Image: East Building of the National Gallery of Art, London
The National Gallery of Art is highlighting ‘In the Tower: Chakaia Booker’, a special exhibition focused on an artist known for turning discarded tires into abstract sculpture. According to the gallery’s newsletter, Booker transforms rubber into art while keeping it out of landfills and using the material to reflect on cultural histories. The exhibition is on view in the East Building, Tower Level, and closes Sunday, August 2.
The project places Booker’s work within the gallery’s rotating ‘In the Tower’ platform, which brings focused presentations to the East Building. The newsletter presents the exhibition as a limited-time opportunity to see Booker’s sculptures before the show ends, underscoring the compressed run of the installation from July 13 through August 2. The gallery’s public-facing information also identifies the location simply as the East Building, Tower Level.
Booker’s practice, as described in the source material, is rooted in reuse and transformation. By making abstract forms from tires, she gives industrial waste a new sculptural life while linking the material to broader cultural narratives. The newsletter’s emphasis on the environmental dimension of the work—specifically, keeping rubber out of landfills—frames the sculptures as both materially inventive and attentive to questions of disposal, labor and history.
The exhibition is part of a summer communication from the National Gallery of Art that also promotes other museum programming, but the Booker presentation stands out as the main art-news item. The gallery’s brief description pairs the sculptures with the artist’s name and includes an image caption for ‘It’s So Hard to Be Green, 2000’, identifying the work as rubber tires and wood, courtesy of the artist and David Nolan Gallery, with an image by Peter Vanderwarker. That caption provides one concrete example of the materials and scale of Booker’s sculptural language.
The announcement is concise, but it situates Booker within a contemporary sculpture context that turns everyday industrial debris into formal abstraction. The gallery characterizes the works as “awe-inspiring,” and while the newsletter does not expand on installation details, the title ‘In the Tower: Chakaia Booker’ indicates a concentrated presentation rather than a sprawling survey. The focus on a single artist allows the museum to present Booker’s material practice directly, without diluting the emphasis on the works themselves.
Visitors who want to see the exhibition have until Sunday, August 2. The notice gives the venue as East Building, Tower Level, and the gallery’s calendar information lists the exhibition duration as July 13 to August 2.
