An Artist’s Continuing Exploration of the Human Form
艺术家对人体形态的持续探索

IN 1975, AFTER the birth of her first son, the artist Senga Nengudi began making a series of sculptures with nylon pantyhose, prompted by the physical and psychological changes she experienced during pregnancy. She was in her early 30s, a first-time mother, and fascinated by how her own body had grown and morphed. She wanted to express the human body’s elasticity, how it could expand and contract like her sinuous new material, which she cut, ripped and tied. She’d then fill these amorphous forms with sand, which, she said, gave her sculptures a “kind of sensuality that the body has.”
1975 年，在她的第一个儿子出生后，艺术家 Senga Nengudi 开始用尼龙连裤袜制作一系列雕塑，这是由于她在怀孕期间经历的身心变化。她 30 岁出头，第一次当妈妈，对自己的身体是如何成长和变形的着迷。她想表达人体的弹性，它如何像她蜿蜒的新材料一样膨胀和收缩，她将其切割、撕裂和绑扎。然后，她会用沙子填充这些无定形的形状，她说，这让她的雕塑有一种“身体所具有的感性”。

From a distance they looked like amoebas, and up close they bulged and rippled like flesh. In one of her early installations — 1977’s “R.S.V.P. I” — she took 10 pairs of nylon pantyhose in varying shades of tan, many of them previously worn, and pinned the ends taut to the walls of a room, while filling the center gusset with sand, creating forms that were simultaneously spindly and bulbous, sensuous and monstrous. She once described them as “abstracted reflections of used bodies.” There were thematic precedents for Nengudi’s sculptures in the alien-like abstractions of Louise Bourgeois and in Bruce Nauman’s assemblages of mundane objects like wallboard, but the way she manipulated a drugstore accessory into a visceral invocation of the human form was nothing less than startling.
从远处看，它们看起来像变形虫，近看它们像肉一样鼓起和起伏。在她早期的装置作品之一——1977 年的《R.S.V.P.我“——她拿了 10 双深浅不一的棕褐色尼龙连裤袜，其中许多是以前穿过的，将末端拉紧在房间的墙壁上，同时用沙子填充中央的角撑板，创造出同时纤细和球状、感性和怪物的形状。她曾将它们描述为“二手身体的抽象反映”。Nengudi 的雕塑在 Louise Bourgeois 的外星人般的抽象作品和布鲁斯·瑙曼 （Bruce Nauman） 对墙板等平凡物品的组合中都有主题先例，但她操纵药店配饰成为对人类形态的发自内心的召唤的方式不亚于令人震惊。

These pieces became known as the “R.S.V.P.” works, named for the enigmatic announcement card for Nengudi’s first New York solo show — was it an exhibition title or a request? — at the gallery Just Above Midtown in 1977. The dozens of “R.S.V.P.” sculptures Nengudi went on to make over the next few years had their own personalities: Some, like “R.S.V.P.” (1975-77), a dark brown pair of pantyhose that splayed open like stretched legs, with other sand-filled hosiery hanging over it like pendulums, were expansive and friendly; others, like 1976’s wishbone-shaped “R.S.V.P. V,” were claustrophobic and menacing. Sometimes, Nengudi, who had been dancing since childhood, used the sculptures as both settings and partners for intricately choreographed performances that responded to the work’s distinct form and are preserved in black-and-white photos from the time, with the artist or one of her friends (or both) clad in nylon tights and entangled in her work.
这些作品被称为“R.S.V.P.”作品，以 Nengudi 在纽约的首次个展的神秘公告卡命名——这是展览名称还是请求？——1977 年在 Just Above Midtown 画廊。在接下来的几年里，Nengudi 继续制作的数十件“R.S.V.P.”雕塑有自己的个性：有些，比如“R.S.V.P.”（1975-77），一双深棕色的连裤袜像伸展的腿一样张开，其他装满沙子的袜子像钟摆一样挂在上面，宽大而友好;其他的，比如 1976 年的叉骨形“R.S.V.P. V”，则带有幽闭恐惧症和威胁性。有时，从小就开始跳舞的 Nengudi 将这些雕塑用作精心编排的表演的背景和伙伴，这些表演与作品的独特形式相呼应，并保存在当时的黑白照片中，艺术家或她的一个朋友（或两者）穿着尼龙紧身衣，纠缠在她的作品中。

