URI McMILLAN

SAND, NYLON, AND DIRT

Stretched to infinity, a sensuous simulacrum biomorphic qualities that are both grotesque

URI MCMILLAN
of the physical body. An amalgamation of and beautiful. They speak to the endurance of
nylon mesh and sand, mimicking ruptured and the human body—and, in particular, the female
distended flesh. Liquid and porous, an abstract body—in its physical transformations.”2 They
gesture of becoming. Lithe and elegant, like the were first shown in New York City in March 1977
lines of the body of the dancer who created it or in Répondez S’il Vous Plaît, Nengudi’s first New
of the other performer who gesticulated inside it. York solo exhibition, at Linda Goode Bryant’s
Pull its delicate gauzy strips with your fingertips, pioneering Just Above Midtown Gallery (JAM), at
remaining open to their lingering invitation, for 50 West Fifty-seventh Street, where Hassinger
they desire not simply to be seen, but to be and Nengudi also performed as dual dancing
exquisitely felt. bodies that became entangled with Nengudi’s
sculptures.3 A space dedicated to, in Bryant’s
words, “the promotion and sale of Afro-American
Here I describe the series R.S.V.P., 1975–77, Art on a quantitative and qualitative level with the
African American visual artist Senga Nengudi’s present dominant western art productions,” JAM
(b. 1943) inventive set of sculptures and primarily exhibited abstract work by black artists,
performance pieces that made use of her best- usually in solo shows, with occasional group
known material, used nylon pantyhose (figs. 33, exhibitions. Faced with a steep rent increase, JAM
34). The sculptures, as Nengudi’s artist statement relocated in 1977 to 178 Franklin Street in Tribeca,
from the late 1970s says, were “abstracted where it joined like-minded alternative art spaces
reflections of used bodies” influenced by her downtown before closing in 1986.4 The gallery was
experience with motherhood and “the elasticity instrumental in introducing Los Angeles–based
of the human body.”1 As Connie H. Choi black artists, including Nengudi and sculptor-
has written, “Stretched, filled, knotted, and dancer Maren Hassinger (b. 1947)—both featured
pulled, the stockings in the series . . . assume in We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical
48. Senga Nengudi (American, b. 1943). R.S.V.P. I, 1977/2003. 49. Senga Nengudi. Inside/Outside, 1977. Nylon, mesh, rubber,
Pantyhose and sand, 10 pieces, overall dimensions variable. approx. 60 x 24 in. (152.4 x 61 cm). Brooklyn Museum; Gift
The Museum of Modern Art, New York: Committee on Painting of Burt Aaron, the Council for Feminist Art, and the Alfred T.
and Sculpture Funds, and The Friends of Education of The White Fund, 2011.21
Museum of Modern Art, 857.2011
no. 163

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Women, 1965–85—and conceptual artist David

SAND, NYLON, AND DIRT

Hammons (b. 1943), to the art-world denizens of
New York City, as evinced by the Studio Museum
in Harlem’s presentation of California Black
Artists (1977), in which Nengudi was included.5
In her artist statement from the late
1970s–early 1980s, Nengudi noted her incipient
interest in the agitprop and time-based medium
of performance art, building on her knowledge
of Happenings in the late 1950s and 1960s,
as her “sculptures then became my props and
costumes.”6 Yet, this interest in her sculptures
as a performance-based “experience” or “event”
can be perceived earlier in photographs, such
as those of her frequent collaborator Hassinger
dancing inside Nengudi’s works at the Pearl C.
Woods Gallery, at 1938 South Western Avenue,
in Los Angeles in May 1977 (fig. 35).7 Both
Hassinger’s and Nengudi’s ambitions to become
professional dancers were thwarted, leading each
to the medium of sculpture instead.8 And Nengudi
would return to JAM, then in Tribeca, on the
evening of February 7, 1981, to perform Air Propo,
a collaborative performance with musician-
composer Butch Morris and dancer Cheryl Banks 50. Senga Nengudi. Performance Piece—Nylon Mesh and Maren 51. Senga Nengudi. Air Propo, 1981. 35mm slide (documentation 52. Poster for Air Propo, 1981. Photocopy, African American

