The American artist Senga Nengudi is the recipient of the celebrated Nasher Prize, an annual $100,000 prize awarded to residing sculptors by the Nasher Sculpture Heart in Dallas, Texas. Nengudi is best-known for her ethereal sculptures and installations that use hosiery and sand as a medium, and that “communicate pointedly to the fragility of the human physique and particular person company”, says Jeremy Strick, the director of the Nasher.
Nengudi, who is predicated in Colorado Springs, Colorado, was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1943 and earned her MA in artwork and dance from the California State School Los Angeles. Her profession spans greater than 5 a long time and defies easy categorisation, extending from sculpture and set up to bounce, movie and images.
Senga Nengudi, Ceremony for Freeway Fets (1978). Photograph: Quaku / Roderick Younger. © Senga Nengudi, 2022. Courtesy of Sprüth Magers and Thomas Erben Gallery, New York.
Latest solo exhibitions embody exhibits on the Henry Moore Institute and the Baltimore Museum of Artwork in 2018, and the worldwide retrospective Topologies, which opened on the Lenbachhaus in Munich in 2019 and traveled to the Denver Artwork Museum, the Museu de arte de São Paulo and the Philadelphia Museum of Artwork.
The Nasher Prize was “conceived to honour artists who all through their careers have constantly produced distinctive and compelling work, influencing the very understanding of sculpture and pushing the boundaries of art-making in new and thrilling instructions”, Strick says.
Lynne Cooke, the senior curator of Fashionable artwork on the Nationwide Gallery of Artwork in Washington DC, was one in all a number of jurors for the seventh version of the prize. The award is “important in that it entails an actual debate concerning the contenders, and the controversy features a dialogue of their contribution to sculpture”, she says.
Senga Nengudi, R.S.V.P. Reverie “Scribe” (2014). © Senga Nengudi, 2022Courtesy of Sprüth Magers and Thomas Erben Gallery, New York. Photograph: Timo Ohler.
“Not everybody has the identical concept of what sculpture is, what it means and the way it’s evolving—it’s about an settlement of the need of sculpture itself,” she provides. Nengudi’s work “brings a freshness to the language of sculpture utilizing on a regular basis, cheap supplies which are related to ladies and ladies’s our bodies, creating an summary artwork that thinks concerning the relationship of a feminine physique to area”.
The Dia Artwork Basis will open a long-term exhibition dedicated to Nengudi in Beacon on 17 February subsequent 12 months. Nengudi first collaborated with Dia in 2018, when she hosted one of many basis’s “artists on artists” lecture sequence, specializing in the work of Joan Jonas.
Senga Nengudi, Sandmining B (2020). Sound piece by Lily Bea Moor, “Solely Love Can Make It Proper” (2020) Trumpet Composition: Butch Morris. Motion Verbs: Senga Nengudi. Masking It Riff: Sanza Pyatt Fittz. © Senga Nengudi, 2022. Courtesy Sprüth Magers and Thomas Erben Gallery, New York.
“Nengudi stood out to the curatorial workforce as an artist that we wished to proceed working with, and we’ve thought of how one can exactly retain the performativity—or, the vitality—of her installations in the course of the run of a long-term present,” says Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, the assistant curator of the muse
The forthcoming Dia exhibition will embody varied our bodies of labor from the Seventies and late Sixties, work from the Nineties, when Nengudi started working in New York, and up to date items, in addition to a efficiency sequence and an accompanying monographic publication together with images and preparatory drawings from varied levels of her profession.