In the decades after she debuted them, Nengudi’s sculptures became icons of the Black Arts Movement, the multidisciplinary intellectual flourishing in the ’60s and ’70s that coincided with and gave artistic shape to the rising political activism and Black nationalism of the era. They have also become touchstones in feminist art (a concurrent artistic movement) for the way even their materials tear apart, in a literal sense, traditional notions of femininity. (Nengudi has noted that, because of the humbleness of her materials, she could “put my entire show in my purse”: “I started thinking, ‘What is the core of a woman’s existence? The purse,’” she said.)
在她首次亮相后的几十年里，Nengudi 的雕塑成为黑人艺术运动的标志，这是 60 年代和 70 年代蓬勃发展的多学科知识分子，与那个时代兴起的政治激进主义和黑人民族主义相吻合，并赋予了艺术形态。她们也成为女权主义艺术（同时进行的艺术运动）的试金石，因为从字面意义上讲，她们的材料也撕裂了传统的女性气质观念。（Nengudi 指出，由于她的材料不起眼，她可以“把我的整个展览都放在我的钱包里”：“我开始思考，'女性存在的核心是什么？钱包，'“她说。

And yet, for decades, she lingered on the periphery of the art world: always creating but rarely seeing her work in mainstream galleries and museums. The ’70s may have been an era of inspired creativity, but it was also a decade of rigid boundaries and narrow identities — both within the establishment and outside it — and Nengudi’s pieces were difficult to categorize. She was a sculptor, but one who used cheap or found materials. She was a dancer, but at the heart of her performances were these strange creations. Her work was too conceptual to be embraced by the mainstream art world as “Black art,” which expected a strictly figurative and sociological view of Black life in America, but it was also too distinctly personal to be celebrated alongside the mostly white men who defined the conceptual art of the era. She was uncategorizable in an age that, for all its experimentation, still treasured systems of organization.

In December, though, nearly 50 years after she began making the “R.S.V.P.” series, a retrospective of Nengudi’s work will be on view at the Denver Art Museum. The show makes plain the extent to which Nengudi and her work were essential fulcrums around which gathered a community of Black artists — fellow genre-defiers like David Hammons, Maren Hassinger and Lorraine O’Grady — who were likewise ignored by the mainstream art world in their formative years but have since been recognized as some of our most significant living artists. On her quest to discover herself and reflect her own experiences, she also broadened the very notion of what a Black artist could be.

NENGUDI WAS BORN Sue Irons in Chicago in 1943. Her father died when she was 3 years old, and after several years, her mother decided to head west. “She had this love of California,” Nengudi said of her mother, Elois, a graceful woman fond of serving rice and beans on fine china with a bottle of champagne. “She only made one trip out there, and that was enough for her.” Nengudi is based in Colorado Springs, where she has lived for the past 31 years, but she was speaking to me over Zoom from a cavernous, mostly unadorned studio in Boulder, where she was on a residency. Her voice, unusually soft, echoed off the high ceilings as she stared a little beyond me.

