Chakaia Booker
“The initial appeal of tires was the surface texture, the designs and patterns created by the manufacturers for grabbing the road and wicking rain and snow away,” Chakaia Booker says of her early years collecting materials on New York’s streets. After more than four decades, she continues to be fascinated by the traces of time, use, burn, and neglect on tires’ hefty rubber skins. “You see and feel all these aftereffects in the material, and that carries over into my repurposing and reimagining.” Booker’s larger-than-life sculpture, Shaved Portions, was on display from April through October in New York’s Garment District, with deconstructed rubber tires as the star material. At a 35-foot-tall height, the sculpture is a love song to the discarded, with thrown-away tire cuts assembled into a rhythmic grid.
“I like the interaction with the world that public art provides, in contrast to the gallery’s personal, almost private viewing space,” she says. The expansive structure rose in the heart of Midtown Manhattan, where traffic and chaos ceaselessly run their course. “If an artist has done their job well, their work will speak to people and will engage them in something bigger than themselves, a wider humanity,” she says. The 71-year-old artist’s modest scale sculptures also currently occupy David Nolan Gallery in New York with a similarly powerful aura, yet more intimately through their smaller sizes. “The goal for me is that each person can engage with the work in a way that resonates with them personally, and that changes over time,” she says.
