CHAKAIA BOOKER: Unpacked

David Nolan Gallery is pleased to announce Unpacked, Chakaia Booker's third solo exhibition with the gallery. At our new location in Tribeca, we turn to the full breadth of media Booker has mastered, alongside the rubber-tire sculptures for which she is best known. The exhibition brings together freestanding and wall sculpture, from the intimate to the monumental; multilayered collaged works on paper, a practice she has maintained since 2009; a tapestry born of one such work; and a series of photographs that invite the viewer to see what the artist has seen.

For more than four decades, Booker has cut and contorted rubber tires into abstract form, a practice that began in the 1980s, when she first took note of tires abandoned after street fires around the city. The material has held her attention ever since. Her work considers two things at once: a contemplation on consumer culture and industrial excess, and a more sensible act of tires pulled from landfills, where they would otherwise sit for years releasing methane as they decompose.

Where Booker’s sculptures are starkly monochromatic, her works on paper are vivid, colorful, densely textured, and richly layered, much like the way the artist adorns herself. Booker is rarely seen without an intricately wrapped headdress, a fashion signature that traces back to her earliest forays into wearable art. 

Booker began working with printmaking techniques in 2009, alongside master printer Phil Sanders at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. Her collaged works on paper follow the same modular logic as her sculpture, and she has reshaped how a generation of artists approach chine-collé, transforming a technique once used to support an image into the very method of building one.

In this process, thin sheets of variously colored and textured paper are laid onto the printing block, becoming translucent as they draw together into what appears as a single surface. Booker has described this translucency as being central to the tactile, layered feel of the work, and notes its close association with her sculpture practice. She tears and cuts these delicate papers by hand, combining them into their final forms, and works at a scale she credits to printers willing to work past the usual constraints of the process.

A single work on paper may hold several hundred individual pieces, at times layered with woodblock embossing, and a single composition can take her more than six months to complete. Booker has described an affinity with Blackburn's own practice of returning to a composition years later, cutting into old woodblocks and remaking them anew. She works in much the same spirit, still printing from blocks first cut in 2009, discovering new configurations within them. Printmaking, for Booker, offers another way of seeing and helps her express another perspective. 

It’s So Hard To Be Green, 2000, a monumental sculpture, on view earlier this year at the National Gallery of Art, sits in the main gallery: its blackened, mural-like mass embodying the transformation of rubber into something that feels alive. Smaller wall pieces greet visitors at the entrance, each one proof of Booker's ability to draw expression from a material so inert, regardless of scale. Much of what is on view appears in New York for the first time: these sculptures, several recent collages, and the Grave Yard Series in its entirety.

Grave Yard Series comprises of twenty photographs, each a deliberate composition staged by the artist, retracing her search for raw material through the urban and industrial landscapes of 1990s New York. The images were shot in an abandoned graveyard in Queens, caught mid-transition — most of its graves relocated, a handful remaining, the site reduced to a dumping ground, a salt storage lot, a place people simply walked through. Booker made the photographs while gathering material for The Observance (A Fragmented Beaded Banner) (1995), her first hanging sculpture, and they now stand as a kind of parafictional backdrop to that work. In this work, Booker becomes both subject and artwork, drawing the viewer into the very process by which her material was first found.

Taken together, the exhibition traces the range of the artist’s practice across media where each form is distinct yet carrying the same creative signature that is recognizably Chakaia Booker.

Unpacked coincides with several major milestones for Booker. On October 29, the City of Akron dedicated a monumental new public sculpture by the artist at Lock 3, overlooking the Ohio and Erie Canal, in a city long known as the Rubber Capital of the World. Organized with Curated Storefront and the Ohio & Erie Canalway Coalition, the work Transit (2026) marks Akron's first major contemporary outdoor sculpture by a woman artist. On Governor’s Island, Brick House (2015) is on view outdoors at Colonel Row through 2027. And at Socrates Sculpture Park, marking the park’s 40^th anniversary, Chakaia Booker returns as an alumna artist with three monumental works, Serendipity (1998), Gridlock (2008), and LIKE (2009), on view through April, 2027. The artist’s works are also on view in Grounds for Sculpture, New Jersey; Karl Stirner Arts Trail, Pennsylvania; Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio; and in Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park, Ohio.