Chakai Booker Monday 7pm Falvey!

Chakaia Booker is one of America's foremost contemporary sculptors and African-American artists. She is best known for the material and process that characterize the majority of her work: cut-up automobile tires that are reassembled on wooden or steel armatures to create abstract sculptures. Formally, Booker's work is engaged in dialogue with the history of Western sculpture, from the ancient and the classical tradition of the human figure through the geometric and minimal non-objective sculpture of the twentieth century. What sets her work apart, and significantly expands upon the history of sculpture, is her ability to manipulate rubber tires to create surfaces on objects that resemble skins, feathers, scales, spikes, armor or attire. The surface patterns created, in concert with their underlying forms, serve as metaphors for a potent range of emotions and psychological states. Common themes in her work include issues of black culture, identity, gender and ecology.