CHAKAIA BOOKER: Empty Seat

Chakaia Booker is one of the foremost sculptors of her generation. For over four decades, Booker has masterfully manipulated the rubber tire into forms previously unimaginable. In doing so she elevates the material to new heights, showcasing her distinct ability in sculptures ranging from the petite to the monumental. Booker, who has referred to herself not only as an abstract and conceptual artist but as a “narrative environmental sculptor,” embeds the tire with profound meaning, speaking to issues of environmental destruction, socioeconomic disparity, and the exploitation of labor. In working with repurposed materials, Booker also brings the history of the original maker and the consumer’s personal use to the viewer, and the audience can choose if or how it becomes a part of their experience of the work. Booker consciously incorporates tires that show the wear and tear of use, encompassing that individual’s history of movement and the traces of their life.

Chakaia Booker: Empty Seat highlights a select group of works by Chakaia Booker spanning from 2006 to 2021. United in their versatility, each sculpture explores a slightly different angle of the artist’s production. While Booker’s medium remains the same within the exhibited group, each work represents a different solution to Booker’s wrestling with the innate challenges of working with rubber tire. Their dimensions, technique, and method of display all radically differ, demonstrating Booker’s artistic breadth. This exhibition is a rare opportunity to encounter the full range of Booker’s use of gesture, material, and scale.

Empty Seat (2006) is grand and theatrical compared to the restrained solemnity of Fractured Alliance (2021). Despite their similarity in size, the repetitive undulations of Fractured Alliance are confined to the vertical wooden space of their frame; Empty Seat explodes with movement and chaos, like an untamed wilderness. Empty Seat can also be displayed either outdoors or indoors, further highlighting the singularity of Booker’s medium. The tendrils cascading from Strayed (2019) make the tough, thick material of the rubber tire appear delicate and fragile. Bottom Half (2008) has a zoomorphic quality; it almost seems like a sea urchin, a living thing pulled from a heap of discarded tires. While the former balances a contained center framed by unconstrained ribbons of tire, the latter assumes a similar visual starting point with only minor deviations from its constricted center. In this way, Bottom Half is perhaps more comparable to Fractured Alliance in its tightness, size comparisons aside. Each possible permutation of sculptural duo in Chakaia Booker: Empty Seat allows for a rich visual debate.

In 2024, Booker’s career reached a milestone as she unveiled a mammoth work of public art in the heart of New York City – even larger than Richard Serra’s famous Tilted Arc (1981). Booker’s Shaved Portions will be on display in the Garment District on Broadway between 39th/40th Streets until February 21st, 2025. Shaved Portions provides a visual counterpoint to Chakaia Booker: Empty Seat and a complement as to the variety of scale in Booker’s oeuvre.

Booker’s central aim is for each viewer to engage with her work in a way that resonates with them personally and changes over time with each visit. The intricacy of her sculptures necessitates careful looking over periods of time. The minimalistic display of Chakaia Booker: Empty Seat allows these core tenets of Booker’s practice to take center stage. By focusing on essentially distinct sculptures of the same medium, the exhibition examines the full potential of an exceptionally significant artist. In the artist’s own words, “finding beauty is fundamental to our collective experience. Sometimes it’s a poetic process, sometimes it is more specific and direct. It is what I do. It is simply who I am.”