URI MCMILLAN
Hassinger, 1977. 35mm slide (documentation of performance). of performance). African American Performance Art Archive Performance Art Archive
(fig. 36, 37), as noted in a press release (fig. African American Performance Art Archive
38) written by then intern Lorraine O’Grady (b.
1934; represented in We Wanted a Revolution).9
Coincidentally, O’Grady, a conceptual artist in her work refuses to coalesce into fully known or everyday life, but also “atomized and particular Experimental and provisional, these gestures are
own right, would debut her own performance at categorical entities.12 In my opening description movements” that imagine alternative futures “minoritarian tendencies” that stage the subtle
JAM as Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, 1980–83, her irate of the R.S.V.P. series above, I briefly tune in to the and freedoms, especially in their transmission shifts that initiate change, a minor key that alters
debutante avatar and art-world instigator (fig. frequencies of the affective and the haptic (in of “ephemeral knowledge of lost queer histories the structure of the major from within. If the minor
39). Thus, Nengudi, along with her peers O’Grady other words, that which is unseen but felt and/or and possibilities within a phobic majoritarian gesture is “out of time, untimely, rhythmically
and abstract painter Howardena Pindell (b. 1943; accessed via touch when encountering Nengudi’s public culture.” Both Muñoz and Rodríguez argue inventing its own pulse,” its perceived wildness,
also represented in the exhibition), gravitated artworks), deliberately focusing on the “new that gestures are not immaterial and therefore flux, and indeterminacy means that its value often
toward the ephemeral mode of performance art, aesthetic sensations” that the artworks provoke, antithetical to the archive because of their goes unrecognized, since “it is no doubt difficult
embracing its ambivalent status as both an action particularly their reach toward “an alternative ephemerality. Rather, they suggest, scholars to value that which has little perceptible form,
and a work of art, to stage both impromptu acts mode of sensuality, of corporeal inhabitation and attempting to recover moods and feelings of that which has not yet quite been invented, let
for bystanders—what Franklin Sirmans might call experience,” to quote Rizvana Bradley.13 In this bodies no longer present need new tools of alone defined. And so the minor gesture often
“social sculpture”—and carefully orchestrated sense, we can conceive of the artworks as what analysis that recognize how gestures resist goes by unperceived, its improvisational threads
events for art-world audiences on both the East recent scholarship has termed “minor gestures.” official modes of documentation and persist and of variability overlooked, despite their being in our
and West Coasts.10 In short, Nengudi’s (and The use of the term “gesture” in this essay perform meanings long after their evaporation.14 midst.”15 “Quintessentially abstract gesture[s] of
Hassinger’s) collective challenge to the Western references scholarship in queer performance Minor gestures, as philosopher Erin experimental black aesthetics” (to quote Bradley),
sculpture canon lay not simply in her use of studies, especially the work of José Esteban Manning has discussed, embrace the uncertainty Nengudi’s sculptures and performance works are
discarded or industrial materials, but also in Muñoz and Juana María Rodríguez, that of that which is not yet fully formed or legible such minor gestures, as are artworks by her West
her emphasis on using embodied practices, or emphasizes how embodied practices—be it in thought rather than the certainty of knowing. Coast peers such as Hammons and, especially,
corporeal behaviors that transfer knowledge those enacted on dance floors or those inherent Minor gestures create sites of dissonance, staging Hassinger, in their use of Post-Minimalism and
through the body—specifically dance—to activate, in sexual exchanges—are not only rehearsals disturbances that open new vistas of thought performance to eschew the representational,
enhance and complement them.11 Still, Nengudi’s for behaviors performed on the stages of and hence create new modes of perception. didactic, or explicitly political.16 Hence, their

100 101
 53. Just Above Midtown press release for Senga Nengudi, Vestige 54. Lorraine O’Grady (American, b. 1934). Mlle Bourgeoise Noire
and Air Propo, January 17, 1981. Just Above Midtown Archive Costume, 1980. Costume made from white gloves. The Eileen
Harris Norton Collection, Santa Monica, California
no. 188
no. 199

102 103
 55a–l. Blondell Cummings (American, 1944–2015). Chicken Soup,
1981. Video, color, sound; 16 min., 3 sec. New York Live Arts
no. 194

104 105
works often failed to satisfy the imperatives to include artists of all races, JAM published a work of black women artists, in which Nengudi

SAND, NYLON, AND DIRT

of “black art” or, in the case of Hassinger and quarterly magazine, B Culture, which offered participated. Artist, art historian, collector, and
Nengudi, “feminist art,” vibrating to the “nuanced “an innovative alternative for the presentation academic Samella Lewis’s (b. 1924; also included
rhythms of the minor” key rather than the overt of artwork and related social commentary, a in We Wanted a Revolution) string of galleries,
note of the major.17 Prioritizing experimentation crossfire of ideas in an eccentric, eclectic, and meanwhile, culminated in her opening of the
over solidity or coherence, Nengudi—solo or visually challenging format.” Its contributors, still-extant Museum of African American Art in
in collaboration with Hassinger and/or their in the premiere issue in 1986, included Thulani 1976, the same year she founded Black Art: An
friends—staged experiential works that blurred Davis, Greg Tate, Lisa Jones, Ntozake Shange, International Quarterly in Los Angeles.26
distinctions between taut aesthetic categories, and Fishbone no. 184 . Meanwhile, the JAM Still, black women artists faced a unique
creating, for instance, performance works that Laboratory Program was “designed to encourage situation of multiple exclusions. If galleries were
merged sculpture with environment, gesture, and experimentation in the arts through the provision largely unaware of their work, it was also often not
the realm of the social. The two were practicing of facilities for development and presentation of supported by their white contemporaries or by the
a form of relational aesthetics, though neither new works in all media.” Hassinger and Hammons Women’s Movement, highlighting the “exclusions
artist is ever considered part of that movement.18 participated in the program in June 1986, and in feminism itself.”27 In the case of artists such as
“Artists like Hassinger, [Houston] Conwill, Cummings was included in “Retakes” (fig. 40), Hassinger and Nengudi, this marginalization was
Hammons, and Nengudi,” Kellie Jones remarks, “a dance series focused on the cumulative compounded by the fact that their work wasn’t
“pushed their work into the place between the development of new work by five choreographers” black or feminist enough for those respective
tangible and the intangible, the solid and the in late 1985 to mid-1986. Peter Rose, one of the movements, as it eschewed explicitly political
formless, where performance became ritual and founders of Performance Space 122 (founded format and gravitated instead toward abstraction,
one thing became another.”19 1979) performed previews of “Diamond Fever” Post-Minimalism, and performance. Thus, it was
This essay focuses on the collaborations there, and New York–based choreographer Jane noteworthy when Hassinger exhibited sculptures
of Nengudi and Hassinger, considering these Comfort debuted her piece “TV Love.” In March and executed one of her first performances,
two Southern California–based black women 1986 JAM hosted a four-week series called “Loud High Noon, at Los Angeles’s ARCO Center for
artists as minor figures, and perhaps “lost Talkin’ and Signifyin’” to explore the range of Visual Art in 1976 and eventually held a solo
bodies,” in the history of art—obscure footnotes the “rap esthetic.”23 If minor in prominence 56. Senga Nengudi. Rapunzel, 1981. Gelatin silver print show called Dangerous Ground at the Los

