Urban Mask

Source catalog description

This description refers to material held by Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Visual details below describe the original material.

Chakaia Booker is celebrated for her sculptures created with discarded rubber tires that evoke themes of consumption, mobility, industrialism, and ecological impact. Her art interrogates the role of mass market industry and conspicuous consumption in American society. It also invites viewers to redefine their notions of value and how that which has been discarded can change and transform into something culturally and artistically valuable. While attending university, Booker studied several subjects, including African dance. The delicate and lyrical forms that comprise Urban Mask suggests the notion of urbanity and traditional West African ceremonial performance culture. Booker once remarked: “African art is all around us. It’s in our art, it is in our music, it’s in our fashion.” This is an abstract, expressionist sculpture composed of rubber from old tires. The tires have been cut into strips and shapes, looped and curled around each other in a series of arcs.

Catalog date

2001

Recorded subjects

African American; Abstraction; Art

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