DePaul exhibit
showcases work
of Chicago native
Artist Senga Nengudi might be known for her involvement in the radical black avant-garde of 1970s Los Angeles, but bringing her work back to Chicago — the city where she was born — conjures memories of her mother and her early years in Catholic school.
“Many years ago, my mom made a major decision to leave Chicago, so it’s powerful to come back this way,” she says. “The incense, the rituals, all of things I encountered in school here became significant for my future practice. That time stuck with me all of my life.”
This influence, among other deeply personal forces, is on display at the DePaul Art Museum, in a survey titled “Improvisational Gestures.” The show highlights the feminist spine holding up her practice, with explorations of motherhood, blackness and the female body threaded throughout the gallery.
Once a student of noh and butoh theater styles, Nengudi’s work centers around her fascination with the body and often treads the line between sculpture and performance art. One of her most famous works, “Untitled (R.S.V.P.),” exemplifies Nengudi’s approach. The piece, first activated in 1977, features nylon pantyhose that have been stretched and filled with sand. Nengudi then creates a web out of these limber legs that is attached to the gallery wall. To engage her performative element, the artist then moved and danced through the nylons, stretching them to their limits and then releasing.
“I'd just had my two children and was fascinated with this issue of pregnancy, how you expand beyond all recognition sometimes,” Nengudi says. “And then your body is so resilient and just bounces back into shape — well, pretty much so. There was also the elasticity of the psyche during pregnancy, this constant resilience that the body enacts.”
Nengudi wanted to find a material that reflected this dynamic and tested a handful of possibilities before the idea of pantyhose “just hit” her. She appreciates its ranges of skin tones and its incredible flexibility.
“I started playing around and filling it, trying to find the sensuality and form that a body has,” Nengudi says. “I found the sand — another big ‘aha’ moment — and went from there.”
While Nengudi initially used her own pantyhose in the project, carrying them around in her bag, she eventually took the work a step further and began collecting nylons from the women in her life. She says that totally shifted the energy of the artwork.
“I realized that women often wear nylons in stressful situations — a dance, a job interview,” she says. “I wanted to capture a sense of that in the nylons.”
This formula allowed her to take on other matters of the body.
“I was also interested in body distortions and body image. I kept asking, ‘What do women do to change their bodies?’ ” Nengudi says. “I was thinking about how women go through elective surgery and how the body can be distorted by life itself.”
“The whole sewn-together Frankenstein image — ‘I want these breasts,’ ‘I want these hips,’ — was on my mind in the smaller works featuring fragments of nylons,” Nengudi says. This obsession with perfection has only grown more hazardous with time, she says, and she bemoans that men have also fallen victim to these social pressures. She believes these shifts have changed the meanings of her artwork.
“Holy jamoly! Things have gotten ridiculous!” she says. “Everything — racism, sexism — has been taken to the maximum. There’s a heightened sense of urgency to my work now. These are issues I am working with, but it’s layered.” She resists the labels that come with being “a black woman of a certain age” in the arts but also recognizes how these identities come through her work.
“One quote I use in my artist’s statement is ‘from tender, tight beginnings to sagging ends,’” she laughs. “And guess what?” She says that age has given its own kind of necessary tension to the work but also speaks to the relaxation that comes with growing older.
More narrowly, Nengudi wants her viewers to take away personal meaning from the exhibition.
“I don’t believe in spoon-feeding the meaning of a piece,” she says. “That’s why I called my work ‘R.S.V.P.’ — repondez s'il vous plait — please respond to this. I want people to have a personal dialogue with what resonates with them.” Nengudi views it as an act of sharing between artist and audience.
And it seems as though one audience member in particular is Beyonce. The pop star’s 2017 Grammy performance addressed themes of pregnancy, ritual and motherhood, and it shared major aesthetic similarities to Nengudi’s other 1977 performance “Inside/Out.” She believes that these images of black motherhood in contemporary art are incredibly nuanced and speak to the balance women of color have to achieve when faced with motherhood .
“I take it down to the universal level of a mother and a child, where there is the love for someone you haven’t even seen yet,” Nengudi says. “Then, you ask yourself about what happens once that baby is born. You don’t want parenting to be fear-based, but you want them to be conscious.”
It’s a vast tension, one that Nengudi uses to stretch the limits of the art world.
PREVIOUS ARTICLE
