April 29--Six sculptures spun from discarded rubber tires and stainless steel will be joining Millennium Park's public art collection Saturday.
Chakaia Booker's sculptures will be on exhibition through April 2018 in the Boeing Galleries, and a seventh sculpture will be added to the South Boeing Gallery in September, said Ed Uhlir, executive director of the nonprofit Millennium Park Foundation.
Booker's sculptures range from 8 to 16 feet tall and weigh up to a ton. She told Smithsonian Magazine for a November article that she doesn't belabor the meaning of her work, and that her sculptures draw from several motifs: environment and ecology, the diversity of humanity and African-Americans, the slavery experience and the industrial world.
To create her art, Booker takes discarded tires and shears the rubber into strips. The materials become a palette of different surfaces, patterns and textures, she told the magazine. She says those shearing and cutting skills come from her teenage years, when she began making her own clothing.
Uhlir first came across Booker's sculptures about three years ago in upstate New York, during an installation at Storm King Art Center. He then suggested to the Millennium Park Foundation's curatorial committee two years ago that the park should exhibit Booker's sculptures in 2016, he said.
"It took about 10 minutes for everyone else on the committee to agree she was a great pick for Millennium Park," Uhlir said.
The sculptures arrived in Chicago on Monday from New Jersey. They came on flatbed trucks and were offloaded with a crane, Uhlir said.
In order for a sculpture exhibition to be well-received by Millennium Park's thousands of visitors, the sculptures must be approachable and designed so that people can touch them, he said. Certain aspects of Booker's sculptures, such as their meandering shapes, allow her work to fit that criteria.
"Her work is a little dark, but it's very interesting due to the fact she's recycling all this material," he said.
Booker, of New York City, is the first African-American artist to be showcased in the Boeing Galleries, city officials said. The installation is free to the public and curated in part by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. The exhibition is financially supported by the Millennium Park Foundation.
Booker's work is also on display in Chicago at The 606 trail, and at Governors State University in south suburban University Park. Her work has been shown globally, and is in the permanent collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, among other museums.
meltagouri@tribpub.com