She grew up between Los Angeles and Pasadena. As the only child of a single working parent — her mother was an escrow officer — she spent a lot of her time alone, parked in front of a television, watching Fred Astaire, Lena Horne and Katherine Dunham. She admired Dunham, in particular, who was one of Hollywood’s first Black choreographers, and was captivated by Astaire’s use of props, like a hatrack or an umbrella. The way he moved with objects — transforming the inanimate into something alive and kinetic — influenced her own later performance pieces. “I want dancers to be activators,” she said. “I want them to partner with the sculpture.” Indeed, it was movement, more than visual art, that informed Nengudi’s early creative life. She took both ballet and modern dance classes. It wasn’t until she was in college that she was forced to make a decision between pursuing a career in visual art or in dance. At that time, she “didn’t have what they considered a dancer’s body,” she said. Dancers were expected to be tall and thin, which Nengudi wasn’t. There was also the question of longevity and sustainability: As a dancer, there were physical limits to what her body might allow her to do over time. Those restrictions did not apply to artists. “I felt that you could live forever and still be an artist,” she said. “You can live to 100 and still have the ability to express yourself.”
她在洛杉矶和帕萨迪纳之间长大。作为单身职场父母的独生子——她的母亲是一名托管官员——她花了很多时间独自一人，停在电视机前，看弗雷德·阿斯泰尔（Fred Astaire）、莉娜·霍恩（Lena Horne）和凯瑟琳·邓纳姆（Katherine Dunham）的电影。她特别钦佩邓纳姆，他是好莱坞最早的黑人编舞家之一，并被阿斯泰尔对 hatrack 或雨伞等道具的使用所吸引。他与物体一起移动的方式——将无生命的东西变成有生命和动态的东西——影响了她后来的行为作品。“我希望舞者成为激活者，”她说。“我希望他们与雕塑合作。”事实上，运动，而不是视觉艺术，影响了 Nengudi 的早期创作生活。她参加了芭蕾舞和现代舞课程。直到上大学，她才被迫在从事视觉艺术或舞蹈事业之间做出决定。她说，当时她“没有他们认为的舞者身体”。舞者被期望又高又瘦，而 Nengudi 并非如此。还有一个关于寿命和可持续性的问题：作为一名舞者，随着时间的推移，她的身体可能允许她做的事情是有物理限制的。这些限制不适用于艺术家。“我觉得你可以永远活着，但仍然是一名艺术家，”她说。“你可以活到 100 岁，但仍然有能力表达自己。”

Nengudi majored in fine arts at California State University, Los Angeles, where she was one of two Black students and the only Black woman in the art department. “Oftentimes, I was the only Black person in a room. Sometimes it was OK, and sometimes it was not,” she said. “It was lonely.” But two discoveries made her feel less alone. The first was the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum), where she worked as an assistant art instructor and encountered the works of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, as well as happenings: free-form, predominantly improvised performances that artists like Claes Oldenburg and Red Grooms first began developing in the late 1950s by creating stage sets out of everyday materials such as cardboard and encouraging viewers to move about freely in them. They were a way of demonstrating that art was and could be anything an artist wanted, and this freedom, combined with how the museum introduced art to children — employees would take kids through the galleries and dance in front of the works — gave Nengudi the confidence to develop her own ideas about dance’s fellowship with art. The second transformative space for her was the Watts Towers Arts Center, a community hub in the historically Black neighborhood of Los Angeles that was co-founded by the legendary sculptor Noah Purifoy. Here, Nengudi discovered more ways to rethink what art could be, this time centered around Blackness. In 1965, the Watts neighborhood was the site of a six-day uprising ignited by an altercation between a Black motorist and a white police officer. The rebellion radicalized a number of Black artists at the time and, as numerous businesses were damaged or destroyed, inspired a cultural shift in Black art toward assemblage, the process of making work from discarded materials. Although Nengudi’s work was already moving in this direction, she credits Purifoy for reinforcing her understanding of aesthetic and what it means to be an artist. “Noah was the most amazing man because he walked his talk, he didn’t really care about money, he cared about the creative process and art itself,” Nengudi said. She was also inspired by the elementary- and middle-school-age students in her mixed-media classes at Watts Towers, marveling at their “open-ended way of dealing with art. You say, ‘Oh, dear, that’s a beautiful flower you’re painting,’ and then they take black paint and paint all over it.”

But it was after college, in 1966, that Nengudi had one of her most important educational experiences while attending a postgraduate program at Waseda University in Tokyo. She’d chosen Japan because of her interest in the Gutai group, the Japanese collective who, like her, were using found objects and performance to redefine artistic practices. At the time of the group’s founding, Japan was a country in flux and in the midst of a deep identity crisis. Just shy of a decade out from the humiliation of World War II, it was trying to square its ancient traditions with a second industrial revolution, and the Gutai group, who were admirers of Abstract Expressionist painters like Jackson Pollock, sought, as they put it in their 1956 manifesto, “to go beyond abstraction.” They preceded modern performance artists, who wouldn’t come into their own in the West until later in the 1960s: The Gutai group’s paintings were made by rolling in a pile of mud, or by foot instead of hand, or by jumping through a paper screen. Nengudi was in awe of their spontaneity, their defiance. “I was just floored,” Nengudi said of their work. “I said, ‘This is it. This is what I am about.’”

