Chakaia Booker: The Observance

Chakaia Booker: The Observance is the first comprehensive monograph on this important yet understudied American artist. Illuminating more than three decades of Booker’s practice, the publication explores her signature form—monumental works made of rubber—while showcasing her innovations across mediums including photography, painting, and prints. With new photography of the wide-ranging exhibition at ICA Miami, historic images, and newly commissioned scholarship, the book illuminates key themes in the artist’s practice. With special attention to Booker’s totemic and anthropomorphic assemblages fabricated from cast-off tires, the publication engages the artist’s ongoing expression of ecological and technological concerns, examinations of racial and economic disparities, and interest in the symbolism of the automobile in American culture.