New York Artist Chakaia Booker Featured at UA Sarah Moody Art Gallery in March

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — The University of Alabama Sarah Moody Gallery of Art will host the Farley Moody Galbraith Endowed Exhibition featuring work by New York artist Chakaia Booker, opening Friday, March 12, with a reception from 6-8 p.m. at the Gallery in 103 Garland Hall on campus.

The show will run through April 18. Prior to opening night, Booker will give a lecture on Thursday, March 11, at 7 p.m. in 205 Smith Hall.

The exhibition, “Chakaia Booker: Divine Detritus by the Black Warrior River,” features 11 recent works by Booker. These sculptural pieces will don walls and pedestals of the Sarah Moody Gallery of Art, transforming the space with magnificent line and form. Using the discarded materials of the transportation industry (namely rubber tires and tubing), Booker builds onto traditional metal/wooden armatures to create formalized, lyrical sculptural works of art. The diversity of colorants found in the rubber products medium, along with intensely varied textures, creates personification and movement within each work.

Booker explores her ongoing interest in the industrial machine, what it makes of men and women and their relationship, and the ensuing “conditions of unmet needs” and desires. Commenting on her sculpture, Booker says, “We become the machine itself: burrowing, collecting the tires; taking a huge amount of energy. When through, you feel you’re a part of that machine.” This is a style of work that propels you, inward first, then outward toward collective achievement.

Booker’s work has been featured most recently at Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, N.Y.; Laumeier Sculpture Park, St. Louis, Mo.; Akron Art Museum in Ohio; The Fukuyama Museum, Hiroshima; The Studio Museum in Harlem; Thomkins Square Gallery, New York; Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City; and Marlborough Gallery Inc., New York.

Her work is represented in public collections, including the Bronx Museum of Art, The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Newark Museum, Oberlin College, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Washington, D.C.

Funding is provided by the Farley Moody Galbraith Endowed Exhibition Fund, the UA College of Arts & Sciences, the Visiting Artists Committee, and the UA Department of Art; additional funding is provided by the Diversity Committee of the College of Arts & Sciences.

An exhibit of works by New York artist Chakaia Booker will open March 12 at the Sarah Moody Gallery of Art.