Nengudi had anticipated some culture shock upon arriving in Japan, as well as racism, but once she got to Tokyo, she was “treated so graciously.” In fact, her only bad experience came from an encounter with white Americans in the city’s well-touristed Ginza district. She was immediately taken with Japanese culture, and became interested in theater traditions like Kabuki and Noh. The way ritual governed life in Japan — from how people answered the phone to how they bathed — influenced her as well. The country had a sophisticated but simple elegance that resisted the Western impulse to “clutter something up,” she said in a 2013 oral history interview with the Smithsonian Institution. A year later, Nengudi left Tokyo for America with “a deep desire to find a connecting link” between the culture she had just experienced and the one to which she was returning.

In many ways, she found that link in New York, where she moved in 1971 on the advice of a professor who told her that the city was a boot camp for artists. She arrived six years after the poet LeRoi Jones (who later changed his name to Amiri Baraka) had moved to Harlem; his relocation, in the eyes of some, created a distinction between an “uptown” artist (those who, like Baraka, were working within the framework of Black nationalism) and a “downtown” one (those who appealed to a mainstream, mostly white, crowd). Nengudi’s decision to live uptown was rooted in a desire to be closer to those from whom she could learn and affirm her own identity as a Black person. “It was more like an adventure — I was so excited about Blackness,” she said. “I wanted to know everything about myself that was not available in Los Angeles.” She moved into an apartment in East Harlem and began working as an instructor at the Children’s Art Carnival, a community program started by the Black artist Betty Blayton-Taylor, who was also a sculptor. In her spare time, she hung out with the Harlem-based Weusi Artist Collective, whose members invoked African themes and symbols in their work. She was inspired by all of New York’s qualities, from how the neighborhoods were rigidly divided along racial lines to the various ways people celebrated their ethnic backgrounds, as in the annual West Indian Carnival, which included a parade.

Although she was inspired, Nengudi didn’t show much work during this period, in part because she didn’t fit neatly into the mold of either an uptown or downtown artist, but also because she was too shy. But she did create, and the project that came out of this period seems to portend the “R.S.V.P.” works: a series of two-dimensional silhouettes, slightly larger than an actual person, which she cut out of colored cloth meant for flags and tied to scaffolding and fences or dangled between alleyways. Even in these early works, which she called “spirits” or “souls,” one can see how she would eventually influence an artist like David Hammons, who after moving to New York would make art in the ’70s and ’80s from materials discarded on the city streets — empty glass bottles, bottle caps, human hair — and install them in inconspicuous public areas, as if in secret. These were sculptures influenced by movement: Representations of the heroin addicts Nengudi would see high on the street corner, swaying back and forth, flirting with the ground but never falling. “It was such a dance,” she said. “This movement, unfortunately it was what it was, but it was graceful.”