URI MCMILLAN
(documentation of performance), 40 × 30 in. (101.6 × 76.2
in dominant narratives of contemporary art and or name recognition, JAM—like the artists it cm). Courtesy of the artist, Lévy Gorvy Gallery, New York, and
Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in 1981,
contemporary Los Angeles culture as well as represented—harnessed its position to initiate Thomas Erben Gallery, New York becoming the first African American woman
the histories of sculpture, dance, performance major statements in the arts, supporting emerging no. 168 artist to have a solo exhibition there. After all,
art, abstraction, and social practice who artists in performance and dance, developing as Nengudi notes, “It was such a challenge
nonetheless initiated, from the margins, major collector bases for African American art (through getting into major galleries or museums. We were
Active in the 1950s, Eleven Associated, at 1046
rethinking of those categories’ tenets.20 As a its “Brunch with JAM” series, for instance), and usually relegated to the community room, which
South Hill Street, a co-op gallery representing
gallery especially committed to noncommercial, serving as a site for community forums and was pretty much in the basement. We had our
African American artists and one Asian American
nonrepresentational styles, JAM is a minor figure discussions.24 ‘rooms.’ So Maren’s shows at ARCO and LACMA
member, watercolor painter and illustrator
in these histories as well, serving a “critical The marginalization of black artists, were major breakthroughs.”28 Yet when she and
Tyrus Wong, was one product of this exclusion.
role in the history of avant-garde practices especially black women artists, by the art assemblage artist Betye Saar (b. 1926; included
In the 1960s and 1970s, owing to racial and
by black artists.”21 Its eclectic mission was world cannot be overemphasized, as their work in We Wanted a Revolution) had solo shows in
class strictures excluding them from museums
instrumental in supporting black women artists continues to receive a paucity of criticism. Los Los Angeles simultaneously (Saar at the Baum/
and the art world cognoscenti in Los Angeles,
such as Nengudi and Hassinger, as well as Angeles–based artists in the 1960s and 1970s, Silverman Gallery, at 170 South La Brea Avenue),
African American artists began opening their
Blondell Cummings (b. 1944; also included in as Kellie Jones notes, hoped to partake in the reviewers made it a point to emphasize that fact,
own venues for exhibiting the work of their peers.
We Wanted a Revolution), who wanted to take “role of the West as a site of possibility, peace, underscoring identity at the expense, Hassinger
These included Brockman Gallery, at 4334
risks without fear of institutional scrutiny or and utopia” but often were faced with vestiges felt, of a rigorous interrogation of the work itself.
Degnan Boulevard, founded by brothers Alonzo
lack of financial support. In Catherine Morris of spatial segregation and economic inequality, “It certainly is a coincidence,” the Los Angeles
and Dale Davis in 1967, and Gallery 32, at 672
and Rujeko Hockley’s words, “JAM was a home, including substandard housing and racially Times art critic William Wilson remarked in
South Lafayette Park Place, founded by painter
a safe space. It was a place to establish one’s restrictive covenants limiting where black his review of both shows no. 155 , “that Baum/
Suzanne Jackson in 1967. Gallery 32, though
voice and present experimental work that took families could live. Largely neglected by the Silverman and LACMA’s contemporary Gallery Six
open for only two years, hosted cutting-edge
cultural hybridity, material experimentation, mainstream art world, black artists in Southern each hold exhibitions by artists who happen to be
exhibitions, including the 1970 Sapphire Show:
and black female subjectivity as a vital and California had to craft their own relationship both black and women. If that circumstance takes
You’ve Come a Long Way Baby, reportedly the
legitimate topic for art-making.”22 Eventually to it, staging art exhibitions around pools, in on any significance, it is evidence that nobody
first exhibition in Los Angeles focusing on the
becoming a nonprofit and widening its focus homes, and in garages in the 1950s and 1960s.25 has to conform to stereotype.”29 The struggle of

106 107
 57a–d. Stills from Senga Nengudi (American, born 1943).
Ceremony for Freeway Fets, 1978. Chromogenic prints
(documentation of performance), each 12 x 18 in.
(30.5 x 45.7 cm). Courtesy of the artist, Lévy Gorvy Gallery,
New York, and Thomas Erben Gallery , New York

108 109
black women artists to attain access into the

SAND, NYLON, AND DIRT

white cube of the gallery or museum—except,
as Alma Thomas (1891–1978) wryly remarked,
to clean it—may suggest why Nengudi and her
Southern California compatriots decided that
“breaking through the white cube and connecting
with the rest of humanity” would become their
modus operandi, as they moved to the street and
sought to connect with what Tina Campt calls the
“exceptional texture of black life.”30
If, as Rizvana Bradley states, “blackness
occupies space differently,” then it is perhaps
telling that artists in the Studio Z collective
(based in David Hammons’s studio on Slauson
Avenue, formerly a dance hall), including
Hammons, Nengudi, and Hassinger, envisioned
aesthetic possibility, cosmic richness, and a
black quotidian in the derelict and decrepit sites
of urban decay and economic devastation.31
Located in freeway underpasses, marginalized
neighborhoods, empty pools, abandoned
buildings, and construction sites in Los Angeles,
Nengudi and Hassinger’s collaborations with
fellow Studio Z members and with each other
utilized aesthetic experimentation in order to 58. Announcement for “Flying,” 1982. Photocopy, 8 1/2 × 11 in. Rebellion filmmaker Barbara McCullough (b. 59. Flying, 1982. 35mm slide. African American Performance

