At the National Gallery of Art, monumental sculptures fashioned from discarded tyres transform environmental waste into powerful reflections on history, resilience, and the possibilities of renewal.
21 July 2026
For more than four decades, Chakaia Booker has reshaped discarded tyres into monumental sculptural forms that challenge conventional understandings of abstraction, materiality, and environmental responsibility. ‘In the Tower: Chakaia Booker: Treading New Ground’, on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, brings together three commanding wall reliefs alongside a striking photographic series that reveals the breadth of the artist’s enduring practice. The exhibition runs from 5 April 2025 to 2 August 2026 and is presented as part of the museum’s acclaimed In the Tower series.
Booker’s sculptures emerge from reclaimed rubber, their surfaces cut, twisted, layered, and woven into dynamic compositions that pulse with movement and tension. Works including Acid Rain, Echoes in Black (Industrial Cicatrization), and It’s So Hard to Be Green transform industrial refuse into monumental landscapes, inviting reflection on ecological crisis, labour, race, and the histories embedded within everyday materials. Rather than concealing the scars of their origins, the tyres retain their weathered textures, becoming records of circulation, consumption, and survival.
The exhibition also features the six-part photogravure series Foundling Warrior Quest (II 21C), in which Booker positions herself as a mythic figure navigating a harsh industrial terrain. Together, these works propose an urgent vision of transformation, where acts of reclamation become gestures of resistance and imagination. ‘Treading New Ground’ offers a compelling encounter with an artist whose practice continues to redefine the relationship between sculpture, ecology, and Black cultural histories.
This exhibition is on view at The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC until 2 August 2026.
