Sep 7th 2017

Senga Nengudi: Improvisational Gestures

@ DePaul Art Museum

935 W Fullerton Ave, Chicago, IL 60614

Opening Thursday, September 7th, from 6PM - 8PM

On view through Sunday, December 10th

Join us for a public reception celebrating the opening of  Senga Nengudi: Improvisational Gestures.

Since the 1970’s Senga Nengudi’s avant-garde performative and sculptural practice has explored the social and physical limits of the human body. Her “R.S.V.P.” series of sculptures, which are made of familiar materials such as pantyhose and sand, mimic the female form-but are stretched, pulled, and twisted into distended proportions. Some of the works included in this exhibition began as performance-based sculptures, which Nengudi would activate by staging choreographed actions while entangled in the stockings.

The first museum survey of these sculptures, Senga Nengudi: Improvisational Gestures features work from the 1970s to the present, including documentation of early performances.
Nengudi (née Sue Irons, American, b. 1943) was born in Chicago where she spent her early childhood. She was raised and educated in Los Angeles and Pasadena, then spent an influential year of graduate study in Tokyo, Japan. As part of a radical black avant- garde along with David Hammons and Maren Hassinger, she lived in New York City in the early 1970s and had a solo exhibition at the pioneering Just Above Midtown Gallery in Harlem in 1977. She currently lives in Colorado Springs.

This exhibition is co-organized by Museum of Contemporary Art Denver and University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, Gallery of Contemporary Art. It was shown at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs’s Gallery of Contemporary Art (GOCA) in 2015, and at the University of Washington’s Henry Art Gallery in 2016.

Official Website

More events on this date

Tags: , , , ,