URI MCMILLAN
(21.5 x 28 cm). African American Performance Art Archive Art Archive
(paraphrasing Amelia Jones) rename and remark 1945; included in We Wanted a Revolution),
urban spaces demarcated as noncultural and whose 59-minute experimental film Shopping
otherwise “dead.”32 For example, Hassinger recalls MAREN HASSINGER: Senga was really Bag Spirits and Freeway Fetishes: Reflections difficulty and the complexity of its relationship
how “a sense of improvisation and play was instrumental in finding these crazy spaces, on Ritual Space,1979, documented some of these to its context,” while “questions of form and
always at the core of our process,” describing how collecting us and getting us to jump out of unannounced actions, Rapunzel and other public politics are frequently subsumed in criticism
Nengudi dragged her to peer into a large hole at a windows. I remember this school, a Catholic performances and installations staged by Studio by racial metaphor.”37 Amelia Jones echoes this
demolition site on Wilshire Boulevard where the school, a building that was halfway torn Z members demonstrated the merger of African point, but not without first framing Nengudi’s
Broadway Wilshire once stood. At the time she down but you could still get in it, and Senga diasporic rituals with the “obscure stretches erasure in much more direct terms: “The primary
didn’t understand the purpose of experiencing went up in the window in one of these of Los Angeles’s surreal terrain: decay, desert, explanation for the exclusion of Nengudi’s
these sites, but their obvious influence on her towers and became Rapunzel. and unkempt tropicalia, all bounded by the collaborative performances and this performative
later sculptures (“I made swirling round wire shimmering, futuristic symbols of abundance that sculpture from histories of art and performance
rope pieces”) and on those of Houston Conwill SENGA NENGUDI: They were demolishing the are never too distant.”36 is racism.” She goes on to argue that it is this
(1947–2016), a fellow Studio Z member (“Years building, and I said this couldn’t happen, Nuanced interpretations of Nengudi’s racism toward black and Chicano artists (recalling
later Houston made a cubic hole in the ground it’s been in the community so long. It was a praxis failed to materialize until several decades a LACMA curator’s comment in the 1970s
in Atlanta and filled its shored up sides with Catholic school on Arlington between Pico into her career, and even then, more attention that “Chicanos don’t make art”) that prevents
niches containing secrets”) confirmed a “shared and Venice. It was a wonderful, beautiful was focused on her identity as a black woman critics from being able to see not only work
moment individually interpreted.”33 Meanwhile, brick building.35 artist than on the body of work she created. We with explicitly political content, or motivated by
Pico Boulevard’s significance as both “a line of can look to the difficulty of the work itself as a concerns not recognizable within the “art world’s
demarcation and hidden history of blackness” Nengudi traversed a still-standing tower and conceptual frame for understanding the limits value systems,” but also performers’ bodies that
surfaces in the impromptu performance affixed a long, flowing garment from an open of both interpretation and criticism. After all, as do not register as artistic.38 As a result, Nengudi’s
Rapunzel, 1980, staged at an abandoned school window, its undulating folds a testament, Jennifer Doyle has recently noted, this problem is complex, and sometimes counterintuitive, play
on the verge of demolishment at the corner of perhaps—albeit a precarious and temporary particularly acute for artists of color. The “mere with spiritual ritual, Afro-Asian experimentation,
Pico and Arlington Avenue (fig. 41).34 In Hassinger one—to the bodies that once inhabited the presence of race as an interpretative factor,” she dance and masquerade, narrative, form,
and Nengudi’s words, space. Photographed by UCLA-trained L.A. notes, often results in the elision of the “work’s and feeling prove too difficult for critics to

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comprehend, let alone elaborate and theorize, Bowles argues, our inability to understand

SAND, NYLON, AND DIRT

largely because they do not neatly fall within the the performance and friendships behind the
confines of the work that black artists, and black photographs mirrors the sense of alienation
woman artists specifically, are expected to make. and exclusion from the city’s art institutions
This interpretive dilemma was confirmed even experienced by Nengudi and her collaborators. He
by her fellow black artists in the 1960s, as David suggests that when we acknowledge “the limits
Hammons observes, because Nengudi’s “work of our comprehensions alongside our attempts
was so ‘outrageously’ abstract” that it refused at interpretation” we realize our inability, as
to align itself with incipient notions of black art scholars, to “fully access the significance the
(i.e., as representational, didactic, and expressly work might have had for the circle of friends
political).39 Thus, Nengudi’s interest in universal Nengudi drew together to enact it.”44
ideas—male-female relationships, the aging body, This photographic opaqueness also points
for example—fail to register, echoing how the to the ephemerality of performance as a medium.
colossal projects of thinkers, practitioners, and Photographs are not the performance itself, as
artists who are women of color are often reduced Peggy Phelan noted; they are representations of
to the particularity of their own identities.40 a representation.45 Still, Nengudi’s own interest
The critic’s presumed role in resolving in impermanence is important here, as it aligns
difficulty is compounded further by the fact itself with José Muñoz’s discussion of ephemera
that the very evidentiary documents that would as evidence. Muñoz underlines the importance
seem to be the most transparent—photographs of reconceiving of the trace or residue, what
of past actions, especially showing frequent remains in the wake of a performance, as a type
collaborators Hassinger and Nengudi together— of evidence in itself. A “hermeneutics of residue,”
do not enable full interpretation, either. For he argues, would recognize the “gesture and its
instance, the most widely circulated images aftermath, the ephemeral trace” as a fresh, and
of Nengudi’s work are of her collaborative necessary, form of material evidence.46 In this

