Internationally acclaimed artist Chakaia Booker will be the Karl Stirner Arts Trail’s (KSAT) 2024-25 artist-in-residence.
A panel discussion celebrating the artist and her sculpture that will be installed on the KSAT, No More Milk and Cookies (shown above), will take place on Sept. 15 at 4 p.m. in Landis Cinema at Buck Hall, 219 N. 3rd St., Easton, Pa. A reception will follow by the sculpture on the arts trail’s Movie Hill near the KSAT dog park; shuttle service from Buck Hall to KSAT will be provided. The rain site will be Buck Hall.
The panelists, who will join Booker in discussing the sculpture and her influence in the art world:
- Artist Berrisford Boothe, professor of art and architecture at Lehigh University and founding director/curator of the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection
- Artist Adama Delphine Fawundu, assistant professor of visual arts and director of graduate studies at Columbia University School of the Arts
- Artist Willie Cole, who created Grace Gate, the first artwork installed on the arts trail
- Robert S. Mattison, Marshall R. Metzgar Professor of Art History Emeritus at Lafayette College
The installation of No More Milk and Cookies is scheduled for Sept. 9–13. The sculpture will remain for at least two years.
Made of reclaimed rubber tires and wood, No More Milk and Cookies (2003) is 14.5′ high x 28′ long x 24′ deep. It was included in an exhibition of Booker’s sculpture at Storm King Arts Center in Mountainville, N.Y., in 2004, and subsequently at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Mass., in 2010.
The arts trail also will hold workshops with Booker this fall, including a public one on Saturday, Oct. 12, from noon–2 p.m., at the base of Movie Hill near the KSAT dog park. The rain location is Ahart Family Arts Plaza between Buck Hall and the Williams Visual Arts Building at the foot of College Hill. Collected found objects and materials will be hammered, nailed, screwed, tied, and glued together into new creations. Guiding participants will be students in Lafayette’s Creative and Performing Arts Scholars program along with Phillipsburg and Easton high school students in the Lafayette art department’s Community-Based Teaching Program, which is led by Jim Toia, KSAT’s executive director and curator.
For more information on Booker’s KSAT residency, email info@karlstirnerartstrail.org.
About Chakaia Booker’s Art
Booker uses innovative artistic practices in sculpting, painting, collage, and photography, employing materials such as rubber, plastic, ceramic, and bronze. She’s known for creating large outdoor sculptures from used construction materials, especially rubber tires.
“Her artistic process is enormously physical, from transporting the tires to reshaping them with machinery,” notes the David Nolan Gallery. “Slicing, twisting, and weaving this medium into radically new forms and textures, Booker gives the industrial materials an anthropomorphic quality.”
Another example of this work is Booker’s 35-foot-tall Shaved Portions, a sculpture on the pedestrian plaza on Broadway in New York City’s Garment District between 39th and 40th streets. The piece was installed in April and will remain through October.
“Booker’s primary material, rubber tires, is conceptually loaded, speaking to issues of environmental destruction, socioeconomic disparity, and access to technology as it relates to modes of transportation,” writes Phil Sanders in Artnet. “Curators and critics have often linked the material to the artist’s African American heritage, which Booker acknowledges, adding that the material also speaks to the resilience required for survival for Africans in the diaspora, citing the difficulty in getting traction to move forward and upward versus spinning in circles.”
About Chakaia Booker
Booker has a commanding appearance as she dons one of the “wearable sculptures” she has created, featuring a headdress made of African textiles wrapped on top of each other with hanging strips of draped fabric.
Her works are in more than 40 public collections and have been exhibited across the U.S. and in Asia, Africa, and Europe. U.S. venues have included the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture and Contemporary Institute of Art in Miami.
She was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005.
Taking Time, a solo exhibition of Booker’s photographs, prints, and sculptures, is currently on display at The Current in Stowe, Vt.
Learn more on Booker’s website.
Funding and Photo Credits
The installation and presence of No More Milk and Cookies on the arts trail and Booker’s KSAT residency are supported in part with funding from the Hotel Tax and Grow NORCO grant programs through the County of Northampton’s Department of Community & Economic Development, a Crayola Community Grant, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency, through the Pennsylvania Partners in the Arts, its regional arts funding partnership.
Top photo: No More Milk and Cookies by Chakaia Booker
Photographer: Jerry L. Thompson
Courtesy of Storm King Art Center
Second Photo: Chakaia Booker
Photographer: Alexandre Ayer – Diversity Pictures
