Senga Nengudi: Spirit Crossing at Sprüth Magers, New York

Senga Nengudi, *Drifting Leaves,* 1972. Cibachrome print. Photo: Doug Harris
© Senga Nengudi, 2023. Courtesy Amistad Research Center, Sprüth Magers and Thomas Erben Gallery, New York.

Those doing ritual have the assurance of time.

Individual acts of art do not have to depend on permanence of the materials

Only the permanence of the soul.

I ascend the townhouse steps at Sprüeth Mager’s East 80th Street location and enter the second floor gallery space. The walls are adorned with bounded nylon sculptures and images of the same works in different contexts. This is the unmistakable work of Senga Nengudi.

I am struck by the stark juxtaposition - Sprüeth Mager’s Upper East Side gallery occupies a world that is close to Nengudi’s former East Harlem home. Historically, the Upper East Side has been representative of many things - proximity to whiteness, privilege, and tradition. Nengudi’s work, on the other hand, draws influence from Japanese ritual and Nengudi’s African heritage, it is avant-garde by nature, it challenges its viewer, it finds dialogue in discomfort.

Much of the work featured in Sprüeth Mager’s exhibition was conceptualized during the time that Nengudi lived in East Harlem. The Spirit Flags that were born from the artist’s time in Spanish Harlem were what Nengudi called “fabric spirits.” These works were composed of nylon fabric, stretched and bound into sculptural pieces that resembled ghost-like beings. Nengudi placed them in various contexts - hanging from fire escapes, fences, and staircases near her former apartment. Nengudi referred to them as the spirits of people whom she had encountered in Harlem, where they were hung and photographed.

Senga Nengudi, *Spirit Crossing*. Installation view, Sprüth Magers, NY, May 17–July 28, 2023. Photo: Genevieve Hansen.

Senga Nengudi, *Red Devil (soul 2)*, 1972, Cibachrome print. Photo: Doug Harris. © Senga Nengudi, 2023. Courtesy Amistad Research Center, Sprüth Magers and Thomas Erben Gallery, New York.

To understand Nengudi’s work, we must place it into context. Nengudi’s rich personal canon finds revolution in the banal. Much of her work is born from everyday materials such as water, nylon, sand, paper, tape, nails, and rope. A member of Studio Z, her work, like that of fellow studio member David Hammons, explores conceptions of identity. (1)

Nengudi’s work has historically existed at the periphery of the art world - deemed too specific for the white women of the conceptual art movement to relate to, and too conceptual to be considered among other Black artists of her generation. (2) Nengudi’s remarkable body of work has resisted the confines of categorization. Consequently, its influence has spanned several decades, defying space and time - allowing itself to have applicability on varying scales - global, local, modern, and historic.

World/Soul without in

I create a peace/piece

I wipe it out with my hands, my feet, my body.

My eyes are first drawn to “Holler,” perhaps because of its bold green color. The human sized silhouette “body” is cut from nylon. I imagine that the body was frozen mid-flight and affixed with ropes to the walls of the room by its fingers, toes, and hair. I envision them as a dancer, much like Nengudi and myself, caught in the fluid space between the stillness of two poses. Although different from her sculptural works involving water, bags, and sand, I am still able to recognize this iconic conceptualization as born from Nengudi’s central philosophy of movement. Here found objects, like rope, nylon, and nails, have been transformed into an expression that is elegant, transformative, and poetic. The construction of the work relies on the concepts of restraint and withholding. “Holler” is simultaneously strong and on the verge of collapse.

Senga Nengudi, *Down (Purple)*, 1972. Cibachrome print. Photo: Doug Harris. © Senga Nengudi, 2023. Courtesy Amistad Research Center, Sprüth Magers and Thomas Erben Gallery, New York.

A cibachrome print triptych captures the image of three works much like “Holler”, placed into various spaces throughout Spanish Harlem. As I observe them, I wonder how Nengudi’s work occupies alternative spaces through different mediums. I think about the way that I engaged with “Holler”, and know that it is distinct from my interaction with this triptych. Both mediums are evocative of similar elements, creating dialogue with their viewer. Seeing the triptych “bodies” in an immersive context with their environments - a stairwell, a fire escape, and a fence, I am better able to envision their ghost-like “spirits”, free in the wind.

I follow along the walls until I reach, “Ellioutt ~ Love”, a triptych composed of two c-prints and one silver gelatin print. I am initially perplexed by the utilization of an explicitly male form. The person is photographed in a bathtub, their eyes closed, suspended in shallow water. They appear to be weightless, much like the Spirit Flags. Historically, much of Nengudi’s work has referred to the elasticity and durability of the female body. I think deeply about Nengudi’s reference here. Implicit in Nengudi’s work is a global exploration of the tension that is inherent to our simple existence as human beings. In this particular moment, Nengudi seems to be communicating human existence as occurring at the intersection of movement, energy exchanges, tension, and vulnerability.

I gravitate back towards Nengudi’s iconic work embodied in “Twins”, a nylon composition much like “Holler”, although “Twins” features two mirrored images with slightly varying features. The two spirits appear to be conjoined, and are turned away from one another. Unlike “Holler” which is bound directly to the wall, the “Twins” are bound in space, occupying a corner of the gallery in which their heads and arms hang from suspenders in the ceiling, and their sides are bound to perpendicular walls. Nengudi’s installations have been described as proxies for human bodies and have been utilized as sites for performance. In this particular context, I wonder what this replication states about the limitation of the singular female form traditionally referenced in her work. I think about the ritualized exactness of the process of developing “Twins”, and whether it was influenced by Nengudi’s fascination with Gutai. In “Twins”, their side-by-side positioning blurs the definition between a singular, lone spirit, and a greater, collective consciousness.

While the works featured at Sprüth Magers were conceptualized in the early 1970s, in 2023, the same body of work has global and local applicability. Nengudi’s Spirit Flags are both fragile and strong. They exist at a point of tension. Their fragility is simultaneously a strength - of their ability to endure, to adapt, to be stretched and molded with their environment.

In a global context, I am reminded of fellow artist Shellyne Rodriguez’s question of empire. In an earlier interview with Speciwomen, Rodriguez considered, “How do we exist at the periphery of empire?”. Through Spirit Flags Nengudi explores the inherent tensions that exist by nature of being a human in a world that has been shaped by Western capitalism, colonialism and imperialism.

It remains in the fabric of time threading through the millennia

Remembered and forgotten a thousand times over. Yet there.

Seen—not seen—experienced as part of the air. (3)

––

(1) “Senga Nengudi.” Hammer Museum, hammer.ucla.edu/now-dig-this/artists/senga-nengudi. Accessed 15 July 2023.

(2) Gyarkye, Lovia. “An Artist’s Continuing Exploration of the Human Form.” The New York Times, 9 Nov. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/11/09/t-magazine/senga-nengudi-art.html.

(3) “Senga Nengudi: In the Fabric of Time.” Exhibition Guide Senga Nengudi: Time | Denver Art Museum, www.denverartmuseum.org/en/exhibition-guide-senga-nengudi-time. Accessed 15 July 2023.

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