Late-career retrospectives like “Senga Nengudi: Topologies” are crucial to an artist’s legacy. These surveys, often occurring when artists have reached their seventh or eighth decade with their most representative works behind them, shape how their creative output will be remembered, and regarded, long after they’ve hung up their paintbrushes or cameras or chisels.
Or, in Nengudi’s case, her pantyhose. For that is the artistic tool that will define her work once and forever.
Nengudi first employed the material for a series of installations in the 1970s that brought her wide notice, pulling and stretching the nylon fabric and pinning it to walls to mimic skin. The sculptures, spindly and tentacled like insects — and yet remarkably human due to their elasticity and flesh-toned coloring — were often activated by dancers in performative pieces that took place in adventurous art spaces back in the day.
If you go
“Senga Nengudi: Topologies” continues through April 11 at the Denver Art Museum. The exhibition is included with regular admission. Info at 720-913-0130 or denverartmuseum.org. Note: Due to current government coronavirus restrictions, the Denver Art Museum is operating under limited capacity and tickets must be purchased in advance.
That “R.S.V.P” series is the star of “Topologies,” even though the exhibit covers 40 years of work in a variety of media and solidly documents Nengudi’s participation in the late 20th century Black Arts Movement and her place in the Black American avant-garde.
The show is successful in that way, presenting evidence of landmark moves in the form of three-dimensional objects, photos, writings, video and sound. Nengudi wasn’t just part of crucial art movements of her time; she was also a leader.
“Topologies” — which was organized by curator Stephanie Weber at the Lenbachhaus museum in Munich, Germany, and stopped in São Paulo, Brazil, before arriving at the Denver Art Museum this month — pulls the various threads of her career together.
Part of that comes from Nengudi’s own participation in the show. The artist, now 77 and certainly aware of how this 40-object assemblage will contribute to her biography, greets visitors at the very beginning via a recent video that has her explaining the motivations behind her creations. She’s also contributed artifacts, such as artist statements, planning sketches and exhibit invitations that add context and reveal her process.
And the exhibit, overseen locally by DAM’s contemporary art curator Rebecca Hart, makes the most of Nengudi’s presence, allowing the artist’s own words to shape the experience of seeing it. It’s a deft exercise in exhibition-making that removes the curator as much as possible from the picture and puts the artist front-and-center.
Here is one quote replicated in all caps, and presented on a gallery wall:
“ANYTHING I MAKE
HAS BLACK FINGERPRINTS ALL OVER IT
BECAUSE I AM BLACK”
ANYTHING I MAKE
HAS THE FRAGRANCE OF A WOMAN
BECAUSE I AM A WOMAN
ANYTHING I MAKE
HAS A RECOGNITION OF SPIRIT
AND SALUTATION TO THE ONE
BECAUSE I AM THAT.”
Nengudi’s words, from 1996, offer a way of seeing qualities of the work that aren’t always obvious and highlighting the places where they are.
In some ways, they may not be necessary. A viewer can’t help but see feminist overtones or commentary on race in the way Nengudi transforms various shades of pantyhose, a symbol to many of female subjection and skin color classification, into the power tools of her art.
These works are alchemy in that they turn a material usually thought of as fragile — ladies’ stockings — into a rigging, of sorts, that is hearty and indestructible enough to stand firm in a gallery setting and not fall apart when a dancer inserts herself inside the piece and begins moving with it, pressing and pushing the mesh at will.
There is a non-physical transformation at play, as well. This fabric covering, which puts women in their place, symbolically communicates ideas at maximum volume. In these works, pantyhose acts as a language, and it speaks free of censorship.
That said, Nengudi’s words as displayed in the exhibition, present intriguing filters for consuming objects that are harder to fathom. Where does spirituality or femaleness or race play out in a piece, such as 2016’s “A.C.Q.I.,” where Nengudi adds to her stretched pantyhose rusted and discarded refrigerator and air conditioner parts?
Or how do those things shape earlier works, like the performance piece “Masked Taping,” in which Nengudi rips off pieces of masking tape and ritualistically sticks them over her body, head-to-toe. The piece was documented during a performance in 1978 by photographer Adam Avial and his images are included in “Topologies.” Deciphering these connections is key to the pleasure and challenge of the show.
Nengudi’s works don’t fit easily into a museum setting. A large quantity of her work at the time it was made was delivered through live actions or through choreography. For example, one of her key works presented here is 1978’s “Ceremony for Freeway Fets,” a performance piece made in collaboration with artists David Hammons, Maren Hassinger and others.
The work, which involved movement and healing rituals, was staged underneath Interstate 110 in Los Angeles and was meant to be about “the fraught relationship between men and women, as well as the subject of racial injustices experienced by Black Americans,” according to exhibition literature.
“Topologies,” by necessity, presents it in the form of vintage photos and a digital slideshow, and it doesn’t carry the weight one supposes it had as it unfolded live. That static quality also hinders the appreciation of the important “R.S.V.P.” series itself. For Nengudi, who studied both art and dance, the movement of dancers inside her work was key to its effectiveness, and seeing the pieces as singular objects unactivated can be underwhelming. One day, a curator will figure out how to make motion, rather than still objects, the core of a Nengudi retrospective.
But “Topologies” is important in that it argues forcefully for Nengudi’s place in American art history, and indeed in Colorado art history. Although her best-known works were created elsewhere, she has lived in the state for decades and taught at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs from 1998 to 2008.
Exhibitions like this are bold and necessary moves for a populist museum like DAM because they stretch the institution and its customers (who don’t always appreciate a challenge). So much of DAM’s year-to-year fare consists of art that is easily digested — the fashion shows, the Impressionism extravaganzas, the current Frida Kahlo spectacle. Visitors are rarely asked to do the kind of work that “Topologies” demands; quite simply, the museum hasn’t trained them to think so hard.
Nengudi’s works at DAM can be activated in the imagination if a viewer takes the time to understand them fully. It requires a little work, a little stretching. I say, let all of that pantyhose, expanded to its limits and into new realms, be the inspiration.
