KELLY BAUM: I think the first thing to know about Raw Attraction is that it's made of castoff materials that the artist collects from a variety of sites in her local environment.

NARRATOR: Chakaia Booker works with a number of different materials—in this case it is the rubber from used tires. She cut, shredded, and reassembled them into a form that might recall a predatory bird, or some other kind of animal. Curator Kelly Baum.

KELLY BAUM: I think you can read the materials in a variety of ways. On the one hand they might appear soft, even, organic, alive, slightly inviting. But on the other hand, they convey, through their allusions to spines and needles, a sense of threat and possible danger.

NARRATOR: While some call attention to the black color of the tires as perhaps symbolic of Booker’s racial identity, the artist has described other connections.

KELLY BAUM: Booker herself is more interested in the symbolic resonance of rubber, which she associates with travel, transit, and movement. And many art historians have connected her use of the tire to New Jersey; to the place where she was born and raised. New Jersey is a state in which areas of great natural beauty exist alongside endless miles of highways and desolate scenes of post-industrial destruction.

NARRATOR: The color black also recalls Louise Nevelson’s found object sculptures—like Mrs. N’s Palace, on display nearby—and Booker has identified her as an important influence.

Raw Attraction also bears an interesting relationship to Abstract Expressionist paintings.

KELLY BAUM: It does not involve the application of paint to a canvas with a brush, so it's not conventionally gestural or expressive. But it does explode, and it does blossom in ways that convey a sense of dynamism and energy, that you can compare to a work like Jackson Pollock’s.