Topologies

Senga Nengudi: Topologies

Denver Art Museum

100 W. 14th Avenue Parkway, Denver, CO 80204

December 13, 2020-April 11, 2021

Admission: Adults: $10; Seniors, Students, and Military: $8; Children 18 & under and Members: Free.

Review by Marsha Mack

Opening during the final month of a historically difficult year—a year that stretched patience thin and tested the tensile strength of American society—Senga Nengudi’s retrospective Topologies at the Denver Art Museum (DAM) traverses decades to adeptly meet the moment.

There is a timeless quality to Senga Nengudi’s work, some of which was created half a century ago but still rings true in the modern era. She was in fact an important player in the feminist performance art and the Black American avant-garde movements of the late 1960s and 1970s, and has continued her practice for over 50 years. Through her iconic, pendulous pantyhose sculptures, evocative performances, and collaborative happenings, Nengudi captures a numinous elegance paired with a distinctive rawness and in doing so comments on the conditions of Black female embodiment.

A still image from Senga Nengudi’s Untitled (Performance, White Cube Gallery, London), 2014, video, duration: 8 minutes 33 seconds, performer: Maren Hissinger. Image by Marsha Mack.

Visitors to Topologies are introduced to the exhibition by a video projection of Untitled (Performance, White Cube Gallery, London) from 2014. This is an ongoing performative sculptural series started in 1975 in which Maren Hissinger—a decades-long collaborator—activates a remade R.S.V.P. X (1977) nylon and sand sculpture by Nengudi. Musically accompanied by a solo cellist and an intimate audience equipped with sand maracas, Hissinger explores internal and spatial psychology in a physical exchange with a distended pantyhose fellow dancer. Performed with great calm, strength, and delicacy, this piece establishes the foundational tones of Topologies for viewers as they cross the threshold into the exhibition.

Senga Nengudi, Inside/Outside, 1977, nylon mesh, rubber, foam, and sand. Image by Marsha Mack.

Performance art—which is at times daunting or bewildering for some spectators— consists of the living body that is charged with personal and cultural histories, moving through physical space. Tasked with sharing decades of fleeting, immaterial works captured primarily in still images and video snippets, the DAM’s inclusion of ephemera such as programs, fliers, sketches, and wall texts necessitates a certain level of focus from viewers. Topologies is not an exhibition of ten-foot long color field paintings, as the celebrated white male artists of the ‘60s and ‘70s were creating around the same time. Nengudi’s sculptures and performances capture the experience of marginalization-turned-innovation, utilizing nylon stockings, collaborative performance, and wayward appliances. She invokes a lived-in sensuality that contrasts sharply with the societal conditions and art world norms of that era.

Senga Nengudi, Insides Out, 1977 (remade in 2003), nylon mesh, metal, and sand. Image by Marsha Mack.

Sculptures such as Insides Out (1977; remade 2003) and the crescent moon headdress Inside/Outside (1977) return agency and focus back to the flesh that constitutes the physical experience of “the difficult embodied aspects of black life, history, and culture.” [1] In these corporeal works that allude to the weight and elasticity of the human body, Nengudi imagines the female body as durable, stretched, and tested, and unspeakably beautiful. Created using everyday materials, there is a vivid physicality in Nengudi’s nylon mesh works whose texture is already known by the skin. They are often contorted with knots and threaded through rigid metal components. A vision of nimble fingers and the wisdom of tactility emanate from Nengudi’s work.

Still images of Maren Hissinger activating Senga Nengudi’s R.S.V.P. Performance Piece, 1977, photographs. Image by Marsha Mack.

Senga Nengudi, R.S.V.P. Performance Piece, 1977 (exhibition copy remade in 2019), nylon, mesh, and sand. Image by Marsha Mack.

R.S.V.P. Performance Piece (1977), which has the look of arms and legs splayed open, presents itself as both receptacle and snare. Activated by Maren Hissinger, the dialog between body and sculpture captures the asymmetrical lyricism of Japanese Kabuki theatre and Yoruba mythology that often informs Senga’s works. [2] The looming, arachnid-like sculpture, displayed close to the ground, is utterly daunting. Its potential for motion is augmented by the stills of performative activation by Hissinger, where the once unapproachable is rendered intelligible.

Senga Nengudi with collaborators Maren Hissinger, Ulysses Jenkins, and Franklin Parker, Flying , 1982, still from a digital slideshow. Image by Marsha Mack.

Rounding the corner through Topologies, viewers learn about Nengudi’s involvement founding Studio Z, a collective of Black artists in Los Angeles in the 1970s. This section highlights the central role of collaboration in her free-flowing practice. Ethereal, fleeting, and experienced by a select few, documentation of Studio Z performing rituals under freeways or crawling on the ground in the dark feels particularly impactful—and perceptibly magical—when brought into the context of today’s increasingly digital world. Though out of sight to most, the members of Studio Z created new meanings in hidden or forgotten locations with ornately fashioned ritual costumes and adornments, improvised ceremonies, and blessings that harnessed euphoria.

By returning to the body, expanding its boundaries beyond the individual and into shared space, and privileging movement and intuition and each tiny moment as things of true value, Senga Nengudi’s pioneering works were a breakthrough in the 1970s and remain vital today. Opening on the heels of a year that crashed and burned into the history books, Senga Nengudi’s Topologies exhibit offers us individual and cultural transformative potential for 2021.

Marsha Mack is a visual artist living and working in Denver, CO. She holds an MFA in ceramics and a Certificate of Advanced Study in Women's and Gender Studies from Syracuse University, and a BFA in ceramics from San Francisco State University. She is the Associate Director of David B. Smith Gallery in Denver, CO, and is a ceramic instructor at the Washington Heights Art center in Lakewood, CO and Foothills Park & Recreation District in Littleton, CO.

[1] Bradley, R., “Transferred Flesh: Reflections on Senga Nengudi's ‘R.S.V.P.’” TDR, 59 (1), 2015: 161-166. Retrieved January 4, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/24585061.

[2] Peabody, R.,"African American Avant-Gardes, 1965-1990.” Getty Research Journal, (1), 2009: 211-217. Retrieved January 4, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/23005379.