URI McMILLAN
SAND, NYLON, AND DIRT
Stretched to infinity, a sensuous simulacrum
of the physical body. An amalgamation of
nylon mesh and sand, mimicking ruptured and
distended flesh. Liquid and porous, an abstract
gesture of becoming. Lithe and elegant, like the
lines of the body of the dancer who created it or
of the other performer who gesticulated inside it.
Pull its delicate gauzy strips with your fingertips,
remaining open to their lingering invitation, for
they desire not simply to be seen, but to be
exquisitely felt.
Here I describe the series R.S.V.P., 1975–77,
African American visual artist Senga Nengudi’s
(b. 1943) inventive set of sculptures and
performance pieces that made use of her best-
known material, used nylon pantyhose (figs. 33,
34). The sculptures, as Nengudi’s artist statement
from the late 1970s says, were “abstracted
reflections of used bodies” influenced by her
experience with motherhood and “the elasticity
of the human body.”1 As Connie H. Choi
has written, “Stretched, filled, knotted, and
pulled, the stockings in the series . . . assume
98
biomorphic qualities that are both grotesque
URI MCMILLAN
and beautiful. They speak to the endurance of
the human body—and, in particular, the female
body—in its physical transformations.”2 They
were first shown in New York City in March 1977
in Répondez S’il Vous Plaît, Nengudi’s first New
York solo exhibition, at Linda Goode Bryant’s
pioneering Just Above Midtown Gallery (JAM), at
50 West Fifty-seventh Street, where Hassinger
and Nengudi also performed as dual dancing
bodies that became entangled with Nengudi’s
sculptures.3 A space dedicated to, in Bryant’s
words, “the promotion and sale of Afro-American
Art on a quantitative and qualitative level with the
present dominant western art productions,” JAM
primarily exhibited abstract work by black artists,
usually in solo shows, with occasional group
exhibitions. Faced with a steep rent increase, JAM
relocated in 1977 to 178 Franklin Street in Tribeca,
where it joined like-minded alternative art spaces
downtown before closing in 1986.4 The gallery was
instrumental in introducing Los Angeles–based
black artists, including Nengudi and sculptor-
dancer Maren Hassinger (b. 1947)—both featured
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
99
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

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

100 101
 53. Just Above Midtown press release for Senga Nengudi, Vestige
and Air Propo, January 17, 1981. Just Above Midtown Archive
no. 188
102
54. Lorraine O’Grady (American, b. 1934). Mlle Bourgeoise Noire
Costume, 1980. Costume made from white gloves. The Eileen
Harris Norton Collection, Santa Monica, California
no. 199
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
of “black art” or, in the case of Hassinger and
Nengudi, “feminist art,” vibrating to the “nuanced
rhythms of the minor” key rather than the overt
note of the major.17 Prioritizing experimentation
over solidity or coherence, Nengudi—solo or
in collaboration with Hassinger and/or their
friends—staged experiential works that blurred
distinctions between taut aesthetic categories,
creating, for instance, performance works that
merged sculpture with environment, gesture, and
the realm of the social. The two were practicing
a form of relational aesthetics, though neither
artist is ever considered part of that movement.18
“Artists like Hassinger, [Houston] Conwill,
Hammons, and Nengudi,” Kellie Jones remarks,
“pushed their work into the place between the
tangible and the intangible, the solid and the
formless, where performance became ritual and
one thing became another.”19
This essay focuses on the collaborations
of Nengudi and Hassinger, considering these
two Southern California–based black women
artists as minor figures, and perhaps “lost
bodies,” in the history of art—obscure footnotes
in dominant narratives of contemporary art and
contemporary Los Angeles culture as well as
the histories of sculpture, dance, performance
art, abstraction, and social practice who
nonetheless initiated, from the margins, major
rethinking of those categories’ tenets.20 As a
gallery especially committed to noncommercial,
nonrepresentational styles, JAM is a minor figure
in these histories as well, serving a “critical
role in the history of avant-garde practices
by black artists.”21 Its eclectic mission was
instrumental in supporting black women artists
such as Nengudi and Hassinger, as well as
Blondell Cummings (b. 1944; also included in
We Wanted a Revolution), who wanted to take
risks without fear of institutional scrutiny or
lack of financial support. In Catherine Morris
and Rujeko Hockley’s words, “JAM was a home,
a safe space. It was a place to establish one’s
voice and present experimental work that took
cultural hybridity, material experimentation,
and black female subjectivity as a vital and
legitimate topic for art-making.”22 Eventually
becoming a nonprofit and widening its focus
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to include artists of all races, JAM published a
SAND, NYLON, AND DIRT
quarterly magazine, B Culture, which offered
“an innovative alternative for the presentation
