Chakaia Booker

Chakaia Booker is a world renowned American abstract sculptor known for creating monumental works for museum, public, and gallery exhibitions.  Booker's works are contained in more than 40 public collections and have been exhibited across the US, in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Booker was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial, received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Art in 2001. Booker has lived and worked in New York City's East Village since the early 1980's and maintains a production studio in Allentown, PA.

Booker pioneered the use and re-use of rubber tires as a sculptural material and subsequently rubber has become the signature material in her visual vernacular for which she is internationally known. Booker began making prints in collaboration with master printer Phil Sanders in 2009 at the storied Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in New York City.  Her approach to making graphic works is akin to her modular process of making sculpture.  Booker changed the way in which many artists now approach the process of chiné colle by turning it from a supportive process into a method for creating an entire image.  Booker's chiné colle monoprints can have upwards of several hundred pieces of individual paper colled in a final work and occasionally include embossment of woodblocks used to print some of the patterns present on the paper.  Booker will often work on single compositions for more than six months. 

Chakaia Booker has sculptural and graphic works in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Brooklyn Museum; National Museum of Women in the Arts, DC; National Museum of African American History and Culture, DC; Storm King Art Center, NY; Yale University Art Gallery, CT; Kemper Museum of American Art, MO and many more.  Booker is included in the publication, Prints and Their Makers, by Princeton Architectural Press.