Chakaia Booker discusses printmaking and evolving old patterns.
In Solo Show, we ask Black artists to curate a list of three treasured works that they’ve encountered or made, and to reflect on how their practice connects to a broader art lineage.
Chakaia Booker, 69, is known for transforming recycled rubber tires into monumental sculptures. These large-scale works, some of which are currently on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., are in dozens of permanent collections, including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem. But for over 15 years, the New Jersey-born artist has also incorporated printmaking into her practice, making abstract works on paper and cloth that pull from what she calls her “library of marks” — leftover patterns and cut-out scraps reused in one work and then another. She makes these works at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop; that New York institution, along with Booker and more than 30 other artists influenced by it, are currently the subject of an exhibition, “Press & Pull,” at CUNY Graduate Center’s James Gallery. Here, the artist discusses some works that have influenced her practice, and one new piece of her own.
Works that inspired her early in her career
My journey into art making began with wearable art, followed by ceramics, but the scale of my work was limited: With wearable art, you can only go so big, and for ceramics, there are limitations in kiln sizes, the weight of the material, the options for joining individual elements, and there’s an increase in fragility as you go larger. Seeing Mark di Suvero’s large-scale public works at Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens in the early ’90s opened up possibilities for me artistically. Public art at that time was less common and less accessible; encountering his work was like being exposed to a new language and helped me understand that what I really wanted to do was go big. The beams in his sculptures reach out into space, curve, angle, arch, grounding themselves while also having a visual weightlessness. It’s quite a feat to make an I-beam feel gestural.
Works she returns to again and again
As printmaking has become a major part of my practice over the last 15-plus years, I’ve felt particularly connected to Robert Blackburn’s repeated reworking of a composition across decades. He’d save his woodblocks to revisit years later, sometimes cutting parts away or reconfiguring them into new patterns. [Woodcut printing involves carving a design into a block of wood and inking the raised edges to create a relief.] “Three Ovals/Blue/Green” (1963-70s) grew from the work “Three Ovals (aka The Ovals)” (1960s–70s). Turning the print on its side and adding color drastically changed the composition and feel. It’s an approach I take with my own printmaking; I still use some of the first woodblocks that I cut back in 2009, which allows me to reprint marks in different ways, altering how they flow. Repetition of pattern, gesture or texture has also been an integral part of my sculptural practice. Blackburn’s work isn’t bound by the static nature of printmaking matrices. He lets the image live and evolve over time. There’s a great deal of hope in the work.
A new work of her own that she’s excited about
My piece in “Press & Pull” was made using the chine collé technique [in which thin sheets of paper, often in different colors and textures, are placed on printing blocks to create unique layered patterns]. Chine collé has a transparent element to it, where all the different pieces are pulled into one another, becoming [what appears to be] a single sheet. You can see into the work. It’s quite tactile and in that way is very much a part of the vernacular of my sculptural work. And of course, there’s always the matter of scale. Working with printers that don’t see limitations has been a huge bonus for me. Going bigger is just part of who I am as an artist, regardless of the medium.