of artwork and related social commentary, a
crossfire of ideas in an eccentric, eclectic, and
visually challenging format.” Its contributors,
in the premiere issue in 1986, included Thulani
Davis, Greg Tate, Lisa Jones, Ntozake Shange,
and Fishbone no. 184 . Meanwhile, the JAM
Laboratory Program was “designed to encourage
experimentation in the arts through the provision
of facilities for development and presentation of
new works in all media.” Hassinger and Hammons
participated in the program in June 1986, and
Cummings was included in “Retakes” (fig. 40),
“a dance series focused on the cumulative
development of new work by five choreographers”
in late 1985 to mid-1986. Peter Rose, one of the
founders of Performance Space 122 (founded
1979) performed previews of “Diamond Fever”
there, and New York–based choreographer Jane
Comfort debuted her piece “TV Love.” In March
1986 JAM hosted a four-week series called “Loud
Talkin’ and Signifyin’” to explore the range of
the “rap esthetic.”23 If minor in prominence
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or name recognition, JAM—like the artists it
represented—harnessed its position to initiate
major statements in the arts, supporting emerging
artists in performance and dance, developing
collector bases for African American art (through
its “Brunch with JAM” series, for instance), and
serving as a site for community forums and
discussions.24
The marginalization of black artists,
especially black women artists, by the art
world cannot be overemphasized, as their work
continues to receive a paucity of criticism. Los
Angeles–based artists in the 1960s and 1970s,
as Kellie Jones notes, hoped to partake in the
“role of the West as a site of possibility, peace,
and utopia” but often were faced with vestiges
of spatial segregation and economic inequality,
including substandard housing and racially
restrictive covenants limiting where black
families could live. Largely neglected by the
mainstream art world, black artists in Southern
California had to craft their own relationship
to it, staging art exhibitions around pools, in
homes, and in garages in the 1950s and 1960s.25
56. Senga Nengudi. Rapunzel, 1981. Gelatin silver print
(documentation of performance), 40 × 30 in. (101.6 × 76.2
cm). Courtesy of the artist, Lévy Gorvy Gallery, New York, and
Thomas Erben Gallery, New York
no. 168
Active in the 1950s, Eleven Associated, at 1046
South Hill Street, a co-op gallery representing
African American artists and one Asian American
member, watercolor painter and illustrator
Tyrus Wong, was one product of this exclusion.
In the 1960s and 1970s, owing to racial and
class strictures excluding them from museums
and the art world cognoscenti in Los Angeles,
African American artists began opening their
own venues for exhibiting the work of their peers.
These included Brockman Gallery, at 4334
Degnan Boulevard, founded by brothers Alonzo
and Dale Davis in 1967, and Gallery 32, at 672
South Lafayette Park Place, founded by painter
Suzanne Jackson in 1967. Gallery 32, though
open for only two years, hosted cutting-edge
exhibitions, including the 1970 Sapphire Show:
You’ve Come a Long Way Baby, reportedly the
first exhibition in Los Angeles focusing on the
work of black women artists, in which Nengudi
participated. Artist, art historian, collector, and
academic Samella Lewis’s (b. 1924; also included
in We Wanted a Revolution) string of galleries,
meanwhile, culminated in her opening of the
still-extant Museum of African American Art in
1976, the same year she founded Black Art: An
International Quarterly in Los Angeles.26
Still, black women artists faced a unique
situation of multiple exclusions. If galleries were
largely unaware of their work, it was also often not
supported by their white contemporaries or by the
Women’s Movement, highlighting the “exclusions
in feminism itself.”27 In the case of artists such as
Hassinger and Nengudi, this marginalization was
compounded by the fact that their work wasn’t
black or feminist enough for those respective
movements, as it eschewed explicitly political
format and gravitated instead toward abstraction,
Post-Minimalism, and performance. Thus, it was
noteworthy when Hassinger exhibited sculptures
and executed one of her first performances,
High Noon, at Los Angeles’s ARCO Center for
Visual Art in 1976 and eventually held a solo
show called Dangerous Ground at the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in 1981,
becoming the first African American woman
artist to have a solo exhibition there. After all,
as Nengudi notes, “It was such a challenge
getting into major galleries or museums. We were
usually relegated to the community room, which
was pretty much in the basement. We had our
‘rooms.’ So Maren’s shows at ARCO and LACMA
were major breakthroughs.”28 Yet when she and
assemblage artist Betye Saar (b. 1926; included
in We Wanted a Revolution) had solo shows in
Los Angeles simultaneously (Saar at the Baum/
Silverman Gallery, at 170 South La Brea Avenue),
reviewers made it a point to emphasize that fact,
underscoring identity at the expense, Hassinger
felt, of a rigorous interrogation of the work itself.