AFTER THREE YEARS, in 1974, Nengudi returned to Los Angeles. New York had changed her in many ways: It deepened her understanding of Black history and culture, as well as validated her sense of self, imbuing her with a new confidence. But it wasn’t until the birth of her first child — with her partner at the time, Rene Pyatt, who died shortly thereafter — that she had a revival. “Even though I spent most of my life without a child, it felt like my life began when they were born,” she said of her sons (her second — with her husband, Ellioutt Fittz, a retired electrician — was born in 1979). Motherhood made her hyperaware of her own body. Giving birth moved her to search for a material that could withstand repeated manipulations that would mirror, she says, the “kind of freaky” experience of having a human being develop in your own body. Along with her stint in New York, it also inspired a new identity: After becoming a mother, she decided to change her name from Sue Irons to Senga Nengudi. “Senga,” she was told, meant something akin to a sage in the Bantu language Lingala.
三年后，即 1974 年，Nengudi 回到了洛杉矶。纽约在很多方面改变了她：它加深了她对黑人历史和文化的理解，也验证了她的自我意识，让她充满了新的自信。但直到她的第一个孩子出生——与她当时的伴侣雷内·派亚特（Rene Pyatt）一起出生，后者不久后就去世了——她才有了复兴。“尽管我一生中的大部分时间都没有孩子，但感觉我的生活就像是从他们出生时开始的，”她谈到自己的两个儿子时说（她的第二个儿子——和她的丈夫、退休电工埃利奥特·菲茨（Ellioutt Fittz）——出生于 1979 年）。母性使她对自己的身体高度敏感。分娩促使她寻找一种能够承受反复操作的材料，她说，这种材料可以反映出人类在自己的身体中发育的“那种怪异”的经历。除了在纽约的工作，这也激发了她一个新的身份：成为母亲后，她决定将自己的名字从 Sue Irons 改为 Senga Nengudi。她被告知，“Senga”的意思是类似于班图语 Lingala 中的圣人。

The name proved prophetic, or was perhaps a promise on which Nengudi made good. Over the following decades — in which white-owned galleries remained essentially closed off to Black artists, and museums continued to ignore them — Black artists were confined to exhibiting in libraries and community centers. With the official channels of the art world unavailable to them, Nengudi and her peers had to create new ones for themselves. She began a series of large public collaborations that became hallmarks of the era. Along with artists like Maren Hassinger — who also used everyday objects to create sculptures — she started the collective Studio Z, members of which participated in Nengudi’s first public group performance, 1978’s “Ceremony for Freeway Fets.” The performance, which ran for less than an hour, took place under a highway near the Los Angeles Convention Center and consisted of a small ensemble of artists playing various instruments — a saxophone, a flute and drums — and Nengudi, Hammons and Hassinger dancing in elaborate costumes. Hassinger represented the female spirit (wearing one of the pantyhose sculptures on her head like a crown) while Hammons, the male spirit, wore bright-colored pants and carried a decorative staff. Nengudi, wearing a white tarp and mask, acted as the bridge between the two gendered energies. “I wanted to kind of do an opening ritual to celebrate and christen the area it was in,” Nengudi said; the site represented the crossroads of a wide variety of cultural and ethnic identities in Los Angeles and reminded her of an African village.
这个名字被证明是预言性的，或者也许是 Nengudi 兑现的承诺。在接下来的几十年里——白人拥有的画廊基本上仍然对黑人艺术家关闭，博物馆继续忽视他们——黑人艺术家被限制在图书馆和社区中心展出。由于无法获得艺术界的官方渠道，Nengudi 和她的同龄人不得不为自己创建新的渠道。她开始了一系列大型公共合作，这些合作成为那个时代的标志。她与玛伦·哈辛格 （Maren Hassinger） 等艺术家一起——他们也使用日常物品创作雕塑——创办了集体 Studio Z，其成员参加了 Nengudi 的第一次公开团体表演，即 1978 年的“高速公路狂欢仪式”。这场演出持续了不到一个小时，在洛杉矶会议中心附近的一条高速公路下举行，由一小群艺术家演奏各种乐器——萨克斯管、长笛和鼓——以及 Nengudi、Hammons 和 Hassinger 穿着精美服装跳舞。哈辛格代表女性精神（像皇冠一样戴着她的连裤袜雕塑），而男性精神哈蒙斯则穿着鲜艳的裤子并携带装饰杖。Nengudi 穿着白色防水布和口罩，充当了两种性别能量之间的桥梁。“我想做一个开业仪式来庆祝和命名它所在的地区，”Nengudi 说;这个地方代表了洛杉矶各种文化和种族身份的十字路口，让她想起了一个非洲村庄。