URI MCMILLAN
“environmental sculpture” Ceremony for Freeway way, if we cannot, and should not, seek to fully
Fets, April 1978, taken by photographer Roderick know all the details of Nengudi’s performance
Kwaku Young (figs. 42–44). Her first full-length and sculptural work, we should also take note of
work of performance, Ceremony for Freeway Fets that which evades the archive precisely because
was a public art project sponsored by Brockman of its intangibility, housed in the elusive corners
Gallery Productions, Caltrans (Los Angeles’s of memory.
transportation system), and a grant from CETA Friendship, finally, emerges as a powerful
(Comprehensive Educational Training Act). A and sustaining force in the joint and solo work of
one-time event—“a sort of ‘JAM West,’” as Rujeko Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi in Southern
Hockley and Catherine Morris note—performed California, particularly in a time period when
by Nengudi, Hammons, Hassinger, and other institutional support of their work was lacking.
members of the Studio Z collective under a As noted earlier, collaboration was key among
freeway underpass on Pico Boulevard near the Los Angeles–based black artists in the 1970s, as
Los Angeles Convention Center, Ceremony for evinced by the production of work by members of
Freeway Fets drew on African dance idioms and loosely organized black art collectives, including
West and Central African masquerades, with Studio Z; Othervisions Studio, the studio and
costumes designed by Nengudi, “not [as] a strict performance space of video-performance
duplication of African form but a reinvention artist Ulysses Jenkins, eventually a professor
and redeployment for new and different at University of California, Irvine; and lesser-
situations.”41 As art historian John Bowles notes, known entities such as the mural group Los
even Young’s photographs challenge us with Angeles Street Graphics Committee and the
the “paradox of their obvious inscrutability.”42 Black Art Council, a watchdog organization
Photo-documentation does not provide full for LACMA. The formation of art communities
access or interpretive comprehension.43 Moreover, by otherwise marginalized black, Latino, and
60. Harmon Outlaw (American, date of birth unavailable). Senga
Nengudi and Maren Hassinger, 1977. In John P. Bowles, “Side
by Side: Friendship as Critical Practice in the Performance Art
of Senga Nengudi and Maren Hassinger,” Callaloo 39, no. 2
(Spring 2016): 406

112 113
queer artists in Los Angeles in the 1970s were John Bowles argues, was a precondition for for one’s distinct stylistic signature.”52 Moreover, Jones, “To the Max: Energy and Experimentation,”

SAND, NYLON, AND DIRT

in EyeMinded : Living and Writing Contemporary Art
crucial incubi for the support and sharing of their art, and remains integral to the production Nengudi and Hassinger’s bricolage, which I
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 383. For a
work, particularly in the context of the city’s and reception of each artist’s individual work. have discussed throughout this essay, echoed detailed chronology of alternative art spaces in New York
vast spatial geography. In their uniting of like- The intimacy we witness in the photographs, Depression-era black performers’ reimagining of City from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, and specifically
minded individuals based on shared interest, be however, also compels the “art world insider,” he the American West not as distinct and separate JAM, see Julie Ault, “A Chronology of Selected Alternative
Structures, Spaces, Artists’ Groups, and Organizations in
it political and/or an oppositional stance toward argues, to “recognize that prominent galleries, from the urban but, rather, the opposite. Thus,
New York City, 1965–1985,” in Alternative Art New York,
the mainstream art world, these “networked arts museums, and publications are not the only though the West is, as Stephanie Batiste says, 1965–1985, ed. Julie Ault (Minneapolis: University of
communities” in areas like Pasadena, Burbank, spaces of privilege in the art world; that the “an ephemeral concept for African Americans” Minnesota Press, 2002), 39–41.
and East L.A. created friendships and working intimacy of friendship can create another, that often signals ideas of freedom more than Artist David Hammons introduced Nengudi to Linda
relationships with a “texture of cultural relation more critical sort of (counter-)privilege.”49 In actual places, the black identity it produces is Goode Bryant, former education director at the Studio
Museum in Harlem, when Nengudi lived in New York City.
specific to L.A.”47 Countering the figure of the this way, we can interpret such photographs of “indeed expansionist, escapist, and idealistic, She lived in East Harlem from 1971 until 1974, before returning
solitary “genius” artist, usually white and male, Hassinger, Nengudi, and their friends as what but also communal, rooted, and aggressively to Los Angeles. The two had been aware of each other since
Nengudi and Hassinger joined such groups in Tina Campt might call “everyday practices of self-justifying.”53 Recovering and reconsidering the late 1960s (both were included, for instance, in the group
“performances that combined sculpture, dance, refusal,” which turn away from an art-historical Nengudi and Hassinger’s black feminist aesthetic exhibition Sapphire Show: You’ve Come a Long Way Baby at
Gallery 32 in Los Angeles in 1970), and Nengudi’s friendship
theater, music, and more with the collaborative canon loathe to include these artists: instead, interventions, then, requires recognizing with Hammons was sparked in 1972 when he, Betye Saar,
spirit of community meetings and the avant- they allude to shared moments of conviviality alternative revolutionary gestures that, in lieu of a Dan Concholar, and several other artists were guests briefly
garde brio of Allan Kaprow’s happenings.”48 and care and hint at gossip and other insider raised fist, use sand and dirt, friendship and used in Nengudi’s 118th Street apartment. Active as artists on
The participation of black women artists in West information that relates to the ephemerality of pantyhose, as the grounds for a new grammar of both coasts, Hammons and Nengudi would repeatedly switch
studio spaces in New York and Los Angeles with each other
Coast–based art groups mirrored East Coast the repertoire rather than the permanence of the feeling and being.
into the 1980s. See O. Donald Odita, “The Unseen, Inside
feminist practices of consciousness-raising archive.50 As I have remarked elsewhere, “The Out: The Life and Art of Senga Nengudi,” Nka: Journal of
circles, feminist collectives (such as Heresies), radical reciprocity of friendship can serve as a Contemporary African Art, nos. 6–7 (Summer–Fall 1997): 25;
feminist co-op galleries (such as A.I.R.), and platform for an art praxis” that is deeply engaged and “Chronology,” in Yasar, Senga Nengudi, 88.

all-women exhibitions (such as Dialectics of in mutual support, “as art and friendship NOTES 5. Nengudi contributed three sculptures to the exhibition
Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women are delicately intertwined and mutually California Black Artists: RSVP XI, 1977; Hanging on Winter,
Artists of the United States, curated by Ana transformative.” 51 1. See Senga Nengudi, “Artist’s Statement, Late 1970s,” in 1977; and RSVP XII, 1977. See California Black Artists, exh.

