AN EMBLEMATIC SCULPTURE evoking the history of Oklahoma City’s Automobile Alley neighborhood is arriving this summer to Campbell Art Park. Chakaia Booker’s Shaved Portions, commissioned specifically for the park and formed from discarded tires, will be on view from July 29, 2021 to May 2, 2022. “This work will introduce a sculptural scale not previously seen in Campbell Art Park,” says artistic director Jeremiah Matthew Davis. “With its soaring heights and gentle undulations, the monumental work of steel and recycled tires will stand sentinel atop Automobile Alley.”
Automobile Alley was once lined with car dealerships in the 1920s but later went into decline. Now, like the degraded tires that are transformed in Booker’s hands, it has been revived over the years into something new, with Shaved Portions inviting viewers to consider the beauty in what others have thrown away. Visitors can explore the large-scale stainless steel structure of stacked loops wrapped with radiant edges of rubber.
While living in New York’s East Village in the 1980s, Booker saw the potential in what had been abandoned as trash. Old tires, left behind from car fires or tossed into vacant lots, had a tactile quality that intrigued the New Jersey-born artist. The cast-off objects resonated with her interest in reshaping materials.
She saw in the torn and heavy tires with their varying shades of black, scarred by rust and the road, a medium for themes of ecology, urban decay, the waste of modern development, and the complexities of Black identity. As she said in a 2003 interview with Sculpture magazine, “Cultural diversity in this society is like tire elements: tires that have been under an explosive moment may retain wonderful visual patterns…”
By the early 1990s, she was cutting, riveting, twisting, and weaving scraps of tire rubber into abstract sculptures where the material’s strength made it a good fit for outdoor work that could withstand the shifts in weather. While she’s now had prominent museum exhibitions, including a major survey currently on view at the ICA Miami in Florida, those outdoor experiences remain central to her work, with previous installations in Chicago’s Millennium Park and New York’s Storm King Art Center.
“Booker’s body of work remains rooted in the early days of her career, transforming urban detritus into biomorphic sculptures,” says Oklahoma Contemporary director of curatorial affairs Carina Evangelista. “[She is] able to coax an intensity of feeling out of abstract shapes into three-dimensional forms of staggering scale and incredible presence of cast-off industrial scraps that would otherwise have languished as insignias of urban blight and measures of wanton waste.”
Much like her 2004 piece Manipulating Fractions, Chakaia Booker’s new structure will include rubber tires as a signature material. Booker’s Shaved Portions will reach a height of forty feet and will span one city block across Campbell Art Park in Oklahoma City. A remarkably scaled installation designed specifically for the art park, Booker’s mountainous work is interactive and will allow visitors to walk through a large central portal in the sculpture.
