In Solo Show, we ask Black artists to curate a list of three treasured works that they’ve encountered or made, and to reflect on how their practice connects to a broader art lineage.
Chakaia Booker, 69, is known for transforming recycled rubber tires into monumental sculptures. These large-scale works, some of which are currently on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., are in dozens of permanent collections, including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem. But for over 15 years, the New Jersey-born artist has also incorporated printmaking into her practice, making abstract works on paper and cloth that pull from what she calls her “library of marks” — leftover patterns and cut-out scraps reused in one work and then another. She makes these works at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop; that New York institution, along with Booker and more than 30 other artists influenced by it, are currently the subject of an exhibition, “Press & Pull,” at CUNY Graduate Center’s James Gallery. Here, the artist discusses some works that have influenced her practice, and one new piece of her own.
Works that inspired her early in her career
Mark di Suvero’s public sculptures at the Socrates Sculpture Park in New York in the early 1990s
My journey into art making began with wearable art, followed by ceramics, but the scale of my work was limited: With wearable art, you can only go so big, and for ceramics, there are limitations in kiln sizes, the weight of the material, the options for joining individual elements, and there’s an increase in fragility as you go larger. Seeing Mark di Suvero’s large-scale public works at Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens in the early ’90s opened up possibilities for me artistically. Public art at that time was less common and less accessible; encountering his work was like being exposed to a new language and helped me understand that what I really wanted to do was go big. The beams in his sculptures reach out into space, curve, angle, arch, grounding themselves while also having a visual weightlessness. It’s quite a feat to make an I-beam feel gestural.
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