“It certainly is a coincidence,” the Los Angeles
Times art critic William Wilson remarked in
his review of both shows no. 155 , “that Baum/
Silverman and LACMA’s contemporary Gallery Six
each hold exhibitions by artists who happen to be
both black and women. If that circumstance takes
on any significance, it is evidence that nobody
has to conform to stereotype.”29 The struggle of
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 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

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

110 111
comprehend, let alone elaborate and theorize,
largely because they do not neatly fall within the
confines of the work that black artists, and black
woman artists specifically, are expected to make.
This interpretive dilemma was confirmed even
by her fellow black artists in the 1960s, as David
Hammons observes, because Nengudi’s “work
was so ‘outrageously’ abstract” that it refused
to align itself with incipient notions of black art
(i.e., as representational, didactic, and expressly
political).39 Thus, Nengudi’s interest in universal
ideas—male-female relationships, the aging body,
for example—fail to register, echoing how the
colossal projects of thinkers, practitioners, and
artists who are women of color are often reduced
to the particularity of their own identities.40
The critic’s presumed role in resolving
difficulty is compounded further by the fact
that the very evidentiary documents that would
seem to be the most transparent—photographs
of past actions, especially showing frequent
collaborators Hassinger and Nengudi together—
do not enable full interpretation, either. For
instance, the most widely circulated images
of Nengudi’s work are of her collaborative
“environmental sculpture” Ceremony for Freeway
Fets, April 1978, taken by photographer Roderick
Kwaku Young (figs. 42–44). Her first full-length
work of performance, Ceremony for Freeway Fets
was a public art project sponsored by Brockman
Gallery Productions, Caltrans (Los Angeles’s
transportation system), and a grant from CETA
(Comprehensive Educational Training Act). A
one-time event—“a sort of ‘JAM West,’” as Rujeko
Hockley and Catherine Morris note—performed
by Nengudi, Hammons, Hassinger, and other
members of the Studio Z collective under a
freeway underpass on Pico Boulevard near the
Los Angeles Convention Center, Ceremony for
Freeway Fets drew on African dance idioms and
West and Central African masquerades, with
costumes designed by Nengudi, “not [as] a strict
duplication of African form but a reinvention
and redeployment for new and different
situations.”41 As art historian John Bowles notes,
even Young’s photographs challenge us with
the “paradox of their obvious inscrutability.”42
Photo-documentation does not provide full
access or interpretive comprehension.43 Moreover,
112
Bowles argues, our inability to understand
SAND, NYLON, AND DIRT
the performance and friendships behind the
photographs mirrors the sense of alienation
and exclusion from the city’s art institutions
experienced by Nengudi and her collaborators. He
suggests that when we acknowledge “the limits
of our comprehensions alongside our attempts
at interpretation” we realize our inability, as
scholars, to “fully access the significance the
work might have had for the circle of friends
Nengudi drew together to enact it.”44
This photographic opaqueness also points
to the ephemerality of performance as a medium.
Photographs are not the performance itself, as
Peggy Phelan noted; they are representations of
a representation.45 Still, Nengudi’s own interest
in impermanence is important here, as it aligns
itself with José Muñoz’s discussion of ephemera
as evidence. Muñoz underlines the importance
of reconceiving of the trace or residue, what
remains in the wake of a performance, as a type
of evidence in itself. A “hermeneutics of residue,”
he argues, would recognize the “gesture and its
aftermath, the ephemeral trace” as a fresh, and
necessary, form of material evidence.46 In this
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way, if we cannot, and should not, seek to fully
know all the details of Nengudi’s performance
and sculptural work, we should also take note of
that which evades the archive precisely because
of its intangibility, housed in the elusive corners
of memory.
