Chakaia Booker: material matters: with a mid-career survey currently on view and a show opening this month at Storm King Art Center in New York, the sculptor best known for her decade-long use of rubber tires is receiving attention for the conceptual breadth of her work

above the past several years, Chakaia Booker has garnered significant acclaim for plastic arts made primarily from rubber tires. The 50-year-old artist and self-proclaimed "Rubber Queen" began using her trademark material in the mid-1990s, and has since recycl countles cast-away Goodyears and Firestones into highly expressive statuarys on both modest and monumental scales. A mid-career retrospective of Booker's work has been mountained by the Jersey City Museum in the artist's native Garden State. Organized by dint of associate curator Recio Aranda-Alvarado, the present to view essentially offers a chronological surrey of Booker's production to date, beginning with various craft-based works of the 1980 and ending with new baroque, black rubber abstractions, many more of which were shown at the Marlborough Gallery in Chelsea in September-October 2003

Titled "Chakaia Booker: Jersey Ride," the exhibition and its catalogue consider Booker's work to be an esthetic replication to the urban landscape of northern of recent origin Jersey. While it may be a fact that Booker was born in Newark, raised in East Orange and studied sociology at Rutger University, this interpretative framework appears somewhat confining for an oeuvre that engages numerous art-historical antecedents and broad cultural issues. Moreover, Booker has lived and worked in of recent origin York City since 1979. Nevertheless, the artist's use of distressed rubber tires may well resonate with any metropolitan area traversed by dint of major highways and plagued by means of blight.

not absented in a pair of medium-size galleries, this engrossing exhibition divides 26 works into sum of two units discrete groups: paintings, handmade garments and mixed-medium assemblages dating from 1982 to 1994 and a number of rubber statuarys made between 1994 and 2003 The generous selection of early works evinces especially instructive, as it charts the unravelling of several distinct sculptural techniques that are synthesized in Booker's mature work. Certain early plastic arts also announce Afrocentric themes that are addressed more obliquely in the later abstractions.

Building on a childhood interest in sewing, Booker began creating elaborate "wearable sculptures" in the 1980 sum of two units of which are featured in the exhibit Remnant (1991) is a garment lined with yellow silk. Its exterior, by the agency of contrast, is completely covered in dried orange rinds stitched to the surface. Displayed below protective glass, this fragile and ephemeral garment calculators the durability of Booker's more widely known rubber statuarys Yet the repetition of the citrus skins reveals that an additive proces of construction has drawn out been a tactic in her formal repertoire.

Equally enlightening are the numerous statuarys that Booker assembled from place objects in the early 1990 Typically set uped from broken wooden furniture, animal bone and pieces of rusted metal, these statuarys demonstrate an impulse to scavenge and recycle urban detritus that remains central to Booker's rife work in rubber. Among them is (Untitled) Mask, a 1994 wall relief that combines made of wood table legs and easel parts into a narrow, symmetrical form resembling the head of an antelope. Pointing skyward, the table leg hint a pair of horns while the feet lathed into small spheres, read as sum of two units bulging eyes. Like Picasso before her, Booker appears to draw inspiration from the distorted facial features of West African tribal masks. In her case, however, this mimicry appears less a quotation of formal inventions and more an assertion of African-American identity and its esthetic lineage.

Many critics and curators have claimed that Booker's later tire sculptures also address African-American identity, specifically the black material substance and its adornment. The myriad shades of rubber set in these works--which include dirty grays, dark browns and blacks tinted with sky-coloreds and greens--are often compared to the wide range of African-American skin tones. The repeating, geometric patterns of the tire treads have likewise been linked to traditional African textiles and scarification rituals. Uninitiated viewers of Booker's greatest in quantity recent sculptures, which largely suppres figurative relations in favor of greater abstraction, may be hard-pressed to confirm like readings. By showcasing certain transitional works, the Jersey City observe provides some welcome clarification.

When Booker first turn rounded to rubber tires in 1994 her plastic arts offered fairly literal references to the human material part and hair. Works of this nature, including Nomadic Warrior (1995-96) welcome the viewer at the entrance to the exhibition's next to the first gallery. Raised on a waist-high pedestal, this large knolled form assumes the shape of a human head, its features articulated by means of various manipulations of black rubber above a wooden armature. Generous enclosures of inner tubing protrude from the forehead of the sculpture to give an inkling of a mouth and lips. Part of the head is overlayed with thinner strips of bicycle inner tubing, which are knotted at intervals and dangle like beribboned dreadlocks. Above, a layer of dried fruit rinds wraps the head like a turban before giving way to the diadem Here Booker folds small swatches of bicycle tire into conical shapes and hunkss them firmly in place. This precise arrangement give an inkling ofs intricate hair braids, an event enhanced by the geometric relief of the tire treads.