Elements of Influence

SENGA NENGUDI’S NASHER PRIZE FOLLOWS A CONSTELLATION OF ARTISTS WHO SUPPORTED ONE ANOTHER AS THEY CHALLENGED PERCEIVED LIMITS OF SCULPTURE AND PERFORMANCE.

BY LYNDSAY KNECHT PHOTOGRAPHY BY NAN COULTER

The year was 1974.

David Hammons had already shifted the weather with his first body prints in Los Angeles. The improvisational quality of these experiments—which needed only self or model, oily substance, the ability to press one’s coated body to paper, and enforcing pigment—magnetized young artists like Senga Nengudi to his studio, its past life a dance hall.

Linda Goode Bryant was the director of education at the Studio Museum in Harlem. She wanted to see Hammons’ embodied records of African American life shown in New York City. I don’t show in white galleries, he told her. So Goode Bryant opened Just Above Midtown that same year at 50 West 57th Street. Movable roots grew from the care of artists and volunteers who funded and ran JAM themselves, transcending the gallery’s 700 square feet.

Senga Nengudi’s first solo exhibition at Just Above Midtown three years later was titled R.S.V.P., an invitation to wonder with the artist at the body’s ability to stretch and contain so much on the brink of creation.

The year was 1974.

Heiner Friedrich’s gallery programs were now settled in New York City. Together with the oil heiress Philippa de Menil and art historian Helen Winkler, Friedrich started Dia Art Foundation to “help artists achieve visionary projects that might not otherwise be realized because of scale or scope.”

The count of galleries and sites in the United States owned by DAF is 11 as of this writing. Dia Beacon opened in 2003 with almost 300,000 square feet of possibility. You can reach this sprawling fantasy of outsized sculptures and installation art protected from weather about 60 miles north of New York City via the Metro train.

Before Dia Beacon opened in the factory, Linda Goode Bryant, also an artist, broke into the building with filmmaker Laura Poitras, imagining what it might be like if the artists of JAM took over a space like that. An excerpt of the film would be shown at the Modern Museum of Art’s exhibition Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces in 2023. The title of the video: Are we really that different?

The year was 1974.

Sue Irons saw an exhibition at UCLA entitled African Art in Motion: Icon and Act. The show’s vision of movement and sculpture reached the artist, who loved partnering with objects as a dancer and creating visceral impressions of kinesis with her Water Compositions series. Inversions of motion and stillness were alive in African history and alive in art and alive in her.

That year, Irons adopted her African name, Senga Nengudi. “Senga” is “listen” in Duala, and “Nengudi” means “a woman who comes to power as a traditional healer.”

“I must say that I feel like starting at a certain point,” Nengudi says by phone, pausing from travel preparations in late January. “Right now, like many people—and I do mean many people—I’m grieving, grieving my husband of 45 years. That’s all my heart right now. But I am no different. Everybody, I know, has suffered outrageous losses, and that has to be a part of the makeup of who I am right now. So kind of that’s where it is, as I’m preparing to do one of the biggest things of my life,” she says.

Before historic exhibitions of her work, like the one she’s soon to help install at Dia Beacon, Nengudi’s husband, Elliott Fittz, made sure the artist had a plane ticket and $100 to make it through a week or two in New York City. The couple met when the artist was clearing out her garage for space to make art. “Wherever I went, I had to have a studio,” she says. Nengudi asked a friend for some help. He brought Fittz to assist.

“I accept [the Nasher Prize] almost like a group thing, you know, because none of us have gotten this far by ourselves,” Nengudi says. “I’m a combination of all these extraordinary people that I’ve known throughout the years that, you know, we’ve interacted together and created, co-created together.”

Materials Nengudi uses with repetition are imbued with people. The nylons she filled with sand for R.S.V.P. and many works afterward often belonged to friends, “and somehow had the energy of the person that used it,” she says. “You know, these weren’t just brand new, they had experience of their own.”

> New signs of Nengudi’s influence bloom in the work of emerging artists who found her via larger surveys at the Hammer and California African American Museum, and retrospectives of her work over the last ten years.

Breeana N. Thorne is the curator of a forthcoming virtual tribute show titled Senga Taught Me. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she prefers the phrase “art caretaker” to describe her role in the world.

“Art is an extension of someone—someone’s spirit, someone’s essence, someone’s feeling, someone’s thoughts. It should be treated with a certain amount of care because it really is an extension of that person,” she says.

Ciarra K. Walters, a devoted artist who moves gracefully between mediums like Nengudi, will show work in Senga Taught Me. Nylons flecked with cracked eggshells like glitter are pinned to the walls of her graduate studio at the Maryland Institute College of Art, which she pressed against in a performance while wearing the shelled pantyhose—the first experiment in a series about vulnerability, grief, and the cycles of destruction and creation.

At home in Maryland, where Walters runs a household of three younger sisters, she’s printed out six copies of Nengudi’s black-andwhite 1981 photograph Rapunzel. Nengudi leans out the window of an abandoned school building in Los Angeles, the length of her headdress made of stretched nylons reaching down like an escape.

“ The humor in it, the seriousness of it,” Walters marvels, her voice a full bell.

For almost a year this image has reminded her of what’s possible. A woman’s use of her body to revive space. An artist’s use of available materials to make a symbol that keeps the moment and lives long after it passes. A pure truth embodied, indivisible as an atom and connected to everything.

“It was the model Senga put forth that helped people understand how far they could push their practice,” says Thomas Lax, curator of Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces at MoMA. That includes Lax, whose exuberant homage to JAM makes physical the dream Goode Bryant had on the Dia Beacon campus—the dream where JAM artists occupy a major institution.

The sound of Senga Nengudi’s breath in the performance Air Propo presses from a video through the folding rooms at MoMA, a guiding rhythm like the interludes in red earth pigment from Colorado Springs on the walls of her show at Dia Beacon, which swirl like curves of breeze that lead viewers from one ecstatic vision to the next. Somehow this landmark exhibition opens right as Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces closes to the public.

Days after the JAM show comes down, the Museum of Modern Art will announce the acquisition of the gallery’s archives. And every one of the works in Senga Nengudi’s exhibition at Dia Beacon will remain in the institution’s permanent collection—including a piece directly on the wall at the center of the show, a grid of points yet to be named. P