Galleries of Contemporary Art to open Senga Nengudi exhibit

The Galleries of Contemporary Art will open “Senga Nengudi: Improvisational Gestures” Aug. 28 in Centennial Hall.

The exhibit will be in place until Dec. 5 and is part of the university’s 50^th anniversary celebration.

Nengudi is a longtime former Department of Visual and Performing Arts faculty member who is widely acknowledged for her performance and multi-media work. The exhibition is co-curated by Elissa Auther Windgate Research Curator, Museum of Arts and Design and Bard Graduate Center, New York, and Nora Burnett Abrams, curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver. Auther is a former UCCS faculty member.

The exhibition surveys Nengudi’s sculptures, performances, video and related works from the 1970s to the present. A catalog dedicated to Nengudi’s work will be co-published by GOCA and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver.

Nengudi’s career emerged in Los Angeles in the mid-1970s and she is largely associated with other avant-garde black artists from that period.. She developed a style melding the body in movement with the use of common, everyday materials in a series of collaborative performances with her artist peers, including Maren Hassinger, Ulysses Jenkins, Franklin Parker, Houston Conwill, David Hammons and Barbara McCullough. Nengudi’s approach to art is inspired by and rooted in ritualistic performances from a wide range of sources including traditional African ceremonies, Japanese Kabuki Theater, events of the 1960s and other forms of modern dance. These cultural forms and rituals are at the root of Nengudi’s practice as a performance artist.

Nengudi is known for her abstract sculptures activated through performance, particularly her biomorphic nylon mesh series, “Respondez s’il vous plait” (1975 to the present). The sculptures are made from pantyhose that the artist stretches, twists, and knots, and fills with sand and other found material.

Nengudi moved to Colorado Springs in the early 1990s and was a lecturer in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts from 1998 to 2009. Select recent solo and group exhibitions include “Senga Nengudi: Alt,” White Cube Gallery, London (2014); “Senga Nengudi: The Material Body,” at MCA, Denver (2014) and “Senga Nengudi: The Performing Body” at Redline Gallery, Denver (2014); “Senga Nengudi: Performances 1976-1981” at Thomas Erben Gallery, (2013); “Blues for Smoke,” Whitney Museum of American Art, (2013); and “Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles 1960-1980,” MoMA PS1, (2011).

The exhibition, catalog publication and related events are generously supported by the UCCS Chancellor’s Office, the CU President’s Fund for the Humanities, and UCCS Galleries of Contemporary Art.

GOCA is a contemporary arts organization with two galleries, one founded on the UCCS campus in 1981 and a satellite downtown location opened in 2010 in the Plaza of the Rockies building.