Columbia tribute sculpture is a sculpture done by Ms. Chakaia Booker in the year 2006 and placed in the custody of the NASA Art program, to commemorate the lost space shuttle Columbia, on 1st February 2003. The sculpture is done mainly from rubber cut from tire remnants sourced from Columbia’s past missions. The rubber is inter-woven together in loops using wiring and nails that fix and hold the hanging loops to a central wooden focal point. The sculpture is formed of 3-Dimensional, star-like loops that emanate from the center and bulge lazily outwards asymmetrically in all directions. The loops then continuously bed back to the center in the artist’s attempt to use repetition and rhythm in the sculpture. However, the random movement of the overlapped lengths of rubber leaves some of them ending up in charred ends, another tip off while others get back to the center upside down or on the right side up. The varying radius of the loops can be estimated to be within a range of 2 feet (for the shorter loops) to 3.5 feet (for the longer loops) from the center. The variation in Length gives the sculpture an imbalanced nature with the shaky and wavy nature of tire rubber giving a sense of visual movement in the viewer’s eye. Chakaia Booker’s exposure of charred parts of rubber and its fortified interior side in the overlaps gives a sense of texture and places emphasis on the mass of the sculpture (Samella, 94).
In the Columbia tribute sculpture, Chakaia Booker portrays the complexity and uncertain nature of life. She shows this by interweaving loops of rubber in uneven pattern that one can never precisely predict the next turn of the loop. In as much as the loops emanate from a central focal point the viewer’s eye cannot tell whether a given length of the loop will end up to a charred end, dead end, return upside down, or return back strong as it left. Perhaps the artist is expressing the unpredictable nature of how human beings live without a glimpse of what awaits them the following day. Ms. Chakaia Booker may have been prompted to express these to paint a picture of the sudden unexpected death of the seven crew members of the NASA team on February1, 2003 over Texas. Just as it appears in the art the team had made quite a number of successful “loops” just to die on reentry back into the earth’s atmosphere (Porter, 19).
By nature stars are supposed to be bright but the Columbia tribute sculpture by Chakaia Booker portlays a “black star” that can effectively emit no light, despite this he deliberately uses very strong and tough materials to represent the “black star”. Space shuttle tire! The use of rubber, that is left loosely hanging portraying movement in the eyes of the viewer, also implies hidden life within the sculpture. This symbolizes that even though those being commemorated might have gone, and we may not be seeing their light, what they have left behind in terms of contributions is great, and can be of immense help to us. Based on this much crafted message Columbia tribute sculpture can be termed as a very successful art piece in terms of its content and composition.
Works cited
Porter, James. Modern Negro art. Washington (D.C.): Howard University Press 1992.
Samella, Lewis. African-American art and artists. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1984