Chakaia Booker

Chakaia Booker (born 1953 in Newark, New Jersey) is an American sculptor known for creating monumental, abstract works for both the gallery and outdoor public spaces.

Booker’s works are contained in more than 40 public collections and have been exhibited across the United States, Europe, Africa, and Asia.

Booker was born in 1953 in Newark, New Jersey and raised in neighboring East Orange, New Jersey.

She learned to sew from her grandmother, aunt, and sister.

Fixing, repairing, and manipulating materials early in life was foundational to Booker’s later approach to wearable art, ceramics, and sculpture, specifically with the use of pattern, repetition, and modular construction.

Booker received a BA in sociology from Rutgers University in 1976 and an MFA from the City College of New York in 1993.

She has studied African dance, ceramics, weaving, basketry, and tai chi, all of which have influenced her art.

Booker has lived and worked in New York City’s East Village since the early 1980s and maintains a production studio in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

Booker is best known for her innovative and signature use of recycled rubber tires, her primary sculptural material.

Rubber has provided Booker with the ability to work in a modular format at a monumental scale while maintaining a fluid movement and gestural feel.

Throughout her career, Booker has consistently used stainless steel and fabric to create sculptural works in addition to rubber tires.

She has lived and worked in New York City’s East Village since the early 1980s.

Beginning in the 1980s, Booker created wearable sculptures which she could place herself inside and utilize as clothing.

"The wearable garment sculpture was about getting energy and feeling from a desired design."

In the 1990s, she began working with discarded construction materials and rubber tires, which evolved into her artistic style.

She maintains a production studio in Allentown, Pennsylvania for fabrication of large-scale and public works.

Booker has served on the boards of the International Sculpture Center and Socrates Sculpture Park.

In the early 1990s, Booker began to create large outdoor sculptures from discarded materials found at construction sites, including rubber tires, a medium in which she continues to work.

The various tire tread patterns, colors, and widths create a palette for Booker similar to the palette of a painter.

Booker's use of tires suggest a range of aesthetic, political, cultural, and economic concerns.

They may be considered a reference to the urban landscape of Northern New Jersey or a reminder how modes of transportation have changed since the industrial age.

The tire sculptures may also be considered to address African American identity: their varying pigments and textures can be interpreted as a representation of the range of African American skin tones, and their resiliency has been viewed as "a compelling metaphor of African American survival in the modern world."

Tire tread patterns in her work may also refer to elements of African culture, including scarification, body painting, and traditional textiles.

Booker's work also deals with themes of class, labor, and gender.

She has participated in both group and solo exhibitions in such places as the Neuberger Museum of Art, the Akron Museum of Art, Marlborough gallery, the Sandler Hudson Gallery in Atlanta, Georgia, and the PS 1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens, as well as in the "Twentieth Century American Sculpture" exhibition held at the White House in 1996.

Booker was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial, received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Art in 2001.

Booker's "Echoes in Black (Industrial Cicatrization)" from the 2000 Whitney Biennial deals with the emotional and physical scarification that people experience in life.

Her 2001 piece "Wench (Wrench) III" is a surrealistic sculpture that subverts a very masculine mechanic's wrench into a feminine feather boa.

The piece "Spirit Hunter" is reminiscent of images of life and death, as well as a feminist approach to birth and sexuality.

Chakaia Booker currently works and resides in New York City.

Her work is part of the permanent collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Akron Art Museum, Cornell University's Johnson Museum of Art, The Max Protetch and June Kelly galleries in New York, and others.

Her piece "No More Milk and Cookies" from 2003 "questions our commercially driven society and what happens when consumption is prohibited."

On June 22, 2008, Booker unveiled "Chaikaia Booker: Mass Transit" in Indianapolis, Indiana.

This public art exhibition featured 10 sculptures "created by the artist following her visit to Indianapolis and her researching of the city's history and heritage."

In 2009, Booker began an in depth exploration of printmaking creating a significant body of graphic works, largely focused on the process of chine collé.

Booker’s approach to printmaking processes is reminiscent of her modular working methods in sculpture.

Printmaking has become a regular part of Booker’s artistic output, and as with her use of rubber, Booker has invented unique ways of manipulating materials and process.

The National Museum of Women in the Arts has exhibited her works in The New York Avenue Sculpture Project (2012), FOREFRONT: Chakaia Booker (2006), and Reaching for the Stars through Art (1998).

The Georgia Museum of Art in Athens, GA also exhibited her work in an exhibition entitled Defiant Beauty, which was on display from April 2012 – 2013.

Several of her works were also on display in New York City's Garment District from June–November 2014.