M+B is pleased to announce the opening of our second location in Los Angeles with an inaugural exhibition of sculptures by Chakaia Booker. Chakaia Booker: FUTURE EQUITY will be on view at M+B Doheny from March 27 through May 8, 2021.
M+B Doheny is located at 470 N Doheny Drive, Los Angeles, California 90048, just around the corner from our Almont location.
Chakaia Booker is best known for her complex sculptures made from reclaimed rubber tires. In repurposing industrial materials, Booker fuses ecological and technological concerns with explorations of racial and economic differences. This solo exhibition is the artist’s first in Los Angeles—it introduces Booker’s vital visual language and features work in the artist’s signature medium of sliced, cut and reconstructed rubber and rubber tires. On view will be a range of Booker’s formats, including pedestal pieces, wall-mounted works and large freestanding sculptures.
Chakaia Booker began integrating cast-off construction materials into large sculptures in the early 1990s. Her process is enormously physical and her assemblages bear the traces of the intense labor applied in working with the rugged material. Booker slices, twists and weaves this medium into radically new forms and textures. Rubber is sheared into strips, with the tread displayed or the underbelly exposed, rendering different colors, surfaces and patterns. For her, the varied tones of the rubber parallels human diversity, while the tire treads suggest images as varied as African scarification and textile designs. The visible wear and tear on the tires evoke the physical marks of human aging. The textures and patterns of the tires give them a woven, textile-like quality, yet the forms seem particularly anthropomorphic. The surface finishes range from rich and lustrous to dried and cracking. It has been suggested that they are metaphors for the African American experience.
Chakaia Booker (b. 1953 in Newark, NJ) received her BA in Sociology from Rutgers University in 1976 and went on to receive her MFA from the City College of New York (CUNY) in 1993. In April 2021, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami will present a comprehensive survey of Booker’s work. Her work has also been the subject of retrospectives at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO. Other solo exhibition venues include the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, Purchase, NY; Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; and Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, NY. Booker was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial gaining international acclaim for her sculpture It’s So Hard to Be Green, a 12 ½ x 21-foot wall-hung sculpture. Recent public installation highlights include Millennium Park, Chicago, Garment District Alliance Broadway Plazas, New York, NY, and National Museum of Women in the Arts New York Avenue Sculpture Project, Washington D.C. Booker’s work is represented in the collections of more than forty public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the National Museum of African American History and Art, Washington, DC; The Studio Museum of Harlem, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Booker was an Artist-in-Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem 1995 and is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Award (1995), a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2002), and Guggenheim Fellowship (2005), among others. Chakaia Booker lives and works in New York City and Allentown, PA.