Chakaia Booker's Explosive Tire Sculptures Aren't Spares 

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• Courtesy of Matt Neckers
• "Untitled"

Chakaia Booker is having a moment, with a 2021 retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and recent inclusion in prestigious fairs including Art Basel in Switzerland. This summer, she installed "Shaved Portions," a 35-foot-high jungle gym-like sculpture, in Manhattan's Garment District. What the international art world might miss out on — but Vermonters shouldn't — is "Taking Time," her solo exhibition at the Current in Stowe.

Since the 1980s, Booker, who works in New York City and Allentown, Pa., has been making sculptures from discarded tires. Five of these are on view in "Taking Time," in addition to "Filtered Thoughts," the new piece installed near the Current's entrance and commissioned as part of this year's show of outdoor sculpture, "Exposed."

Booker's work is complex. It can be read as purely abstract but is never far removed from discussions of racism, feminism and environmentalism. The fact that she has used such a charged, physically demanding material for decades ties form and content together in work that is remarkable, lively and fresh.

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• Courtesy of Efa Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshops
• "Untitled, cb22.21"

The two relief sculptures from 1996, both untitled, are swirling masses of rubber set into 4-by-4-foot wooden frames. Think about how heavy a single car tire is and multiply it: Kelly Holt, gallery manager at the Current, said each relief is about 400 pounds and took a team to hang on the wall.

Despite gravity, Booker creates movement and lightness within her compositions. In one, bike tires snake out into the room while shards of larger car tires bubble up and recede, crisscrossing like a pit of vipers. In the other, light bounces off swaths of smooth rubber and falls into shredded valleys. Everywhere, twisted treads lead the eye up into new nooks and crannies.

"Handle With Care," a relief from 2010, takes an entirely different compositional approach. Booker has swapped the wooden frame for a hidden steel one, which supports the rubber so it appears to float on the wall. The composition is much more orderly, with carefully cut and folded chunks accumulating into ruffles. A circular form on the left side radiates out; here, the artist references and magnifies the shapes and tread patterns of the tires' original design.

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• Courtesy of Matt Neckers
• "Muse"

Of all the tire-based works, "Muse" (2007) and "Midtown South" (2012) literally stand out. Each freestanding sculpture is a little explosion. Booker uses sliced tires, melted fragments, and pieces with fraying (and very sharp) steel edges and arranges them as a master florist would put together a bouquet. Contrasting textures swoop up and out.

When Booker first started this work, burned-out cars weren't uncommon on New York City streets, and that's where she got her tires; the material is imbued with that setting. These sculptures are elegant and dangerous, with an undertone of the apocalypse.

That sense is clearer still in the "Foundling Warrior Quest" series of photogravures. Printed in 2010 from images of Booker taken in the 1990s, the series shows the artist collecting tires from dump sites. The technique and her use of black paper lend the images a haunting, grainy, filmic quality, enhancing the sense of narrative. Dressed in heavy work gloves and boots — as well as her signature West African-influenced cloth headdress, belt trimmed with cowrie shells and large bone cross on her chest — Booker becomes the protagonist of her artwork as much as its creator. She scavenges what she needs for an epic journey through the wasteland.

Booker makes things with frugality and specificity. She fastens the rubber with drywall screws, because to do so with prettier means wouldn't make sense. Massive sculptures sit alongside delicate, precisely made chine collé prints. In those, layers of pattern and drawing overlap in raucous compositions that echo the tires, her sculpted headwear, the body. Booker assembles fragments of influences the way she combines pieces of tires: this one recognizable, that one transformed — recycling as re-creation.