URI MCMILLAN
Mendieta [1948–1985; represented in We Wanted Senga Nengudi, ed. Begum Yasar, exh. cat. (New York: cat. (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 1977), unpaged.
• Dominique Lévy Gallery, 2015), 81. Maren Hassinger’s first solo New York exhibition, Beach,
a Revolution] and featuring Nengudi and others) occurred at JAM in the winter of 1980, and Bryant also placed
that were instrumental in developing the careers In conclusion, Senga Nengudi and Maren
2. Connie H. Choi, “Senga Nengudi,” in Now Dig This! Art and her in a multi-artist show in Grand Central Station that year.
of several artists in We Wanted a Revolution, Hassinger’s freewheeling experiments in Black Los Angeles, 1960–1980, ed. Kellie Jones, exh. cat., Coincidentally, Hammons performed at an opening-day
including Lorraine O’Grady and Howardena collaborative performances and performative Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (Los Angeles: University of performance at Beach as well. In 1981, JAM also sponsored

Pindell. In addition, black women artists took sculpture subverted a Minimalist visual language California Press, 2011), 313. Hassinger’s performance Still Wind. Kellie Jones, South of
with sociopolitical content. Refusing Minimalism’s Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s
this one step further, founding organizations 3. Nengudi’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, also called and 1970s (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017), 244,
devoted to their particular concerns—most customary rejection of narrative, the body, or Répondez S'il Vous Plaît, took place in May 1977 at the Pearl 246. Several other black Southern California–based artists
notably “Where We At” Black Women Artists, metaphor, Nengudi and Hassinger injected the C. Woods Gallery. Hassinger also performed with Nengudi participated in JAM’s inaugural exhibition, Synthesis. Kellie
form with unexpected and often overlooked and her sculptures during this exhibition. See “Chronology,” Jones, “Now Dig This! An Introduction,” in Now Dig This!,
which also included several artists in We Wanted in Yasar, Senga Nengudi, 89.
narratives of the everyday. And they often exacted 27. A copy of the advertisement for this exhibition appears
a Revolution, including Faith Ringgold (b. 1930), in Catherine Morris and Rujeko Hockley, eds., We Wanted a
Kay Brown (b. 1932–2012), and Dindga McCannon this electrifying aesthetic intervention through 4. Linda Goode Bryant to Betye Saar, August 27, 1974, Just Above
Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–1985 / A Sourcebook
(b. 1947). the gestural vocabularies of performance. Midtown Archives [no. 156]. In 1977, Bryant included Nengudi
(New York: Brooklyn Museum, 2017), 137.
in the group exhibition The Concept as Art at JAM and wrote
Hassinger and Nengudi’s personal and Ironically, their recurring pivot toward ephemeral
extensively about Nengudi’s work in the exhibition catalogue 6. Senga Nengudi, “Artist’s Statement, Late 1970s, Early 1980s,”
professional affinity is evident in numerous and embodied modes of representation, rejecting Contextures, published in 1978. “Tension, environment, in Yasar, Senga Nengudi, 82.
photographs. These include documentation the march toward figuration so predominant in architecture, atmosphere and emotion,” she noted, “are

of their performances together—such as African American art historiographies, partially prominent elements in the anthropomorphic sculptures of 7. As Ellen Tani notes, “Hassinger has been the primary activator
explains their obscurity in these genealogies. This Senga Nengudi.” See Linda Goode Bryant, “Contextures,” of Nengudi’s work since 1977.” Quoted in Ellen Tani, “What You
Flying, staged at the Los Angeles Municipal in Contextures, ed. Linda Goode Bryant and Marcy S. Missed: Senga Nengudi’s Performed Objects,” in Yasar, Senga
Art Gallery,at 4804 Hollywood Boulevard, in oversight has persisted despite the fact that their Phillips, exh. cat. (New York: Just Above Midtown, 1978), 43. Nengudi, 23.
Barnsdall Art Park, on July 6, 1982, at the opening praxis so explicitly embraces what art historian The “alternative space movement,” Kellie Jones notes in her

of the exhibition Afro-American Abstraction Kobena Mercer terms the “improvisational discussion of the feminist SoHo co-op gallery A.I.R., “found 8. Senga Nengudi, “Excerpt from a letter to Thomas Erben,
aspects of the black vernacular, which selectively parallels with ethnically specific spaces such as the Studio February 15, 1995,” in Yasar, Senga Nengudi, 85.
(figs. 45, 46)—and an image of the two sitting Museum in Harlem, and were created to provide exhibition
together at the Pearl C. Woods Gallery in Los appropriates what is given or found in one’s 9. “Senga Nengudi,” press release, January 17, 1981, Just Above
opportunities for a cadre of artists, in this case women, who
Angeles in 1977 (fig. 47). Their friendship, as environment and transforms it into raw material were denied exposure in the larger mainstream art world.” Midtown Archive no. 190 . In addition to Banks and Morris,
Nengudi’s frequent collaborators included artists Maren

114 115
 Hassinger, Ulysses Jenkins, Franklin Parker, Houston Conwill, in recent scholarship in the humanities, including Manning’s, Collections, circa 1980–1990, MSS 119, Fales Library and Borneo, December 7, 2011, https://eastofborneo.org/articles/

