This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Working from a studio in the heart of Manhattan's East Village, Chakaia
Booker creates large-scale sculptures from found objects, especially
tires from cars, trucks, motorcycles, and bicycles. One of her
pieces, It's So Hard to be Green, is a high-relief wall of
shredded tires that appear to look like a junk yard. The piece
earned her much critical acclaim in the 2001 Whitney Biennial.
For
her, tires are metaphors for the range of skin tones of African
Americans. The tread patterns suggest scars on African faces, and
the toughness of the rubber suggests the strength of dark-skinned
people. She began art by making wearable art and dresses in
elaborate coats, dresses, richly colored shawls, and head dresses and
appears as richly layered as her sculptures.
Booker was born in
Newark, New Jersey, and has an undergraduate degree in sociology from
Rutgers University in 1976. In 1993, she earned a Masters of fine
arts degree from City College of New York. In her creativity, she
has always wanted to experiment and not conform and focuses on finding
unusual materials and discards from construction sites, urban dumps,
roadsides, etc.
She has had numerous one-person shows in
galleries in New York, the Neuberger Museum of Art in Ohio, the Akron
Museum, and abroad-- Netherlands, Korea, and Japan.
Source:
ARTnews, January 2002, "Queen of Rubber Soul," by Lilly Wei |
| ** If you discover credit omissions or have additional information to add, please let us know at registrar@AskART.com. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Chakaia Booker is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
Black American Artists
|
|
|