CHAKAIA BOOKER American, b. 1953

Chakaia Booker has used black rubber tire as her sculptural material since the 1980s. She employs it for its pattern, movement, layers of texture, and environmental and social connotations. This material is conceptually loaded, speaking to issues of environmental destruction, socioeconomic disparity, and access to technology as it relates to modes of transportation. Curators and critics have often linked rubber tires to the artist’s African-American heritage, which Booker acknowledges; she adds that the material also speaks to the resilience required for survival for Africans in the diaspora, citing the difficulty in getting traction to move forward and upward versus spinning in circles. Booker alone has elevated rubber tires to heights known only with bronze or stone in the past. 

As an abstractionist, the essential elements of materiality, modularity, and movement are the key building blocks for all of Booker’s works regardless of media. Modularity is essential to understanding Booker’s work, whether in sculpture, painting, or printmaking. The ability to build textures, movements, and forms through repetition not only creates rich, tactile, and seductive surfaces, it draws parallels to industrialization, textiles for fashion, and cultural homogenization, hallmarks of the American middle class and American dream. 

Chakaia Booker’s work is in more than 40 public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, NY; Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; and the Whitney Museum of Art, New York, among others. Most recently, Booker’s retrospective The Observance took place in 2021 at The Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami, FL.