Friendship, finally, emerges as a powerful
and sustaining force in the joint and solo work of
Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi in Southern
California, particularly in a time period when
institutional support of their work was lacking.
As noted earlier, collaboration was key among
Los Angeles–based black artists in the 1970s, as
evinced by the production of work by members of
loosely organized black art collectives, including
Studio Z; Othervisions Studio, the studio and
performance space of video-performance
artist Ulysses Jenkins, eventually a professor
at University of California, Irvine; and lesser-
known entities such as the mural group Los
Angeles Street Graphics Committee and the
Black Art Council, a watchdog organization
for LACMA. The formation of art communities
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
113
queer artists in Los Angeles in the 1970s were
crucial incubi for the support and sharing of
work, particularly in the context of the city’s
vast spatial geography. In their uniting of like-
minded individuals based on shared interest, be
it political and/or an oppositional stance toward
the mainstream art world, these “networked arts
communities” in areas like Pasadena, Burbank,
and East L.A. created friendships and working
relationships with a “texture of cultural relation
specific to L.A.”47 Countering the figure of the
solitary “genius” artist, usually white and male,
Nengudi and Hassinger joined such groups in
“performances that combined sculpture, dance,
theater, music, and more with the collaborative
spirit of community meetings and the avant-
garde brio of Allan Kaprow’s happenings.”48
The participation of black women artists in West
Coast–based art groups mirrored East Coast
feminist practices of consciousness-raising
circles, feminist collectives (such as Heresies),
feminist co-op galleries (such as A.I.R.), and
all-women exhibitions (such as Dialectics of
Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women
Artists of the United States, curated by Ana
Mendieta [1948–1985; represented in We Wanted
a Revolution] and featuring Nengudi and others)
that were instrumental in developing the careers
of several artists in We Wanted a Revolution,
including Lorraine O’Grady and Howardena
Pindell. In addition, black women artists took
this one step further, founding organizations
devoted to their particular concerns—most
notably “Where We At” Black Women Artists,
which also included several artists in We Wanted
a Revolution, including Faith Ringgold (b. 1930),
Kay Brown (b. 1932–2012), and Dindga McCannon
(b. 1947).
Hassinger and Nengudi’s personal and
professional affinity is evident in numerous
photographs. These include documentation
of their performances together—such as
Flying, staged at the Los Angeles Municipal
Art Gallery,at 4804 Hollywood Boulevard, in
Barnsdall Art Park, on July 6, 1982, at the opening
of the exhibition Afro-American Abstraction
(figs. 45, 46)—and an image of the two sitting
together at the Pearl C. Woods Gallery in Los
Angeles in 1977 (fig. 47). Their friendship, as
114
John Bowles argues, was a precondition for
SAND, NYLON, AND DIRT
their art, and remains integral to the production
and reception of each artist’s individual work.
The intimacy we witness in the photographs,
however, also compels the “art world insider,” he
argues, to “recognize that prominent galleries,
museums, and publications are not the only
spaces of privilege in the art world; that the
intimacy of friendship can create another,
more critical sort of (counter-)privilege.”49 In
this way, we can interpret such photographs of
Hassinger, Nengudi, and their friends as what
Tina Campt might call “everyday practices of
refusal,” which turn away from an art-historical
canon loathe to include these artists: instead,
they allude to shared moments of conviviality
and care and hint at gossip and other insider
information that relates to the ephemerality of
the repertoire rather than the permanence of the
archive.50 As I have remarked elsewhere, “The
radical reciprocity of friendship can serve as a
platform for an art praxis” that is deeply engaged
in mutual support, “as art and friendship
are delicately intertwined and mutually
transformative.” 51
URI MCMILLAN
• Dominique Lévy Gallery, 2015), 81.
In conclusion, Senga Nengudi and Maren
Hassinger’s freewheeling experiments in
collaborative performances and performative
sculpture subverted a Minimalist visual language
with sociopolitical content. Refusing Minimalism’s
customary rejection of narrative, the body, or
metaphor, Nengudi and Hassinger injected the
form with unexpected and often overlooked
narratives of the everyday. And they often exacted
this electrifying aesthetic intervention through
the gestural vocabularies of performance.
