At the Juried Craft Exhibition Members Preview, the Delaware Art Museum will celebrate its most recent large-scale sculpture acquisition in the Copeland Sculpture Garden–Chakaia Booker’s 2008 One Way. Made of recycled tires and stainless steel, the work of art was recently part of Booker’s solo exhibition in Chicago’s Boeing Galleries at Millennium Park.
Chakaia Booker is best known for her sculptures made of discarded materials which are most often recycled tires. Her work explores race, globalization, feminism, and ecology. Booker received a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Rutgers University, her master of fine arts degree from City College of New York, and has been included in countless group exhibitions beginning with the Whitney Biennial in 2000. Her work is in the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Storm King Art Center, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. In 2012, the National Museum of Women in the Arts installed four of her large-scale sculptures along New York Avenue adjacent to the museum, and in 2014, Towson University presented a survey of recent sculpture. That solo exhibition travelled to the Leonard Pearlstein Gallery at Drexel University in 2015. A large-scale wall sculpture by the artist is also featured in the Heritage Hall of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture.
The Delaware Art Museum is committed to acquiring works of art by women and historically underrepresented minorities. Chakaia Booker is the first African-American artist to be represented in the Museum’s Copeland Sculpture Garden. The artist explains that One Way conveys her concerns about diversity, mobility, and hope. The sculpture’s interconnecting circles are meant to resemble movement and perceptual cycles. This significant addition further supports the Museum’s ability to showcase the diversity in process, materials, and interests occupying contemporary art today.