Although there is no surviving footage of the performance, it was documented in Roderick Young’s photographs, which chronicle a remarkable moment of Black art in Los Angeles in the 1970s. In his photos, the gathering appears as a kind of celebration anointing Nengudi the de facto leader. When she talked about the performance later with the filmmaker Barbara McCullough, who was present for the ceremony and later included it in a film, Nengudi described herself as “practically possessed” and lost in a “rapture.” “Over the years, I have described her as a mild-mannered wild woman,” McCullough said of Nengudi recently. “Her ideas are so expansive and somewhat disconnected from the normal way of thinking.” McCullough learned from Nengudi that “you could do your art with anything.”
虽然没有幸存下来的表演镜头，但它被记录在罗德里克·杨 （Roderick Young） 的照片中，这些照片记录了 1970 年代洛杉矶黑人艺术的非凡时刻。在他的照片中，这次聚会似乎是一种庆祝 Nengudi 成为事实上的领导人。当她后来与出席颁奖典礼并后来将其改编成电影的电影制片人芭芭拉·麦卡洛 （Barbara McCullough） 谈论这场表演时，Nengudi 形容自己“几乎被附身”并迷失在“狂喜”中。“多年来，我一直把她描述成一个温和的野女人，”麦卡洛最近谈到 Nengudi 时说。“她的想法是如此广泛，与正常的思维方式有些脱节。”McCullough 从 Nengudi 那里学到，“你可以用任何东西来做你的艺术。

Studio Z encouraged Nengudi to be more outward with performance. But the collective also reminded her of the importance of relationships and interactivity, a theme that remains key to her practice. “We would get together to try and push the envelope and find new ways of doing things and new vocabularies for ourselves,” Nengudi said. One of her most important and longest collaborations was with Hassinger, who is best known for her sculptures composed of industrial materials like wire rope, and whose friendship with the artist began with long phone conversations, the kind that, Hassinger said, people just don’t have anymore. “They would be all over the place,” Hassinger said. “A lot of it would center around art and projects that we were working on, but a lot of it would also be gossip and raising children and making dinner.” They also had a shared background in dance: Both women had studied under instructors from the Lester Horton company, the first in the United States to be racially integrated.
Studio Z 鼓励 Nengudi 在表演上更加外向。但这个集体也提醒了她人际关系和互动性的重要性，这一主题仍然是她实践的关键。“我们会聚在一起尝试挑战极限，为自己找到新的做事方式和新的词汇，”Nengudi 说。她最重要、持续时间最长的合作之一是与哈辛格的合作，哈辛格以其由钢丝绳等工业材料制成的雕塑而闻名，她与这位艺术家的友谊始于长时间的电话交谈，哈辛格说，人们现在已经没有这种电话交谈了。“他们会到处都是，”哈辛格说。“其中很多会围绕我们正在从事的艺术和项目，但很多也会是八卦、抚养孩子和做饭。”她们在舞蹈方面也有共同的背景：两位女性都曾在莱斯特·霍顿（Lester Horton）公司的指导下学习，这是美国第一家实行种族融合的公司。

Hassinger became one of Nengudi’s primary collaborators in the “R.S.V.P.” performances, and they have remained fixtures in each other’s work for nearly 40 years. In photographs of a 1977 performance at Pearl C. Wood Gallery in Los Angeles, Hassinger, who has an Afro and is wearing a black bodysuit and tights, activates the sculptures by entrapping herself in the nylon pinned to the gallery wall. In another image, Hassinger sits in a kind of boat pose — feet lifted, knees pulled to her chest and hands supporting her body — as the nylon wraps around her chest, thighs and head. The choreography recalls the simple, usually spontaneous gestures of the Gutai group, or the nodding-out addicts Nengudi first encountered in New York years earlier. The movements varied from performance to performance, and depended on the shape and size of the sculpture, but the intervention of a human form within one of the sculptures — a hand stretched out to the wall, or propped up on her head mid-handstand — seemed to enhance the humanlike characteristics of Nengudi’s work, until both forms were indistinguishable from each other.
哈辛格成为 Nengudi 在“R.S.V.P.”表演中的主要合作者之一，近 40 年来，他们一直是彼此作品中的固定成员。在 1977 年在洛杉矶 Pearl C. Wood 画廊的一场表演照片中，身穿黑色紧身衣和紧身衣的黑人哈辛格将自己困在别在画廊墙上的尼龙中，从而激活了雕塑。在另一张照片中，哈辛格以一种船的姿势坐着——抬起双脚，膝盖拉到胸前，双手支撑着她的身体——尼龙缠绕在她的胸部、大腿和头部。编舞让人想起具体派团体简单、通常是自发的手势，或者 Nengudi 几年前在纽约第一次遇到的点头成瘾者。动作因表演而异，并取决于雕塑的形状和大小，但其中一个雕塑中的人形干预——一只伸向墙壁的手，或支撑在她的头上倒立——似乎增强了 Nengudi 作品的人类特征，直到两种形式彼此无法区分。