Ironically, their recurring pivot toward ephemeral
and embodied modes of representation, rejecting
the march toward figuration so predominant in
African American art historiographies, partially
explains their obscurity in these genealogies. This
oversight has persisted despite the fact that their
praxis so explicitly embraces what art historian
Kobena Mercer terms the “improvisational
aspects of the black vernacular, which selectively
appropriates what is given or found in one’s
environment and transforms it into raw material
for one’s distinct stylistic signature.”52 Moreover,
Nengudi and Hassinger’s bricolage, which I
have discussed throughout this essay, echoed
Depression-era black performers’ reimagining of
the American West not as distinct and separate
from the urban but, rather, the opposite. Thus,
though the West is, as Stephanie Batiste says,
“an ephemeral concept for African Americans”
that often signals ideas of freedom more than
actual places, the black identity it produces is
“indeed expansionist, escapist, and idealistic,
but also communal, rooted, and aggressively
self-justifying.”53 Recovering and reconsidering
Nengudi and Hassinger’s black feminist aesthetic
interventions, then, requires recognizing
alternative revolutionary gestures that, in lieu of a
raised fist, use sand and dirt, friendship and used
pantyhose, as the grounds for a new grammar of
feeling and being.
NOTES
1. See Senga Nengudi, “Artist’s Statement, Late 1970s,” in
Senga Nengudi, ed. Begum Yasar, exh. cat. (New York:
2. Connie H. Choi, “Senga Nengudi,” in Now Dig This! Art and
Black Los Angeles, 1960–1980, ed. Kellie Jones, exh. cat.,
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2011), 313.
3. Nengudi’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, also called
Répondez S'il Vous Plaît, took place in May 1977 at the Pearl
C. Woods Gallery. Hassinger also performed with Nengudi
and her sculptures during this exhibition. See “Chronology,”
in Yasar, Senga Nengudi, 89.
4. Linda Goode Bryant to Betye Saar, August 27, 1974, Just Above
Midtown Archives [no. 156]. In 1977, Bryant included Nengudi
in the group exhibition The Concept as Art at JAM and wrote
extensively about Nengudi’s work in the exhibition catalogue
Contextures, published in 1978. “Tension, environment,
architecture, atmosphere and emotion,” she noted, “are
prominent elements in the anthropomorphic sculptures of
Senga Nengudi.” See Linda Goode Bryant, “Contextures,”
in Contextures, ed. Linda Goode Bryant and Marcy S.
Phillips, exh. cat. (New York: Just Above Midtown, 1978), 43.
The “alternative space movement,” Kellie Jones notes in her
discussion of the feminist SoHo co-op gallery A.I.R., “found
parallels with ethnically specific spaces such as the Studio
Museum in Harlem, and were created to provide exhibition
opportunities for a cadre of artists, in this case women, who
were denied exposure in the larger mainstream art world.”
Jones, “To the Max: Energy and Experimentation,”
in EyeMinded : Living and Writing Contemporary Art
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 383. For a
detailed chronology of alternative art spaces in New York
City from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, and specifically
JAM, see Julie Ault, “A Chronology of Selected Alternative
Structures, Spaces, Artists’ Groups, and Organizations in
New York City, 1965–1985,” in Alternative Art New York,
1965–1985, ed. Julie Ault (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2002), 39–41.
Artist David Hammons introduced Nengudi to Linda
Goode Bryant, former education director at the Studio
Museum in Harlem, when Nengudi lived in New York City.
She lived in East Harlem from 1971 until 1974, before returning
to Los Angeles. The two had been aware of each other since
the late 1960s (both were included, for instance, in the group
exhibition Sapphire Show: You’ve Come a Long Way Baby at
Gallery 32 in Los Angeles in 1970), and Nengudi’s friendship
with Hammons was sparked in 1972 when he, Betye Saar,
Dan Concholar, and several other artists were guests briefly
in Nengudi’s 118th Street apartment. Active as artists on
both coasts, Hammons and Nengudi would repeatedly switch
studio spaces in New York and Los Angeles with each other
into the 1980s. See O. Donald Odita, “The Unseen, Inside
Out: The Life and Art of Senga Nengudi,” Nka: Journal of
Contemporary African Art, nos. 6–7 (Summer–Fall 1997): 25;
and “Chronology,” in Yasar, Senga Nengudi, 88.