SAND, NYLON, AND DIRT

and David Hammons. Odita, “The Unseen, Inside Out,” 25. is largely in direct dialogue with philosophers Gilles Deleuze Special Collections, New York University, box 2, folder 234. senga-nengudis-ceremony-for-freeway-fets-and-other-los-
For a brief analysis of Air Propo, in relation to Nengudi’s and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and The predecessor to B Culture was Black Currant, a angeles-collaborations/, accessed June 1, 2017; The phrase
oeuvre, see Jessica Bell Brown, “Senga Nengudi: Of Gravity Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University publication produced by Bryant and artist Janet Henry when “exceptional texture of black life” is quoted in Tina M. Campt,
and Grace,” in Yasar, Senga Nengudi, 26. of Minnesota Press, 1987) . My use of Manning’s work in this JAM was located on Franklin Street. See Rujeko Hockley, Listening to Images (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
essay is not to distinguish what she calls minor gestures “Just Above Midtown Gallery,” in Morris and Hockley, 2017 ), 7–8.
10. Franklin Sirmans, “Searching for Mr. Hammons,” in David from what may be called major gestures—that project does Sourcebook, 136.
Hammons: Selected Works, exh. cat. (New York: Zwirner & not interest me here. Rather, my concern is how a figure like 31. Bradley, “Transferred Flesh,” 164.
Wirth, 2006), unpaged ; quoted in Jones, Now Dig This!, 241. Senga Nengudi gets occluded from histories of art for reasons 24. Tony Whitfield, “Interview with Linda Goode Bryant,” originally
For more on histories of performance art staged by black very similar to what Manning articulates above. published in Artist and Influence: The Journal of Black 32. Jones, “Lost Bodies,” 158.
women, see Uri McMillan, Embodied Avatars: Genealogies American Cultural History 13 (1994); reprinted in Morris and
of Black Feminist Art and Performance (New York: New York 16. Bradley, “Transferred Flesh,” 165. Hockley, Sourcebook, 159. 33. Maren Hassinger, “Manifesto” ; quoted in John P. Bowles,
University Press, 2015). “Side by Side: Friendship as Critical Practice in the
17. Manning, The Minor Gesture, 1. 25. Jones, South of Pico, 3, 9–10, 13–14. Performance Art of Senga Nengudi and Maren Hassinger,”
11. Thus, I concur with Jessica Bell Brown: “For performance Callaloo 39, no. 2 (Spring 2016): 415.
activates the potential of Nengudi’s sculptures to appear as 18. Relational aesthetics, a term coined by French art critic and 26. See Jones, “Introduction,” in Now Dig This! Lewis and
more than proxy-bodies in distress.” Brown, “Senga Nengudi curator Nicolas Bourriaud in his 1998 book of the same name Yale-trained art historian Judith Wilson, who taught at the 34. Jones, South of Pico, 15.
,” 29. My description of embodied practices recalls Diana (Esthétique relationnelle), refers to artistic practices that University of California, Irvine , were largely responsible for
take the creation of social relationships as their focus and documenting the Los Angeles black art scene during this 35. Finkel, “Q&A: Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi.”
Taylor’s definition of performance as “vital acts of transfer,
transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of hence perceive the viewer’s participation in these socially time period.
36. Stillman, “Senga Nengudi’s ‘Ceremony for Freeway Fets.’”
identity through reiterated” behaviors. See Diana Taylor, constructed environments as the subject of the art itself. In
The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory the United States, as Claire Bishop notes, “this expanded 27. Jones, “Lost Bodies,” 120. Both Nengudi and Hassinger
37. Doyle, Hold It against Me, 94, 95.
in the Americas (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), field of post-studio practices” emphasizing the artist as a participated in feminist- oriented exhibitions and were
2. For an introduction to embodied behaviors as an object producer of situations (rather than a producer of discrete contacted by feminist artists active at the Woman’s Building
38. Jones, “Lost Bodies,” 161.
of analysis, see Taylor, Performance (Durham, N.C.: Duke objects) and the spectator as a co-producer or participant, (Nengudi served on several committees), though, in Nengudi’s
University Press, 2016). goes under several names, including (most recently) “social words, “We were included in [the feminist movement] as a 39. Kellie Jones, “David Hammons,” interview,
practice.” See her Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the necessity.” Nengudi was included in Secrets and Revelations: Real Life Magazine, no. 16 (Autumn 1986): 2.
12. In fact, as art historian Amelia Jones notes, the “hybrid, Politics of Spectatorship (New York: Verso, 2012), 1, 2. African-American Women Artists, a feminist-themed show,
performative and boundary crossing nature” of performance I am thinking here of Jennifer Doyle’s thoughts on the albeit of all black women, in 1979 at the Pearl C. Woods 40. I paraphrase this point from Alexander G. Weheliye , Habeas
work by Nengudi and her colleagues, as well as by the LA- irony that so much art associated with relational aesthetics Gallery in Los Angeles. In addition, Hassinger was included Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black
based Chicano art collective ASCO, precluded its absorption is so dry, often to the exclusion of work dealing with love in a feminist-oriented show, curated by Arlene Raven, titled Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, N.C.: Duke

