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Senga Nengudi

Long-term view, Dia Beacon

Overview

Over her five-decade-long career, Nengudi has realized a remarkable body of work that blurs the boundaries between sculpture and performance, fine art and ritual, individual authorship and collective energy. Made of everyday materials such as vinyl, water, nylon, sand, dry-cleaning bags, lint, paper, and tape, Nengudi’s installations are at once proxies for bodies and sites for performance. The works accommodate a variety of cultural references from African, Japanese, and South Asian rites to Western avant-garde art. Characteristic of her openness to multiplicity, the artist, born Sue Ellen Irons, has assumed pseudonyms that inflect her creative identities as sculptor (Senga Nengudi), painter (Harriet Chin), photographer (Propecia Leigh), and writer (Lily Bea Moor).   

Dia’s long-term exhibition of Nengudi’s work will be accompanied by a performance program and publication, revealing the multiplicity of her practice. Sculptures and room-sized installations from the years 1969 to 2020 will be on display at Dia Beacon including recent acquisitions in Dia’s permanent collection. Performances at Dia Beacon and partnering venues will activate and complement the sculptural presentation, and an artist's book will collect, for the first time, Nengudi’s drawings, photographs, prints, poems, performance instructions, and other writings.

Senga Nengudi is curated by Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, associate curator at Dia, with Emily Markert, curatorial assistant.

All exhibitions at Dia are made possible by the Economou Exhibition Fund. 

Senga Nengudi is made possible by significant support from the Andy Warhol Foundation. Additional support provided by FABA – Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, Chara Schreyer, and Sprüth Magers. 

Dia Beacon Interactive Floor Plan

Over her five-decade-long career, Senga Nengudi has realized a body of work that blurs categorizations of sculpture and performance, fine art and ritual, and individual authorship and collective energy. Made of everyday materials such as vinyl, water, nylon, sand, dry-cleaning bags, lint, paper, and tape, Nengudi’s installations are at once proxies for bodies and sites for performance. The works accommodate a variety of cultural references, from African, East Asian, and Native American rites to Western avant-garde art. Characteristic of her openness to multiplicity, the artist, born Sue Ellen Irons, has assumed pseudonyms that inflect her creative identities as sculptor (Senga Nengudi), painter (Harriet Chin), photographer (Propecia Leigh), and writer (Lily Bea Moor). This exhibition features early sculptural works alongside room-sized installations reconsidered specifically for the galleries at Dia Beacon. Typical of Nengudi’s practice, all works on view either allude to or retain traces of the attuned improvisational acts that made them as an invitation to join the artist in the creative process.

Selected sculptures from the pivotal Water Compositions series (1969–70), which consist of heat-sealed vinyl shapes filled with colored water, are presented in a loose array. Like bodies at rest, they allow for gravity and entropy to determine their shape and surface tension. In some instances, the artist employed rope as both a hanging apparatus and support around which to wrap the water volumes. With these works, Nengudi hoped to make “something that people could feel and that had a sense of the body.” Effectively inaugurating her sculptural practice, the Water Compositions present a considered softening of the rigid geometries of Southern California Minimalism. The series variously calls upon Claes Oldenburg’s limp, stuffed objects; the participatory works of Lygia Clark; domestic food sealing; and summertime popsicles. By hanging the water-filled, plastic masses from rope in Water Composition I, II (1970/2019) and III (1970/2018), Nengudi articulated a new relationship among the art object, the wall, and the floor that would henceforth characterize her installations. These early works’ multivalence, economy of materials, and allusion to feminized activities have remained defining features of the artist’s aesthetics.

Improvisation and ritual are parallel motifs in Nengudi’s practice that she has pursued in performances and installations since the late 1970s. “Ritual means to me a ceremonial way of doing things,” the artist said in 1979. “Something that has been done by other people before, generally in the same type of way.” In Wet Night–Early Dawn– Scat Chant–Pilgrim’s Song (1996), she explores how various cultures acknowledge spirit through ritual. The work’s rhythmic title suggests points along a journey or the spiritual transformation of a pilgrimage. For her use of materials in this multipart work, the artist drew on her formative travels to Japan, where she experienced the performative mark-making of the Gutai group and traditional ways of handling simple materials like paper as if they were fine textiles. Installed at intervals around the room, four sprayed paintings on cardboard are veiled by elegantly draped dry-cleaning bags and bubble wrap. Like altars, the covered paintings are enshrined under an accordion-folded paper canopy or adorned with vessels for offerings. On the floor at the center of the room sits a bed of crisp bubble wrap that the artist compares to celebratory firecrackers in potentia—the bursting of each small pocket of air produces a comparable sound. Spanning the entire room, a gestural wall-drawing in pigment made from red earth weaves all elements together like a wind blowing through the installation.

