Chakaia Booker, Acid Rain, 2001, rubber tires and wood, overall: 10 x 20 x 3 (120 x 240 x 36 in.) each armature (3 total): 80 x 48 x 1 in., tire pallet (12 total):  22 x 48 x 40 in., National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. Museum purchase: Members' Acquisition Fund © Chakaia Booker. Photograph by Lee Stalsworth 

07.10.26  By JANEL ST. JOHN 

Most drivers see discarded tires as roadside debris.

Chakaia Booker sees sculpture.

For more than four decades, the Newark-born artist has cut, twisted, woven, and layered discarded rubber into monumental works that pulse with movement and energy. Towering reliefs made from weathered tires become sweeping abstractions that speak to the environment, labor, African American identity, resilience, and the overlooked beauty hidden in everyday materials.

Now, visitors to the National Gallery of Art have a rare opportunity to experience that vision on a monumental scale. In the Tower: Chakaia Booker: Treading New Ground transforms the museum's soaring Tower gallery with three spectacular sculptures - works that are at once muscular and graceful, industrial, and organic. Installed floor to ceiling and surrounding visitors on all sides, the sculptures become an immersive environment. Benches placed at the center of the gallery invite visitors to sit quietly as the monumental forms envelop the space, creating an experience that is haunting, surreal, and unexpectedly beautiful.

For Booker, every tire carries a history. She began salvaging the discarded rubber from highways and construction sites in the 1990s, effectively creating source material from the urban landscape around her. "It started back in the '80s," she told Trend & Texture. "The material littered the city and onto the highways... It's about having things around you, and seeing how things change over time." The tires would have normally ended up in landfills, where they trap and emit methane gas. But in her hands, they’ve become powerful metaphors - embodying endurance, survival, and reclamation, while challenging us to consider the effect of rubber on our collective future.

That process of transformation extends beyond the sculptures themselves. In the accompanying photographic series, Foundling Warrior Quest, Booker documents herself searching for abandoned tires and salvaged materials across vast, open landscapes. The photographs portray the artist as both collector and creator, revealing that the search is as essential to her practice as the sculpture itself.

"I think everything is a protest statement," she said. "It doesn't matter if it's a carnation or roses. Everything is worthwhile having a conversation about."

Perhaps that's what makes Treading New Ground so compelling. Booker asks us to slow down, look again, and discover beauty where the world has learned not to look.

Booker's ability to see possibility in the overlooked, didn't begin with discarded tires. It began much earlier, with a young girl who learned to create with her hands. 

Born in 1953, she learned to sew under the direction of her grandmother, aunt, and sister. As a teenager, she started deconstructing and altering garments herself, favoring her own unconventional patterns over standard ones. That same resourcefulness never left her personal practice. Today, she’s known for elaborate, ever-changing headdresses - layered fabrics, dramatic silhouettes, and a presentation as dramatic as anything she builds from rubber and steel.

“Everyday I get up and I sculpt myself first,” she told Trend & Texture. “Then I go to the studio. It's the idea of putting on layers of things to create a bigger statement."  

That instinct became the foundation for a broader artistic practice rooted in experimentation, craftsmanship, and the belief that ordinary materials could be transformed into something extraordinary. It would chart the course for her entire life!

After earning a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Rutgers University,  she received her MFA from the City College of New York in 1993. Along the way, she studied African dance, ceramics, weaving, basketry, and tai chi - disciplines that continue to influence the rhythm, movement, and structural language of her sculptures. 

Today, Booker's monumental abstract sculptures have been exhibited throughout the United States, Europe, Africa, and Asia, are represented in more than 40 public collections. An internationally renowned artist, she has earned some of the art world’s highest honors, including participation in the 2000 Whitney Biennial and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005.

Curated by Kanitra Fletcher, NGA Associate Curator of African American and Afro-Diasporic Art, In the Tower: Chakaia Booker: Treading New Ground remains on view at the National Gallery of Art through August 2. 

Visitors who miss the Washington exhibition will have another opportunity to encounter Booker’s monumental work in Homecoming: Chakaia Booker, an outdoor installation at Socrates Sculpture Park on Long Island, through April 2027. An alumna artist at the park, Booker was invited back for the 40-year celebration - a fitting continuation for an artist whose work invites us to see beauty, resilience, and possibility where others might never think to look.