5. Nengudi contributed three sculptures to the exhibition
California Black Artists: RSVP XI, 1977; Hanging on Winter,
1977; and RSVP XII, 1977. See California Black Artists, exh.
cat. (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 1977), unpaged.
Maren Hassinger’s first solo New York exhibition, Beach,
occurred at JAM in the winter of 1980, and Bryant also placed
her in a multi-artist show in Grand Central Station that year.
Coincidentally, Hammons performed at an opening-day
performance at Beach as well. In 1981, JAM also sponsored
Hassinger’s performance Still Wind. Kellie Jones, South of
Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s
and 1970s (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017), 244,
246. Several other black Southern California–based artists
participated in JAM’s inaugural exhibition, Synthesis. Kellie
Jones, “Now Dig This! An Introduction,” in Now Dig This!,
27. A copy of the advertisement for this exhibition appears
in Catherine Morris and Rujeko Hockley, eds., We Wanted a
Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–1985 / A Sourcebook
(New York: Brooklyn Museum, 2017), 137.
6. Senga Nengudi, “Artist’s Statement, Late 1970s, Early 1980s,”
in Yasar, Senga Nengudi, 82.
7. As Ellen Tani notes, “Hassinger has been the primary activator
of Nengudi’s work since 1977.” Quoted in Ellen Tani, “What You
Missed: Senga Nengudi’s Performed Objects,” in Yasar, Senga
Nengudi, 23.
8. Senga Nengudi, “Excerpt from a letter to Thomas Erben,
February 15, 1995,” in Yasar, Senga Nengudi, 85.
9. “Senga Nengudi,” press release, January 17, 1981, Just Above
Midtown Archive no. 190 . In addition to Banks and Morris,
Nengudi’s frequent collaborators included artists Maren
115
 Hassinger, Ulysses Jenkins, Franklin Parker, Houston Conwill,
and David Hammons. Odita, “The Unseen, Inside Out,” 25.
For a brief analysis of Air Propo, in relation to Nengudi’s
oeuvre, see Jessica Bell Brown, “Senga Nengudi: Of Gravity
and Grace,” in Yasar, Senga Nengudi, 26.
10. Franklin Sirmans, “Searching for Mr. Hammons,” in David
Hammons: Selected Works, exh. cat. (New York: Zwirner &
Wirth, 2006), unpaged ; quoted in Jones, Now Dig This!, 241.
For more on histories of performance art staged by black
women, see Uri McMillan, Embodied Avatars: Genealogies
of Black Feminist Art and Performance (New York: New York
University Press, 2015).
11. Thus, I concur with Jessica Bell Brown: “For performance
activates the potential of Nengudi’s sculptures to appear as
more than proxy-bodies in distress.” Brown, “Senga Nengudi
,” 29. My description of embodied practices recalls Diana
Taylor’s definition of performance as “vital acts of transfer,
transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of
identity through reiterated” behaviors. See Diana Taylor,
The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory
in the Americas (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003),
2. For an introduction to embodied behaviors as an object
of analysis, see Taylor, Performance (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 2016).
12. In fact, as art historian Amelia Jones notes, the “hybrid,
performative and boundary crossing nature” of performance
work by Nengudi and her colleagues, as well as by the LA-
based Chicano art collective ASCO, precluded its absorption
into exhibitions and texts that surfaced at the height of
multiculturalism in the 1990s, when more artists of color
enjoyed a brief moment of visibility in the mainstream art
market. As a result, when coupled with the scant archive of
Nengudi’s works, as well as her own lack of interest in the
permanence of her materials, the artist’s oeuvre remains
largely unknown. Jones, “Lost Bodies: Early 1970s Los
Angeles Performance Art in Art History,” in Live Art in LA:
Performance in Southern California, 1970–1983, ed. Peggy
Phelan (New York: Routledge, 2012), 161.
13. Rizvana Bradley, “Transferred Flesh: Reflections on Senga
Nengudi’s R.S.V.P.,” TDR: The Drama Review 59, no. 1
(Spring 2015): 165.
