Chakaia Booker: material matters: with a mid-career survey currently on view and a show opening this month at Storm King Art Center in New York, the sculptor best known for her decade-long use of rubber tires is receiving attention for the conceptual breadth of her work

Over the past several years, Chakaia Booker has garnered significant acclaim for sculptures made primarily from rubber tires. The 50-year-old artist and self-proclaimed "Rubber Queen" began using her trademark material in the mid-1990s, and has since recycled countless cast-away Goodyears and Firestones into highly expressive sculptures on both modest and monumental scales. A mid-career retrospective of Booker's work has been mounted by the Jersey City Museum in the artist's native Garden State. Organized by associate curator Recio Aranda-Alvarado, the show essentially offers a chronological surrey of Booker's production to date, beginning with various craft-based works of the 1980s and ending with recent baroque, black rubber abstractions, many more of which were shown at the Marlborough Gallery in Chelsea in September-October 2003.

Titled "Chakaia Booker: Jersey Ride," the exhibition and its catalogue consider Booker's work to be an esthetic response to the urban landscape of northern New Jersey. While it may be a fact that Booker was born in Newark, raised in East Orange and studied sociology at Rutgers University, this interpretative framework seems somewhat confining for an oeuvre that engages numerous art-historical precedents and broad cultural issues. Moreover, Booker has lived and worked in New York City since 1979. Nevertheless, the artist's use of distressed rubber tires may well resonate with any metropolitan area traversed by major highways and plagued by blight.

Presented in a pair of medium-size galleries, this engrossing exhibition divides 26 works into two discrete groups: paintings, handmade garments and mixed-medium assemblages dating from 1982 to 1994, and a number of rubber sculptures made between 1994 and 2003. The generous selection of early works proves especially instructive, as it charts the development of several distinct sculptural techniques that are synthesized in Booker's mature work. Certain early sculptures also announce Afrocentric themes that are addressed more obliquely in the later abstractions.

Building upon a childhood interest in sewing, Booker began creating elaborate "wearable sculptures" in the 1980s, two of which are featured in the show. Remnant (1991) is a vest lined with yellow silk. Its exterior, by contrast, is completely covered in dried orange rinds stitched to the surface. Displayed under protective glass, this fragile and ephemeral garment counters the durability of Booker's more widely known rubber sculptures. Yet the repetition of the citrus skins reveals that an additive process of construction has long been a tactic in her formal repertoire.

Equally enlightening are the numerous sculptures that Booker assembled from found objects in the early 1990s. Typically constructed from broken wooden furniture, animal bones and pieces of rusted metal, these sculptures demonstrate an impulse to scavenge and recycle urban detritus that remains central to Booker's current work in rubber. Among them is (Untitled) Mask, a 1994 wall relief that combines wooden table legs and easel parts into a narrow, symmetrical form resembling the head of an antelope. Pointing skyward, the table legs suggest a pair of horns while the feet, lathed into small spheres, read as two bulging eyes. Like Picasso before her, Booker appears to draw inspiration from the distorted facial features of West African tribal masks. In her case, however, this mimicry seems less a quotation of formal inventions and more an assertion of African-American identity and its esthetic lineage.

Many critics and curators have claimed that Booker's subsequent tire sculptures also address African-American identity, specifically the black body and its adornment. The myriad shades of rubber found in these works--which include muddy grays, dark browns and blacks tinted with blues and greens--are often compared to the wide range of African-American skin tones. The repeating, geometric patterns of the tire treads have likewise been linked to traditional African textiles and scarification rituals. Uninitiated viewers of Booker's most recent sculptures, which largely suppress figurative references in favor of greater abstraction, may be hard-pressed to confirm such readings. By showcasing certain transitional works, the Jersey City survey provides some welcome clarification.

When Booker first turned to rubber tires in 1994, her sculptures offered fairly literal references to the human body and hair. Works of this nature, including Nomadic Warrior (1995-96), greet the viewer at the entrance to the exhibition's second gallery. Raised on a waist-high pedestal, this large mounded form assumes the shape of a human head, its features articulated by various manipulations of black rubber over a wooden armature. Generous folds of inner tubing protrude from the front of the sculpture to suggest a mouth and lips. Part of the head is covered with thinner strips of bicycle inner tubing, which are knotted at intervals and dangle like beribboned dreadlocks. Above, a layer of dried fruit rinds wraps the head like a turban before giving way to the crown. Here Booker folds small swatches of bicycle tire into conical shapes and screws them firmly in place. This precise arrangement suggests intricate hair braids, an effect enhanced by the geometric relief of the tire treads.