sculptures. This recycled material, and the surface patterns that it creates, reference African textiles and body decoration to evoke issues of black culture, identity, gender, and environmentalism. Formally, Booker's work is engaged in dialogue with the history of Western sculpture, from the ancient and classical tradition of the human figure through the Modernist non-objective sculpture of the twentieth century. What sets her work apart, and significantly expands upon the history of sculpture, is her ability–with rubber tires–to create surfaces on objects that resemble skins, feathers, scales, spikes, armor, or attire. These surfaces, in concert with their underlying forms, serve as metaphors for a potent range of emotions and psychological states. Booker's sculptures can seem alluring, threatening, encompassing, vulnerable, majestic, humorous, ominous, or tender. In and Out refers simultaneously to the indoor/outdoor placement of the sculptures, the complex dialogues among surface/structure and mass/volume/void in each work, and also to the sexually suggestive images in some of Booker's work.
Chakaia Booker received an MFA from the City College of New York and a BA from Rutgers University. She has created outdoor installations for Storm King Art Center, the City of Indianapolis, the New York Public Art Fund, Socrates Sculpture Park, Laumeier Sculpture Park, and NASA. Solo exhibitions of her work have been organized by the Akron Art Museum, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Laumeier Sculpture Park and Museum, and the Neuberger Museum of Art at SUNY Purchase, and she was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial. Her work has been collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Bronx Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, among others.
Chakaia Booker: In and Out is supported by a generous grant from the Lois and Richard England Family Foundation. The accompanying exhibition catalogue has been supported in part by Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY.
Added Substance, 2008
Rubber tire and stainless steel
96 x 45 x 57 inches (with base)
94.5 x 52.5 x 36 inches (without base)
Lent by the Artist and Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY
Anonymity, 2007
Rubber tire and stainless steel
98.5 x 72 x 67 inches (with base)
98.25 x 72 x 42 inches (without base)
Lent by the Artist and Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY
Conversion, 2006
Rubber tire, wood, steel pipe with fittings
80 x 69 x 58 inches (with base)
Lent by the Artist and Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY
Crossed Vagina, 2001
Rubber tire and wood
23 x 25.5 x 9 inches
Lent by the Artist and Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY
Dorothy Shoes, 1994
Rubber tire, wood, paint
26 x 19 x 18.5 inches
Lent by the Artist and Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY
Delinquent, 2009
Acrylic and acid-free paper on
prepared wood panel
47 x 95 x 3.25 inches
Lent by the Artist and Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY
Graffiti, 2009
Acrylic and acid-free paper on
prepared wood panel
48 x 48 x 3.25 inches
Lent by the Artist and Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY
Gridlock, 2008
Rubber tire and stainless steel
2 pieces: 101.5 x 54 x 48 inches each (with base)
Lent by the Artist and Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY
Holla, 2008
Rubber tire and stainless steel
93.5 x 40 x 56 inches (with base)
98.25 x 72 x 42 inches (without base)
Lent by the Artist and Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY
It's So Hard To Be Green, 2000
Rubber tire and wood
157 x 258 x 42 inches
Lent by the Artist and Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY
Last Digit, 2003
Bronze
23 x 8 x 10 inches
Lent by the Artist and Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY
Meeting Ends, 2005
Rubber tire, wood, stainless steel
80 x 50 x 47 inches
Lent by the Artist and Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY
Mixed Message, 2005
Rubber tire and wood
47 x 43 x 56 inches
Lent by the Artist and Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY
Rainbow, 2001
Rubber tire and wood
11 x 12 x 10 inches
Lent by the Artist and Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY
Square Peg, 2003
Rubber tire and wood
99 x 72 x 40 inches (with base)
96 x 60 x 28 inches (without base)
Lent by the Artist and Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY
Sugar in my Bowl, 2003
Rubber tire and steel
97.5 x 118 x 62 inches
Lent by the Artist and Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY
Take Out, 2008
Rubber tire and stainless steel
130.5 x 96 x 60 inches (with base)
130 x 88 x 36 inches (without base)
Lent by the Artist and Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY
The Fatality of Hope, 2007
Rubber tire, wood, steel
85 x 201 x 32 inches
Lent by the Artist and Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY
Twist of Fate, 2003
Rubber tire and wood
25 x 31.5 x 20 inches
Lent by the Artist and Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY
Untitled (Male Torso that Left His Path), 1992
Rubber tire and wood
60 x 66 x 42 inches
Lent by the Artist and Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY
Wrench Wrench II, 2001
Rubber tire, wood, steel
103 x 48 x 18 inches (with base)
81 x 46 x 21 inches (without base)
Lent by the Artist and Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY
Yes, 2006
Rubber tire and wood
28 x 33 x 17 inches
Lent by the Artist and Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY
No More Milk and Cookies, 2003
Rubber tire and wood
174 x 336 x 288 inches
Lent by the Artist and Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY
The Conversationalist, 1997
Rubber tire and wood
144 x 240 x 252 inches
Lent by the Artist and Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY
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