The Armory Show

Since the 1970s, Senga Nengudi has made powerful sculptures, photographs, and performances that engage bodily forms and actions, often in concert with found materials. Early in her career, Nengudi collaborated with a politically active group of artists in Los Angeles who were concerned with social justice and racial equality. In line with the feminist zeitgeist and a related desire to assert the political character of private spheres, Nengudi turned her practice toward the domestic after the birth of her son in 1974. Her signature R.S.V.P. sculptures (two of which are on view at Armory) utilize common objects associated with femininity—namely, used women’s nylon stockings—and push them beyond immediate recognition while retaining their affective charge. Filling the nylons with sand and stretching, nailing, and/or tying them, Nengudi does not efface their identifiability. When encountering these abstract works of assemblage, one never quite forgets that they were made to hold a woman’s legs.

As she was beginning the R.S.V.P. series, Nengudi melded performance, sculpture, and documentation. Nengudi’s loose group of collaborators (called “Studio Z,” and including David Hammons and Maren Hassenger) occasionally met to engage in spontaneous performative actions. At times they used Nengudi’s sculptures as props for performance; documentation of such events precipitated Nengudi’s black and while silver gelatin prints (three of which are on view at Armory). In these photographs an obscured body pulls, wears, and otherwise encounters the forms of Nengudi’s sculptures—which are drawn taut to mimic a walking figure, draped ceremonially around a body, or pulled over the head as a mask. In each case, the sculpture is activated by its relation to the performing body. In another work featured in the Armory presentation, Eggactly (1996), a work on paper is sheathed in a plastic dry cleaning bag. The bag, usually a vessel for sterilized garments, in this case functions conceptually as a womb. The work puts forth a playful derivative of the R.S.V.P. sculptures (the dry cleaning bag operating as a container for clothes, as the nylons are a kind of container for bodies) while expanding the formal range of Nengudi’s evocative practice.