At 79, Senga Nengudi Is Still Shattering Norms through Radical, Spiritual Sculpture

Senga Nengudi was born in Chicago, but she is rooted in many places. Her artwork is a confluence between cultures, looking toward and lingering at their meeting points. “My work has always been interested in cross-cultural relationships,” said the artist. The pseudonym she gave herself in the mid-1970s is a testament to this global sensitivity: She takes it from Duala words meaning “to listen” or “to hear” (senga) and “a woman who comes to power as a traditional healer” (nengudi).

In the late 1960s, Los Angeles was glowing with the twilight years of the Black Arts Movement, brimming with a dauntless vanguard of artists working to visualize the expanse of a fresh Black radical imagination. It was in this vast terrain of potentiality and urgency that the career of a young Nengudi began to take shape, as her art shook up the domains of sculpture, installation, and performance art. Now, at 79 years old, and living in a moment of similar urgency, the artist continues to shatter art history’s mold, and she is getting the recognition that her tectonic impact deserves.

This past year has been a veritably triumphant one for Nengudi, marked by a litany of awards and exhibitions. February saw the opening of a long-term solo exhibition at Dia Beacon featuring early and recent work by the artist, alongside a robust schedule of performances and public programming. Later that month, the Museum of Modern Art wrapped up a highly celebrated group show, “Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces,” where Nengudi’s work was shown in dialogue with many of her peers, including David Hammons, Lorraine O’Grady, and Suzanne Jackson. In April, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas awarded Nengudi its annual laureate prize. And now, Sprüth Magers in New York has unveiled “Spirit Crossings,” Nengudi’s second solo show of the year.

Rigorously philosophical and conceptual, Nengudi’s artwork is a reflection of her careful engagement with her own Black and female identity, as well as with an incredible breadth of global cultures, religions, and spiritual traditions. “Art has allowed me to do a lot of things, including travel,” said Nengudi. This globe-hopping has lent her a deep understanding of spiritual practices originating in Africa, the Caribbean, and East Asia. Nengudi’s recent solo shows point to her global awareness and capacious spiritual attunement.

Upon entering the Dia Beacon exhibition, viewers are met with Wet Night—Early Dawn—Scat Chant—Pilgrim’s Song (1996), a four-part installation which—like much of Nengudi’s work—draws from a web of weird yet everyday materials, including earth pigment, cleaning bags, and bubble wrap. Evoking a series of veiled altars, the work is heavily informed by Nengudi’s studies of ritual and spiritual practices in Japan, where she traveled for a post-graduate program. There, she collaborated with the Gutai Arts Association, a collection of avant-garde artists whose conceptual artwork emphasized the use of simple materials in their radical performance art and happenings.

Nengudi’s sagacious spiritual commitment is combined with an equally intense consciousness of the body. The artist’s experience as a dancer also informs her sculpture and performance work. Having minored in dance while she was majoring in art at Los Angeles State College, the two art forms have always mingled together in her creative core. Nengudi has always been interested in dancing as a form of meditating on the body, exploring the various expressions and extremes of our physical selves. In her words, it is a practice of “extending the body beyond itself.”

In many ways, her visual art is also a reflection of these investments in making sense of the body’s landscape: Though it is abstract and conceptual, it is also decidedly figurative in its emphasis on human corporeality. At Dia Beacon, artworks sprawl across gallery walls and floors, a dynamic patterning of sculptural bodies that readily evokes choreography. Nengudi had a self-described “strong hand” in arranging things. “I’m very fascinated by what spaces can tell us about the artwork, how a work can completely change meaning when it’s repositioned,” she said.

Much of the show is focused on Nengudi’s “Water Compositions,” which comprise large, hermetically sealed vinyl sacks filled with colored water, often tied up with rope in sinuous configurations. Despite their brilliant color, there is an eeriness that creeps into the experience of these sculptures, a feeling akin to encountering defamiliarized versions of our own bodies. The elastic forms hang and droop with gravity’s pull or rest supine on the floor, slouching and stretching like limbs. In a museum that is largely dedicated to clean, restrained minimalism, the dancing, corporeal energy of Nengudi’s “Water Compositions”—as they scatter and sprawl across galleries—offers a refreshing and subversive visual counterpoint.

At Sprüth Magers, meanwhile, Nengudi’s hymns to the body become something of an elegy. Here, the focus is her “Spirit Flags” (mid-1970s): fabric cutouts that Nengudi created when she was living in New York. Evoking the human silhouette, these works emerged from Nengudi’s reckoning with the heroin epidemic that was devastating the city at the time. “It would kind of look like they were sleeping or leaning,” recalled Nengudi as she reflected on the horrifying encounters that led her to make the works. “These wavering beings would be on street corners, and so I decided to make these flag figures—these ‘Spirit Flags’—and hang them up in backyards, in alleyways.”

Like much of Nengudi’s work, the “Spirit Flags” resemble but do not cohere as bodies. As their collective title suggests, they evoke phantasmic, humanoid forms. The lightness of fabric makes them appear like floating, transcending bodily encasements for some higher realm. “There’s a play between body and spirit, and sometimes the body feels limited in what it can do,” said Nengudi. “But the soul is still there and resilient, and can go beyond gravity and physics.”