Since mid-April, a 35-foot-tall labyrinth of steel and rubber has loomed over the storefronts of Manhattan’s Garment District. The monumental public sculpture, titled Shaved Portions, is the creation of Chakaia Booker, an artist known for her inspired use of salvaged tires in sculptures large and small.
Surrounded by towering buildings, the installation winds through the pedestrian plaza on Broadway between 39th and 40th streets. The honeycomb pattern lends it a rhythm and tension that feels at once playful and ominous, like a portal to an unknown world. It is a striking pairing, this artwork and the city around it.
Shaved Portions, a joint initiative between the Garment District Alliance and the New York City Department of Transportation’s Art Program, will be on view through November 1. The sculpture was originally commissioned by the Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center for its Campbell Art Park in 2021, but takes on new life in this New York City iteration. On a recent visit, pigeons, tourists, and locals alike flocked to the structure, puzzling through its construction.
“Sculpture cannot be disassociated from the environment it is displayed in, just as the environment cannot help but be influenced by the sculpture,” says Booker, 71, who has also installed public artworks in Millennium Park in Chicago and Military Park in Newark, the city where she grew up.
As with other works of Booker’s, notions of labor, ecology, gender, racial politics, and consumerism are at play here—all heightened by the history and associations of the Garment District. “It is about hopefulness and purpose; it is about the legacy of the humanity we all carry forward,” the artist says.
Booker began using rubber from discarded tires in the 1980s, when she was living in the East Village and abandoned car parts were as common as corner stores. The material was readily available, cost her next to nothing, and its characteristics—shades of black, patterns reminiscent of African design motifs and scarification, inherent malleability—proved endlessly interesting to an artist figuring out her own style and voice. “Raw materials are only limited in their potential by our own imaginations,” Booker reflects. “It’s imagination that keeps me going.”
What she developed is an approach all her own, says her gallerist David Nolan: “There is nobody else. It’s a bit like what John Chamberlain did with car parts in the 1950s and ’60s, and in a way she’s expanded on all that.”
Booker now sources tires from wherever she can: donations, city streets, landfills, auto shops. “The tires themselves arrive in various states of use, wear, and decay. Part of the allure is knowing that the tires have lived a former life, much like getting old growth on reclaimed wood,” she says.
Booker is also a photographer, ceramist, printmaker, and painter. A selection of her extraordinary paper prints are on view through July 11 at the EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop’s study center just a few blocks over, as a partner show to Shaved Portions. These paper works, made using the chine-collé technique (in which thin paper is placed atop a sturdier base), are incredibly layered and complex, employing the same level of meticulous care as her rubber sculptures. Her abstract shapes carry the texture and energy of three dimensions (and some patterns are even reminiscent of tire treads), though the many layers are pressed incredibly flat. Edges blur, colors overlap, and hand embossing animates the borders.
Booker first experimented with printmaking while getting her MFA at City College of New York in the 1990s, and her history with the influential Blackburn Printmaking Workshop dates back to 2009. Robert Blackburn was a pioneer of contemporary printmaking, who collaborated with Jasper Johns, Romare Bearden, Robert Rauschenberg, and Helen Frankenthaler, among other marquee names of art history. “You cannot work at the printmaking workshop without feeling Bob’s presence,” Booker says.
The artist’s penchant for layering extends to her own body: For decades Booker has been swathing herself in layers of fabric as she builds up her headdress, jewelry, and clothing. “I get up every morning and sculpt myself and then go to my studio to continue making work,” she says. Nolan likens her personal style to “her own daily, private performance,” and also to a kind of armor.
Booker has been making and showing her work for decades—she was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005—but it is only in the last few years that the art world establishment has started to catch up. In 2021 she was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. Nolan brought her work to Art Basel in 2022 and to Berlin in 2023, for a show with Carol Rama at the cutting-edge Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi. Through this October, her work is also on view at The Current in Stowe, Vermont.
Her work is in more than 40 public collections, and Nolan hints that this number is sure to grow soon. “The world is more open and wants to engage with artists who have been around for a while but have been ignored for their race, their sex,” Nolan says.
For Booker, still drawn to the same materials as when she started out, it’s just about making the work and following her instincts. “Art takes time to make,” she says. “Take the time to look. What we get from the work as artists keeps us going. What you get from it can keep you going too.”
