National Gallery of Art, Washington, April 5–August 3, 2025

For over four decades, Chakaia Booker has cut, coiled, and contorted used tires, transforming this industrial waste into abstract sculpture. She selects found, weathered fragments that convey the histories of the tires’ use, incorporating their stains, cracks, and fading into her art. Booker utilizes discarded tires to prevent their disposal into landfills, where the methane gas they emit pollutes the environment and contributes to global warming. Aware of the ramifications of climate change, Booker considers how the production and interpretation of her artwork factors in those circumstances.

In the Tower: Chakaia Booker presents three monumental wall relief sculptures: Acid Rain (2001), Echoes in Black (Industrial Cicatrization) (1996), and It’s So Hard to Be Green (2000). It also features Booker’s six-part photogravure series Foundling Warrior Quest (II 21C) (2010), in which she appears as a mythical being foraging in a harsh, industrial landscape. The black-and-white imagery conjures up a distant past as much as it alludes to a future environment stricken by the effects of a climate crisis.

Booker’s works express her long-standing environmentalist concerns. Global natural disasters, international climate activism, and humankind’s reckoning with the effects of climate change inform her art. In response, Booker projects a new vision for the world, one in which we all play a part in reshaping.

The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

The exhibition is curated by Kanitra Fletcher, associate curator of African American and Afro-Diasporic art, with Claudia Watts, research assistant, both at the National Gallery of Art, Washington.