Artist Talk: Speak Easy with Chakaia Booker
Chakaia Booker is a prominent artist known for her work using tires as a medium. Other mediums in which she works include metal fabrication, printmaking and abstract painting. Booker fuses ecological concerns with explorations of racial and economic difference, globalization, and gender by recycling discarded tires into complex assemblages. Tires resonate with her for their versatility and rich range of historical and cultural associations. Booker slices, twists, weaves, and rivets this medium into radically new forms and textures. The tones of the rubber parallel human diversity, while the tire treads suggest images as varied as African scarification and textile designs. The visible wear and tear on the tires evokes the physical marks of human aging. Equally, Booker’s use of discarded tires references industrialization, consumer culture, and environmental concerns. Booker’s artistic process is enormously physical, from transporting the tires to reshaping them with machinery.
Booker received a B.A. in sociology from Rutgers University in 1976, and an M.F.A. from the City College of New York in 1993. She gained international acclaim at the 2000 Whitney Biennial with It’s So Hard to Be Green (2000), a mural-sized wall-hung tire sculpture. Booker received the Pollock-Krasner Grant in 2002 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005. Her recent exhibitions include Wonder at the Renwick Gallery (Washington DC); Public Art 606 Bloomingdale Trail (Chicago) ; Millennium Park Exhibition (Chicago); , and a permanent commission for the National Museum African American History and Culture Museum Washington DC. She has lectured and taught both nationally and internationally at colleges and universities as well as museums and galleries.