14. See José Esteban Muñoz , Cruising Utopia: The Then and
There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University
Press, 2009), 67. Rodríguez, meanwhile, notes that gestures
can be “literal—actual movements of the body—or figurative,
gestures that reach out to manipulate how energy and matter
flow in the world.” Yet, in relationship to queerness, gestures
are especially important for animating “how bodies move in
the world” and, as a mode of critique, for revealing how a
“cascade of everyday actions is capable of altering political
life.” See Juana María Rodríguez, Sexual Futures, Queer
Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (New York: New York
University Press, 2014), 4, 2, 5.
15. Erin Manning, The Minor Gesture (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 2016), 1–2. The turn toward considering
“the minor,” such as “becoming-minor” or a “minor literature,”
116
in recent scholarship in the humanities, including Manning’s,
SAND, NYLON, AND DIRT
is largely in direct dialogue with philosophers Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1987) . My use of Manning’s work in this
essay is not to distinguish what she calls minor gestures
from what may be called major gestures—that project does
not interest me here. Rather, my concern is how a figure like
Senga Nengudi gets occluded from histories of art for reasons
very similar to what Manning articulates above.
16. Bradley, “Transferred Flesh,” 165.
17. Manning, The Minor Gesture, 1.
18. Relational aesthetics, a term coined by French art critic and
curator Nicolas Bourriaud in his 1998 book of the same name
(Esthétique relationnelle), refers to artistic practices that
take the creation of social relationships as their focus and
hence perceive the viewer’s participation in these socially
constructed environments as the subject of the art itself. In
the United States, as Claire Bishop notes, “this expanded
field of post-studio practices” emphasizing the artist as a
producer of situations (rather than a producer of discrete
objects) and the spectator as a co-producer or participant,
goes under several names, including (most recently) “social
practice.” See her Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the
Politics of Spectatorship (New York: Verso, 2012), 1, 2.
I am thinking here of Jennifer Doyle’s thoughts on the
irony that so much art associated with relational aesthetics
is so dry, often to the exclusion of work dealing with love
URI MCMILLAN
and friendship, and focused almost solely on work done in
museums, as well as her observation that even the most
visible artists of color are too often not seen as representative
of the decades in which they work, as evidenced by Adrian
Piper’s exclusion from conversations about relational
aesthetics. See Doyle, Hold It against Me: Difficulty and
Emotion in Contemporary Art (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 2013), 169, 97.
19. Jones, South of Pico, 257.
20. The phrase “lost bodies” is from Amelia Jones’s essay
cited above. I invoke it here since I share Jones’s concerns
that artists whose performance remains are not housed in
archives, or presented in exhibitions via documentation,
become lost bodies written out of important cultural and
artistic histories, in this case histories of 1970s Los Angeles
art and performance. As a result, these histories become
understood via integral, but already canonized historical
figures, at the expense of lesser-known but equally
important artists.
21. Catherine Morris and Rujeko Hockley, “Revolutionary
Hope: Landmark Writings, 1965–85,” in Morris and Hockley,
Sourcebook, 22.
22. Ibid.
23. Quotations and information about JAM programs in this
paragraph are from materials in the folder “Just Above
Midtown/Downtown” in the Downtown Flyers and Invitations
Collections, circa 1980–1990, MSS 119, Fales Library and
Special Collections, New York University, box 2, folder 234.
The predecessor to B Culture was Black Currant, a
publication produced by Bryant and artist Janet Henry when
JAM was located on Franklin Street. See Rujeko Hockley,
“Just Above Midtown Gallery,” in Morris and Hockley,
Sourcebook, 136.
24. Tony Whitfield, “Interview with Linda Goode Bryant,” originally
published in Artist and Influence: The Journal of Black
American Cultural History 13 (1994); reprinted in Morris and
Hockley, Sourcebook, 159.
25. Jones, South of Pico, 3, 9–10, 13–14.
26. See Jones, “Introduction,” in Now Dig This! Lewis and
Yale-trained art historian Judith Wilson, who taught at the
University of California, Irvine , were largely responsible for
documenting the Los Angeles black art scene during this
time period.