URI MCMILLAN
into exhibitions and texts that surfaced at the height of and friendship, and focused almost solely on work done in At Home: A Celebration of a Decade of Feminist Art in University Press, 2014), 22.
multiculturalism in the 1990s, when more artists of color museums, as well as her observation that even the most Southern California, at the Long Beach Museum of Art in
enjoyed a brief moment of visibility in the mainstream art visible artists of color are too often not seen as representative 1983. Still, as the only black women invited to participate in 41. Morris and Hockley, “Revolutionary Hope,” 22; Jones, South
market. As a result, when coupled with the scant archive of of the decades in which they work, as evidenced by Adrian the latter show, Nengudi and Hassinger enacted a “protest of Pico, 207. As Amelia Jones notes, if part of the power of
Nengudi’s works, as well as her own lack of interest in the Piper’s exclusion from conversations about relational performance,” called the Spooks Who Sat by the Door, on Ceremony for Freeway Fets—like that of ASCO’s art actions—
permanence of her materials, the artist’s oeuvre remains aesthetics. See Doyle, Hold It against Me: Difficulty and the steps of the entry to the exhibition. In Nengudi’s words, was a “kind of opulent, theatrical immersion—literally—into
largely unknown. Jones, “Lost Bodies: Early 1970s Los Emotion in Contemporary Art (Durham, N.C.: Duke University “We wore white sheets over our selves like ghost [sic] and we the sub-street-level bowels of this freeway-ribboned city,”
Angeles Performance Art in Art History,” in Live Art in LA: Press, 2013), 169, 97. held up products with Black stereotypes such as Aunt Jemima Nengudi and her interlocutors in Studio Z importantly also
Performance in Southern California, 1970–1983, ed. Peggy and Uncle Ben rice and stood there in silence. They didn’t chose to “re-write LA as a potentially open network where
Phelan (New York: Routledge, 2012), 161. 19. Jones, South of Pico, 257. get it. Once again we were invisible.” Senga Nengudi, email new forms of culture, rituals with African themes as imagined
interview by Amelia Jones, October 2009; quoted in Jones, by Nengudi and her colleagues, could be enacted.” See Jones,
13. Rizvana Bradley, “Transferred Flesh: Reflections on Senga 20. The phrase “lost bodies” is from Amelia Jones’s essay “Lost Bodies,” 126, 127. “Lost Bodies,” 156, 158.
Nengudi’s R.S.V.P.,” TDR: The Drama Review 59, no. 1 cited above. I invoke it here since I share Jones’s concerns
(Spring 2015): 165. that artists whose performance remains are not housed in 28. Jori Finkel, “Q&A: Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi,” Los 42. Bowles, “Side by Side,” 411.
archives, or presented in exhibitions via documentation, Angeles Times, November 27, 2011, http://articles.latimes.
14. See José Esteban Muñoz , Cruising Utopia: The Then and become lost bodies written out of important cultural and com/2011/nov/27/entertainment/la-ca-pst-kellie-jones- 43. Tina Campt reiterates this point, suggesting that we “‘listen to’
There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University artistic histories, in this case histories of 1970s Los Angeles interview-20111127, accessed June 1, 2017. rather than simply ‘look at’” photographs—precisely because
Press, 2009), 67. Rodríguez, meanwhile, notes that gestures art and performance. As a result, these histories become of our assumption that vision equals knowledge. Instead, she
can be “literal—actual movements of the body—or figurative, understood via integral, but already canonized historical implores us to engage photography through other sensory
gestures that reach out to manipulate how energy and matter figures, at the expense of lesser-known but equally 29. William Wilson, “Art Review: Of Cables and Collages in Artists’ registers—such as sound and touch—in order to inaugurate
flow in the world.” Yet, in relationship to queerness, gestures important artists. Wonderland,” Los Angeles Times, May 27, 1981 no. 157 . a “practice of looking beyond what we see and attuning our
are especially important for animating “how bodies move in senses to the other affective frequencies through which
the world” and, as a mode of critique, for revealing how a 21. Catherine Morris and Rujeko Hockley, “Revolutionary 30. Specifically, painter Alma Thomas notes, often “the only photographs register.” Campt, Listening to Images, 6, 9.
“cascade of everyday actions is capable of altering political Hope: Landmark Writings, 1965–85,” in Morris and Hockley, way to get in there [the museum] as a Negro would be with
life.” See Juana María Rodríguez, Sexual Futures, Queer Sourcebook, 22. a mop and bucket to wash and scrub something.” Quoted 44. Bowles, “Side by Side,” 414.
Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (New York: New York in Kellie Jones, “It’s Not Enough to Say ‘Black is Beautiful’:
22. Ibid. Abstraction at the Whitney, 1969–1974 ,” in Jones, EyeMinded, 45. See Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance
University Press, 2014), 4, 2, 5.
413; the quote “breaking through the white cube” is from Nick (New York: Routledge, 1996), especially the chapter
15. Erin Manning, The Minor Gesture (Durham, N.C.: Duke 23. Quotations and information about JAM programs in this Stillman, telephone interview with Senga Nengudi, May 2011, “The Ontology of Performance: Representation without
University Press, 2016), 1–2. The turn toward considering paragraph are from materials in the folder “Just Above quoted in Nick Stillman, “Senga Nengudi’s ‘Ceremony for Reproduction,” 146–66.
“the minor,” such as “becoming-minor” or a “minor literature,” Midtown/Downtown” in the Downtown Flyers and Invitations Freeway Fets’ and Other Los Angeles Collaborations,” East of

116 117
46. See Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 71, 81.

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47. Jones, “Lost Bodies,” 124.

48. Stillman, “Senga Nengudi’s ‘Ceremony for Freeway Fets.’”

49. Bowles, “Side by Side,” 411.

50. Campt, Listening to Images, 4.

51. Simone Leigh, Chitra Ganesh, and Uri McMillan, “Alternative

Structures: Aesthetics, Imagination, and Radical Reciprocity:
An Interview with GIRL,” in “Queer Form,” special issue,
ASAP/Journal 2, no. 2 (May 2017 ): 246, 242.

52. Kobena Mercer , “Diaspora Aesthetics and Visual Culture,”

in Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance
and Popular Culture, ed. Harry J. Elam Jr. and Kennell Jackson
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005); reprinted in
Travel & See: Black Diaspora Art Practices since the 1980s
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), 233–34.

53. Stephanie Leigh Batiste , Darkening Mirrors: Imperial

Representation in Depression-Era African American
Performance (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 30.

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