This work of Senga Nengudi is in the collection of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburg, USA
R.S.V.P. XI, 1977-2004.
About:
Born in Chicago (1943), raised and educated in Los Angeles and Pasadena with a year of post grad study in Tokyo, Japan, and residing in New York City in the early 70’s, Nengudi is currently living in Colorado.
Interested in the visual arts, dance, body mechanics and matters of the spirit from an early age these elements still play themselves out in ever changing ways in her art. She has always used a variety of natural (sand, dirt, rocks, seed pods) and unconventional (panty hose, found objects, masking tape) materials to fashion her works, utilizing these materials as a jazz musician utilizes notes and sounds to improvise a composition. The thrust of her art is to share common experiences in abstractions that hit the senses and center, often welcoming the viewer to become a participant. (website)
“It was only when she moved back to Los Angeles that she connected Japanese Minimalism, African ceremonial dress, African-American improvisation, and Western vernacular vocabularies into a new visual language that would result in the R.S.V.P. series. Along with McCullough, Hassinger, Parker and, peripherally, Hammons, she formed the loose collective — Studio Z — where they felt free to collaborate and experiment with discarded and overlooked materials and forgotten spaces.
R.S.V.P. Reverie ‘T’, 2014.
Soon after her son was born in 1974, Nengudi began to work with panty hose as a material. For her, it reflected the elasticity of the human body. She stretched the pantyhose in various lines across walls and to the floors, and then invited a collaborator — usually Maren Hassinger — to “activate”, or dance with the pieces. The results are spectacular: conjuring bondage, weaving, lynching, sex, birth, and jazz, the works point to — yet always resist — direct reference, while clearly defining their sculptural relationships to the female body. Even as standing pieces, the R.S.V.P. installations seem to bear the traces of movement both sensual and constrained. The clear awareness of Eva Hesse, who died in 1970, only adds to the sense that Nengudi takes great pleasure in visual conversation. (…)Nengudi continues to push herself into new mediums. Among the most ambitious works at RedLine was a video installation titled “Warp Trance.”Employing conceptual social practice, Nengudi used a 2007 residency at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to explore the sounds, rhythms, patterns and the movements of workers in textile mills to explore the unconscious dance and ceremony involved in labor.”
(NoelBlack in Hyperallergic, September 6, 2014)
R.S.V.P. !, 1977.
Along with doing art Nengudi is strongly committed to arts education. Along with teaching courses at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs in the Visual Arts and Performing Arts Department, she has always been involved with bringing arts programs emphasing diversity to the communities in which she resides. Besides her individual efforts she has belonged to a variety of organizations with similar goals.
R.S.V.P. Reverie ‘Embrace’, 2014.
Senga: “Sharing each others cultures through the arts provides a true bridge to a healthy respect for one another and arts education in general provides a means to stimulate the mind and exercise creative problem solving.” (website)