27. Jones, “Lost Bodies,” 120. Both Nengudi and Hassinger
participated in feminist- oriented exhibitions and were
contacted by feminist artists active at the Woman’s Building
(Nengudi served on several committees), though, in Nengudi’s
words, “We were included in [the feminist movement] as a
necessity.” Nengudi was included in Secrets and Revelations:
African-American Women Artists, a feminist-themed show,
albeit of all black women, in 1979 at the Pearl C. Woods
Gallery in Los Angeles. In addition, Hassinger was included
in a feminist-oriented show, curated by Arlene Raven, titled
At Home: A Celebration of a Decade of Feminist Art in
Southern California, at the Long Beach Museum of Art in
1983. Still, as the only black women invited to participate in
the latter show, Nengudi and Hassinger enacted a “protest
performance,” called the Spooks Who Sat by the Door, on
the steps of the entry to the exhibition. In Nengudi’s words,
“We wore white sheets over our selves like ghost [sic] and we
held up products with Black stereotypes such as Aunt Jemima
and Uncle Ben rice and stood there in silence. They didn’t
get it. Once again we were invisible.” Senga Nengudi, email
interview by Amelia Jones, October 2009; quoted in Jones,
“Lost Bodies,” 126, 127.
28. Jori Finkel, “Q&A: Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi,” Los
Angeles Times, November 27, 2011, http://articles.latimes.
com/2011/nov/27/entertainment/la-ca-pst-kellie-jones-
interview-20111127, accessed June 1, 2017.
29. William Wilson, “Art Review: Of Cables and Collages in Artists’
Wonderland,” Los Angeles Times, May 27, 1981 no. 157 .
30. Specifically, painter Alma Thomas notes, often “the only
way to get in there [the museum] as a Negro would be with
a mop and bucket to wash and scrub something.” Quoted
in Kellie Jones, “It’s Not Enough to Say ‘Black is Beautiful’:
Abstraction at the Whitney, 1969–1974 ,” in Jones, EyeMinded,
413; the quote “breaking through the white cube” is from Nick
Stillman, telephone interview with Senga Nengudi, May 2011,
quoted in Nick Stillman, “Senga Nengudi’s ‘Ceremony for
Freeway Fets’ and Other Los Angeles Collaborations,” East of
Borneo, December 7, 2011, https://eastofborneo.org/articles/
senga-nengudis-ceremony-for-freeway-fets-and-other-los-
angeles-collaborations/, accessed June 1, 2017; The phrase
“exceptional texture of black life” is quoted in Tina M. Campt,
Listening to Images (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
2017 ), 7–8.
31. Bradley, “Transferred Flesh,” 164.
32. Jones, “Lost Bodies,” 158.
33. Maren Hassinger, “Manifesto” ; quoted 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): 415.
34. Jones, South of Pico, 15.
35. Finkel, “Q&A: Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi.”
36. Stillman, “Senga Nengudi’s ‘Ceremony for Freeway Fets.’”
37. Doyle, Hold It against Me, 94, 95.
38. Jones, “Lost Bodies,” 161.
39. Kellie Jones, “David Hammons,” interview,
Real Life Magazine, no. 16 (Autumn 1986): 2.
40. I paraphrase this point from Alexander G. Weheliye , Habeas
Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black
Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 2014), 22.
41. Morris and Hockley, “Revolutionary Hope,” 22; Jones, South
of Pico, 207. As Amelia Jones notes, if part of the power of
Ceremony for Freeway Fets—like that of ASCO’s art actions—
was a “kind of opulent, theatrical immersion—literally—into
the sub-street-level bowels of this freeway-ribboned city,”
Nengudi and her interlocutors in Studio Z importantly also
chose to “re-write LA as a potentially open network where
new forms of culture, rituals with African themes as imagined
by Nengudi and her colleagues, could be enacted.” See Jones,
“Lost Bodies,” 156, 158.
42. Bowles, “Side by Side,” 411.
43. Tina Campt reiterates this point, suggesting that we “‘listen to’
rather than simply ‘look at’” photographs—precisely because
of our assumption that vision equals knowledge. Instead, she
implores us to engage photography through other sensory
registers—such as sound and touch—in order to inaugurate
a “practice of looking beyond what we see and attuning our
senses to the other affective frequencies through which
photographs register.” Campt, Listening to Images, 6, 9.
44. Bowles, “Side by Side,” 414.
45. See Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance
(New York: Routledge, 1996), especially the chapter
“The Ontology of Performance: Representation without
Reproduction,” 146–66.
117
46. See Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 71, 81.

SAND, NYLON, AND DIRT

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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