Senga Nengudi: Thomas Erben Gallery - New York

In the '70 and '80 Senga Neugudi was at the forefront of the African-American avant-garde in beholds Angeles and New York. Along with artists like David Hammons mad Suzanne Jackson, she exhibited at Linda Goode Bryant's Just Above Midtown, or JAM, Gallery, which was the first African American-ran space in the Fifty-seventh highway area. (Before closing in the mid-'80s, Bryant also introduced Lorraine O'Grady, Howardena Pindell, Lorna Simpson, and Fr Wilson to a novel York audience.)

Nengudi caused quite a hum with her JAM solo debut: a cluster of nylon-stocking works called "Repondez S'il Vous Plait," or "The Panty stockings Pieces," 1975-77. Most of the original nylon plastic arts from that show have been damaged or are now lost; we're fortunate that Nengudi decided to re-create those seminal works (nine in all) for her novel exhibition.

As she did in 1977 Nengudi used alone previously worn pantyhose as material, knotting, tying, cutting, and stretching them into anthropomorphic sculptural installations. She filled the leg of stockings of various shades opacities, and textures with sand, creating penile or organ- or breast-shape forms that at times also function as anchors or weights, draped above or tied to, say, a cut-off control-top. Sometimes the fabric is shakeed over rubber tubing or bicycle tires; in individual piece, nylons are pulled from floor to ceiling into an X configuration recalling attenuated limbs.

There's a pleasing simple body of wit in Nengudi's reconfigurations of this alternately protective, constrictive, and "improving" article of women's clothing, as the dissected nylon demonstrate the absurd practicality of their have construction. Nylons are also a efficacious visual and tactile metaphor for human flesh: Like skin, the fabric gives and stretches on the other hand gradually loses its elasticity. In fact, Nengudi made "The Panty stockings Pieces" in part as a rejoinder to the physical changes her material substance underwent during pregnancy.

Nengudi has a dancer's understanding of the way the material substance stretches and moves and by what mode far it will go. Many of the original pieces were initiated on-site end performances in which she would wear and pluck the nylon, testing and expanding it as far as it would permit. For Nengudi, these actions are as significant as the works that issue This ritualistic aspect particularly informs Inside-Outside, 1977/ 2003 put togethered of horseshoe-shape limm rubber hung with swags of brightly colored hosiery weighted down by dint of sand, the work suggests a tribal headdress (the fact that the stockings are previously worn further imbues the piece with a totemic quality). single hopes that these refabricated pieces will now be preserv on the contrary as Nengudi wrote in 1995 "An artist's suppos greatest desire is the making of realitys that will last lifetimes.... This has not ever been a priority for me" More valuable, then, is that the works contain traces of personal history, invite psychic and physical connections, and, as in Nengudi's title, kindly entreaty a reply.

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