Chakaia Booker: Untitled Lock 3 Project 

Production | Acquisition Grant

Chakaia Booker’s large-scale permanent sculpture, commissioned for the newly reimagined Lock 3 Park in Akron, Ohio, highlights both the artist’s and the city’s long history with rubber.  Originally salvaged from the streets of New York’s East village in the 1980s, recycled tires remain the artist’s primary medium, as she cuts, shreds, and shapes them into abstract compositions of magnificent scale and ambition. However, her use of tires transcends its materiality to point to themes of ecology, as well as social and economic disparity. Akron was once the tire manufacturing center of the U.S., but like many other cities in the rustbelt, experienced a decline in the latter part of the 20th century. Entering an era of rebirth, Akron presents an apt venue for a major new work by this artist to speak to the socioeconomic past and future of the Rubber City.