Urban Butterfly

Educated at Rutgers University and the City College of New York, Booker has been making sculptures since the 1990s that rehabilitate and rejuvenate the rubber of castoff auto tires. Formally, the work demonstrates sensitivity to the malleability and characterological mutability of rubber as a medium. Booker’s sculptures are both elegant and sharp, animated by the flaws, cracks, and shredded imperfections of the material and by her deft handling. Wall-hung, they are in dialogue with art-historical precedents of Minimalist sculpture and monochrome painting. They may also carry multivalent meaning related to African-American identity, to African textile traditions, to the colonial history of the rubber trade and the forced labor that made it possible, even to the Olmec and Maya who first used the material.