Location: UCF Art Gallery
UCF Art Gallery is pleased to host Chakaia Booker for an Artist Talk:
January 26, 10:30 AM – 11:30AM
Over the past decade, Chakaia Booker has become one of America’s most important contemporary sculptors. 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.
Booker received a B.A. in sociology from Rutgers University in 1976, and an M.F.A. from the City College of New York in 1993. She gained international acclaim at the 2000 Whitney Biennial with It’s So Hard to Be Green (2000), her 12.5 x 21 foot wall-hung tire sculpture. Booker received the Pollock-Krasner Grant in 2002 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005. She has exhibited in group and solo exhibitions nationally and internationally.
For more information on Chakaia Booker visit NMWA.org
This event is free and open to the public… all are welcome to attend!
