Visit This: 25 Years of Rubber Sculptures, on View in New York

Over her four-decade career, the artist Chakaia Booker has worked with ceramics, textiles and paper. But since the 1980s, she's been linked to one particularly unconventional medium: rubber tires. A resident of New York's East Village during that era, Booker found that abandoned tires were plentiful in the neighborhood. "Availability in the early days was an asset, but where I really saw rubber tires' potential was as a raw material," she says. "I could really do anything with it, just as I could with wood, steel or clay." Over the years, Booker's work with tires has expanded to include large-scale abstract sculptures - one of which is 35 feet tall and currently on view in Manhattan's garment district - as well as pieces that can be appreciated within the boundaries of a gallery, like those that comprise "Chakaia Booker: Empty Seat," a New York solo show of Booker's rubber-tire sculptures created between 1996 and 2021. Whether shredded into graceful ribbons, chopped into jagged spikes or molded to resemble a human torso, each creation reveals the medium's potential and pliability. "The only limitation with the material is imagination," Booker says. 

November 7, 2024