Senga Nengudi


Senga Nengudi is an African-American visual artist best known for her abstract sculptures that combine found objects and choreographed performance. She is part of a group of African-American avant-garde artists working in New York and Los Angeles from the 1960s onward.

Early life and education

Nengudi was born as Sue Irons in Chicago in 1943, and following the death of her father in 1949, moved to Los Angeles and Pasadena with her mother. As a result of an existing segregated school system, Nengudi found herself in between schools, transferring back and forth between Los Angeles and Pasadena. Her cousin Eileen Abdul-Rashid is also an artist. Following her graduation from Dorsey High School, Nengudi studied art and dance during the 1960s at California State University, Los Angeles, graduating with a BA in 1967. She then spent a year studying at Waseda University, Tokyo, in the hopes of learning more about the Gutai collective. In 1967, she returned to California State University, from which she received her MA in sculpture in 1971. During college, in 1965, she interned at the Watts Towers Art Center when Noah Purifoy was the director. She also worked as an art instructor at the Pasadena Art Museum and the Fine Arts Community Workshop. She moved to New York City shortly thereafter to continue her career as an artist, and she traveling back and forth between New York City and Los Angeles frequently. She lives and works in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Work

Nengudi was part of the radical, avant-garde black art scenes in both New York City and Los Angeles during the 1960s and 1970s. She was a member of the Studio Z collective, also known as the LA Rebellion, that comprised African American artists "distinguished by their experimental and improvisational practice" David Hammons and Maren Hassinger, also members of Studio Z, were frequent collaborators with her work.
She worked with two galleries in particular: Pearl C. Woods Gallery in Los Angeles and Just Above Midtown in New York. Just Above Midtown was owned and directed by Linda Goode Bryant who influenced Nengudi. She has described the creative energies of working with galleries like these two that were "trying to break down the walls" for the black artist community.

"Répondez s'il vous plait" ("R.S.V.P."), 1975–77

In 1975, following the birth of her son and seeing the changes in her body, Nengudi began her "répondez s'il vous plait" series for which she is best known. Combining her interest in movement and sculpture, Nengudi created abstract sculptures of everyday objects through choreographed sets which were either performed in front of a live audience or captured on camera. The sculptures were made from everyday objects, like pantyhose, and parts were stretched, twisted, knotted, and filled with sand. The finished sculptures, originally intended to be able to be touched by the audience, were often hung on gallery walls but stretched across gallery space, evoking the forms of bodily organs, sagging breasts, and a mother's womb. For her, the use of pantyhose as a material reflected the elasticity of the human body, especially the female body. These sculptures as well as her later performance pieces involving pantyhose expressed a mélange of sensuality, race identify, body image, and societal impacts on women's bodies.
Despite being increasingly involved within the African American artist community in Los Angeles, when the "R.S.V.P" series made its debut, there was no significant interest from the public in her work. One of Nengudi's close friends, David Hammons, consistently collaborated with Nengudi on multiple artistic pieces. He brought forth an explanation for the public's lack of interest in Nengudi's work, ascribing it to the abstract aesthetic present in a lot of Nengudi's pieces throughout the 1960s and the 1970s. Furthermore, Nengudi's "R.S.V.P" sculptures differed greatly from most of the art work made popular by her artistic peers in Los Angeles, as well as New York. Nengudi was made aware of the perception of her art by the public in relation to artwork made by her peers, a concept solidified in New York, where some people felt as though she was not making "black art".
Nengudi's "R.S.V.P." sculptures have made more recent appearances in traveling group shows, including "Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles 1960–1980" and "Blues for Smoke".

Performances

In 1978, Nengudi paired with Hassinger for a performance piece in which the two artists improvised movement while entangled inside a large web of pantyhose. The performance symbolized the ways in which women are restricted by societal gender norms. Nengudi also took many staged photographs during this period. She often appeared anonymously in them herself as a genderless figure, defying definition.
The same year, Nengudi and members of the Studio Z collective performed Ceremony for Freeway Fets under a freeway overpass on Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles. Nengudi designed costumes and headdresses made of pantyhose for the performers. Hammons and Hassinger played the roles of male and female spirits, with Nengudi performing as a spirit to unite the genders. Both the dance performance and soundtrack, performed by members of Studio Z, were improvised.
In 2007, she created a video installation entitled "Warp Trance", and her residency at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia articulated the experiences of textile workers.
In March 2017, Nengudi participated at the Armory Show in New York City in the Focus Section. The booth was presented by Thomas Erben Gallery and Lévy Gorvy.
Nengudi also participated in the 2017 Venice Biennale, Viva Arte Viva, May 13 – November 16, 2017.

"Warp Trance"

During her 2007 residency at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, PA, Nengudi incorporated video art into her practice for the first time. During visits to textile mills around the state, she recorded video and audio footage of the textile mills in full operation, and she also collected objects, like Jacquard punch cards, which were used to program Jacquard loom machines, mechanizing textile mills. In the final installation, Nengudi projected video footage onto a vertical screen of punch cards in a space with ambient sound from the audio recordings. The work explores themes of technology, the politics of labor, contemporary music, and the repetition of ritual dance.

Exhibitions and museum collections

Nengudi's work can be found in the museum collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NY, The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY, and Brooklyn Museum, NY.

Selected exhibitions

Complicating cultural, ethnic and racial classification became as central to Nengudi's work as her handling of gender constraints. She often combines African, Asian and Native American art forms in particular for her performance pieces and staged photographs. While her oeuvre highlights issues surrounding gender, race and ethnicity, Nengudi's work focuses on the ways in which everyone is negatively affected by these systematic forces and her pieces attempt to foster cross-cultural inspiration for men and women alike.
She often cites African and Eastern philosophies as underpinning her work.

Other work

In addition to her installations, sculpture, and performances, Nengudi also creates paintings, and photography and writes poetry under the pseudonyms Harriet Chin, Propecia Lee, and Lily B. Moor. In an interview, Nengudi explained how she decided to create these pseudonyms:
"It all started when I saw a rack of postcards with art that was incredible and very African-looking, but then when I turned over the postcard and saw that the artist was white, I thought, "What the heck?" Later I questioned why I responded that way. I thought about this issue of naming, and how we jump to conclusions based on the ethnicity of a name. Of course, if there is no name attached, then people just have to respond to the work in itself. But if it's work by someone named "Yamamoto" or "Rodriguez," there's immediately another filter that we put on to view it. The different names I use all have a personal thread related to them. I want it to be like Br'er Rabbit, trying to be the trickster, to play with things, and to make people look at things differently." --Senga Nengudi
She has also curated exhibits, like a solo show of Kira Lynn Harris at the Cue Art Foundation in New York in the spring of 2009.

Selected publications