Wright Auction

American sculptor Chakaia Booker is an internationally renowned artist famous for her monumental, abstract works. Born and raised in Newark, New Jersey, Booker received a BA in Sociology from Rutgers University (1976) and a MFA from the City College of New York (1993) and studied a variety of disciplines, including African dance, ceramics, weaving, basketry and tai’ chi. Her diverse educational background shaped her artistic practices in a wide range of media from sculpting and painting to collage and photography. Booker is perhaps best known, however, for her elaborate sculptures made of discarded materials such as rubber tires which explore themes of race, economy, globalization, and gender.

Booker began creating large, outdoor sculptures in the early 1990s. The process of crafting her monumental, complex pieces is enormously physical and involves transporting tires and other materials before slicing, twisting, and weaving them into new forms. Her rubber tire works, with their various tones and textures, are a reflection of human diversity and the treads themselves evoke African scarification and textile design, and the tires themselves are a broader reference to industrialization, consumer culture, and their environmental impact. In keeping with her boundless creativity, Booker views her own body as an extension of her oeuvre and her personal aesthetic often incorporates large, sculptural headdresses of African textiles.

Booker has exhibited in group and solo exhibitions nationally and internationally and was the recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Grant in 2002 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005. Her works are in more than 40 public collections, including the National Museum of African American History and Art, Washington, DC; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and she was honored with a retrospective, Chakaia Booker: The Observance, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami in 2021.