The sculptor’s monumental tire tapestries at the National Gallery of Art, alongside her haunting prints, are painstakingly crafted and subtly menacing.
In a row of six images at the National Gallery of Art, a figure stands alert or crouches intently. Wearing a heavy turban and a cross that appears to be made of bones, she surveys the wasteland before her. In one image, she carries heavy rubber tires with thick workman gloves, destination unknown: a road warrior.
The sepia-toned images were produced by lithography and photogravure, early printing methods using stone and copper plates. Vintage processes suggest an artifact depicting an ancestor from the 19th century — or a relic from the not-so-distant future, made in the wake of some grave calamity that set technology back by centuries.
Chakaia Booker, the shamanic figure in those images as well as the artist who created them, occupies several realms at once. She is primarily a sculptor who works with tires: so, so many tires, stripped and sliced and coiled and collaged into vast agglomerations. A studio scavenger, she recycles automotive waste otherwise destined for the landfill.
But she is also a performance-oriented artist who weighs the notion of environmental ruin within the contexts of craft, justice and Western art history.
“Treading New Ground,” the latest entry in the National Gallery’s “In the Tower” series of solo art shows, features three of Booker’s tire tapestries. Monumental in scale, these painting-like installations comprise hundreds of bits and scraps of tires, from bicycle tubes to airplane wheels. The prints, in an adjacent hallway, should not be overlooked.
For “Acid Rain” (2001), the artist manipulates her medium in every conceivable way, stripping tires into thin ribbons and slicing rubber into fat curlicues. Booker cuts tires on the bias the way a chef chops a scallion; she knits rubber as if it were yarn. At 10 by 20 feet long (and nearly 3 feet thick), the piece represents an enormous amount of labor. A typical work for Booker, “Acid Rain” weighs more than 2,000 pounds.
Acquiring and recycling tires is only part of that process. Booker’s deceptively simple sculptures are more than collages. Works like “It’s So Hard to Be Green” (2000) are assembled with large armatures built from wood and steel. To make sculptures at this scale, the artist builds preliminary models using computer-assisted design software.
“Treading New Ground” showcases an artist whose works longtime Washingtonians will recognize. “Acid Rain” made a splash in the former Corcoran Gallery of Art’s 48th biennial back in 2005. The piece belongs to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, which also installed several sculptures by Booker on a median outside its building in 2012-2014; one of them took the form of a great rectangle trimmed in tire fringe, framing the view along New York Avenue to the White House.
The experience in the National Gallery’s light-filled aerie is like the toxic inverse of sitting in a Mark Rothko room: Immersed in Booker’s sculptures, it’s hard not to imagine off-gassing VOCs. (There’s no scent, at least not at a museum-appropriate distance from the work, but it feels like there should be.) The familiar materials summon to mind other, less noxious sensations: sweat and grease, inevitably, but also summer and asphalt. The associations are intense but not unpleasant, even if the work is supposed to sound the alarm over looming ecological disaster.
Booker draws comparisons to other artists best known for working in a single medium, namely John Chamberlain, who displayed crushed car parts as colorful sculptures. Both convey the violence and waste that automobiles have wrought over the past century. You could imagine the artists crossing tracks at the dump. But the similarities end there: Chamberlain made sculptures that operate in three dimensions; Booker’s works read more like woven fabrics, with a heavy emphasis on craft and labor. “Echoes in Black (Industrial Cicatrization)” (1996) is an entire cycle of abstract compositions condensed into 14 vertical panels.
The photographic prints — a highlight here for viewers who have seen Booker’s larger works over the past 20 years — add another dimension to her project.
The six prints that make up Booker’s “Foundling Warrior Quest (II 21C)” (2010) take as their starting point a plate from a photogravure series made a century earlier by the photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis. In the early 1900s, with the support of President Theodore Roosevelt and the banker J.P. Morgan, Curtis set out to make “The North American Indian,” a sweeping 20-volume documentary print series adopting a romanticized view of Native Americans as a noble people on the verge of total extinction.
With “Foundling Warrior Quest,” Booker submits herself as the subject of the same sort of flattening, colonial gaze. Posing as the primitive in an antique print study, Booker suggests that she has been similarly discounted by blinkered, self-appointed ethnologists. There’s something else to it. Booker’s prints point to a misalignment, as if she is out of phase with the world around her. But it’s the viewer who is out of step, unable or unwilling to heed the warning written into Booker’s every work.
May 21, 2025