Sandmining B (2020), from Nengudi’s Sandmining series (2004– ), references uses of sand in Brazilian Neo-Concrete art and in the cleansing rituals of certain South Asian and Native American communities. The installation comprises an expanse of sand from which breast-like mounds topped with saturated pigment emerge. Scattered throughout are hollow and sinuous metal scraps, which at times push out from the sand to suggest movement beneath the surface. Against the back wall, which is speckled with bursts of pure pigment, leans an exhaust pipe adorned with curled and knotted nylon stockings—a material that, alongside sand, has featured prominently in the artist’s sculptures, headgears, and performances since the 1970s. As part of Sandmining B, a sound piece pairing a recent poem by the artist with an improvisational piece by the late cornetist Lawrence “Butch” Morris and a piano riff by Sanza Pyatt Fittz is audible at intervals throughout the day.

With Untitled 12, and 3 (all ca. 1990/2023), Nengudi returned to clear plastics. In these works, however, she used the sophisticated simplicity of the fold as her primary sculptural process. These wall-bound constructions allude to the traditional technique of origami, Conceptual art practices, and—through their responsiveness to gravity—the body. A formal operation where shape is a function of time turned onto itself, each fold in these works exemplifies Nengudi’s defining interest in the primacy of ritual in reactivating that which remains over time. “Those doing rituals have the assurance of time,” wrote the artist in a 1993 poem. “I create a peace—piece/ I wipe it out with my hands, my feet, my body/ It remains in the fabric of time threading through the millennia/ Remembered and forgotten a thousand times over/ Yet there/ Seen—not seen—experienced as part of the air.”

– Matilde Guidelli-Guidi

Senga Nengudi was born in Chicago in 1943. Her work spans sculpture, performance, photography, drawing, and poetry. She completed a BA in fine arts with a minor in dance in 1966 and an MFA in sculpture in 1971, both at California State University, Los Angeles, and spent the year between her undergraduate and graduate studies enrolled at Waseda University, Tokyo. Her foundational training in dance included classes in the Horton technique in Los Angeles and in Kabuki theater in Tokyo. While a student, Nengudi served as an educator at the Watts Towers Art Center with artist Noah Purifoy and at the Pasadena Museum of Art (now Norton Simon Museum), where early Happenings would occur. In 1977, Nengudi’s first solo exhibition took place at Just Above Midtown Gallery, New York. In 2019–21, a retrospective of her work was organized by the Lenbachhaus, Munich, and Museu de arte de São Paulo, and traveled to the Denver Art Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The artist was awarded the Nasher Prize in 2023. Dia’s engagement with Nengudi began in 2017 with an invitation to participate in the institution’s long-running Artists on Artists Lecture Series. Nengudi lives in Colorado Springs.

 

 


 

  1. Wet Night–Early Dawn–Scat Chant–Pilgrim’s Song, 1996
    Earth pigment on wall, spray-paint on cardboard, dry-cleaning bags, bubble wrap, and mixed media
    Dia Art Foundation
  2. Untitled, 2023
    Earth pigment on wall, string, and pins
    Dia Art Foundation; gift of the artist, Thomas Erben, and Sprüth Magers
  3. Water Composition III, 1970/2018
    Vinyl, water, and rope
    Dia Art Foundation
  4. Water Composition II, 1970/2019
    Vinyl, water, and rope
    Dia Art Foundation
  5. Water Composition (green/yellow), 1969–70/2018
    Vinyl and water
    Dia Art Foundation
  6. Water Composition (green), 1969–70/2023
    Vinyl, water, and rope
    Dia Art Foundation
  7. Water Composition I,1970/2019
    Vinyl, water, and rope
    Dia Art Foundation
  8. Water Composition(multicolor), 1969/2021
    Vinyl and water
    Dia Art Foundation
  9. Sandmining B, 2020
    Sand, pigment, steel, nylon mesh, and digital sound file*; sound piece: “Only Love Can Make It Right,” 2020: Lily Bea Moor; trumpet composition: Butch Morris; Action Verbs: Senga Nengudi; Masking It riff: Sanza Pyatt Fittz
    Dia Art Foundation
  10. Untitled 1, ca. 1990/2023
    Vinyl and water; exhibition copy
    Collection of the artist; courtesy Thomas Erben and Sprüth Magers
  11. Untitled 2, ca. 1990/2023
    Vinyl and water; exhibition copy
    Collection of the artist; courtesy Thomas Erben and Sprüth Magers
  12. Untitled 3, ca. 1990/2023
    Vinyl and water; exhibition copy
    Collection of the artist; courtesy Thomas Erben and Sprüth Magers


* The sound piece plays daily at 10:30 am, 11:30 am, 12:30 pm, 1:30 pm, 2:30 pm, 3:30 pm, and 4:30 pm

Artist

Senga Nengudi

(1943)

Senga Nengudi was born in Chicago in 1943. She lives in Colorado Springs.

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