Senga Nengudi: Populated Air

A celebration of five decades of multimedia artist Senga Nengudi’s creative practice.

Radically expanding our understanding of Senga Nengudi’s art, this book publishes never before seen drawings, prints, photographs, performance scores, and poetry, spanning five decades of her practice.

When Senga Nengudi’s sculptural installation RSVP debuted at Just Above Midtown in 1977, the works quickly became icons of the Black Arts movement. During her five-decade-long career, Nengudi has realized a remarkable body of work that blurs the boundaries between sculpture and performance, fine art and ritual, individual authorship and collective energy. Made of everyday materials, Nengudi’s installations are at once proxies for bodies and sites for performance. Characteristic of her openness to multiplicity, the artist, born Sue Ellen Irons, has assumed pseudonyms that inflect her creative identities as sculptor (Senga Nengudi), painter (Harriet Chin), photographer (Propecia Leigh), and writer (Lily Bea Moor). This publication is devoted to all of her creative identities.

Matilde Guidelli-Guidi is a curator and co-department head at Dia Art Foundation. Svetlana Kitto is an editor at Dia Art Foundation. A. B. Spellman is a jazz critic and poet.