Chakaia Booker: Shaved Portions

Chakaia Booker: Shaved Portions

Aug. 19, 2021 - Summer 2022
Campbell Art Park

This summer, Oklahoma Contemporary will present Shaved Portions, a new work by renowned sculpture artist Chakaia Booker in Campbell Art Park. Since the early 1990s, Booker has famously made energetic abstractions out of interwoven beams upholstered with discarded tires. Her expressionistic assemblages turn snarls of rubber fragments into large, elaborate and ornamental sculptures exploring ecological and social ideas of recombination and transformation.

Shaved Portions reassembles tires into a towering, cathedral-like space that viewers may enter, created from multiple spiny-edged loops, stacked and linked together in a configuration specially designed for the park. Booker’s work in proximity to Automobile Alley resonates with the history of downtown Oklahoma City, creating a dynamic complement to similar themes in Ed Ruscha: OKLA.

Image: Chakaia Booker, Manipulating Fractions, 2004.