Like the rest of contemporary art, performance works had up until this point been presented as a largely white activity, populated exclusively by the same lithe bodies that had marginalized Nengudi as a dancer years earlier. There was so little to compare it to in the late ’70s that it was easy to overlook just how groundbreaking it was to see two Black women in their 30s, with Afros and curves, contorting their figures in form-fitting clothing, while Nengudi’s strangely beautiful nylon forms wrapped around them like an old friend, holding them in her embrace.

AFTER THE “R.S.V.P.” series, Nengudi began working on increasingly ambitious projects while continuing to experiment with found materials and nontraditional spaces. In “Masked Taping” (1979), she covered her body from the knees up in pieces of masking tape and had herself photographed as she moved about her darkened studio as a ghostlike outline. And in a 1996 solo exhibition, “Wet Night — Early Dawn — Scat Chant — Pilgrim’s Song,” she used found objects like baking pans, dry cleaner bags, chopsticks and Santeria candles to pay homage to religious iconography and the relationship between the real and unreal.
在“R.S.V.P.”系列之后，Nengudi 开始从事越来越雄心勃勃的项目，同时继续尝试找到的材料和非传统空间。在《蒙面胶带》（1979 年）中，她用蒙面胶带从膝盖以上覆盖自己的身体，并在她在黑暗的工作室中移动时拍摄自己作为幽灵般的轮廓。在 1996 年的个展“Wet Night — Early Dawn — Scat Chant — Pilgrim's Song”中，她使用烤盘、干洗袋、筷子和 Santeria 蜡烛等现成物品来向宗教图像以及真实与虚幻之间的关系致敬。

But in 2003, she returned to the “R.S.V.P.” series, recreating some of her original nylon sculptures, after her friend Lorraine O’Grady insisted “there was still energy in them.” By this time, Nengudi was in a different stage of her life. She was teaching at the University of Colorado and caring for her ailing mother, who had been paralyzed by a stroke (she died in 2004). Remaking the pieces was a challenge. First, the nature of the materials had changed: “You think of pantyhose as pantyhose, but no, they have different crotches; they have different elasticity,” she said in the Smithsonian oral history. But she was also a different person, and in the process of preparing these works, Nengudi began to reflect anew on how they related to her own body. Whereas she had once seen them as a metaphor for new motherhood, she now began to see them in relation to the sexual abuse she had suffered as a child, something she hadn’t even told her mother about. “I’ve never really mentioned it, because I didn’t want my work to be seen with a narrow lens,” Nengudi said. “But there are some elements in there that I think have to do with that abuse.”
但在 2003 年，她回到了“R.S.V.P.”系列，在她的朋友 Lorraine O'Grady 坚持“它们仍然充满活力”之后，重新创作了一些她原来的尼龙雕塑。此时，Nengudi 正处于他人生的不同阶段。她在科罗拉多大学任教，照顾因中风而瘫痪（于 2004 年去世）生病的母亲。重新制作这些作品是一项挑战。首先，材料的性质发生了变化：“你把连裤袜看作是连裤袜，但不是，它们的裤裆不同;它们具有不同的弹性，“她在史密森尼口述历史中说。但她也是一个不同的人，在准备这些作品的过程中，Nengudi 开始重新思考它们与她自己的身体有何关系。虽然她曾经将它们视为新妈妈的隐喻，但现在她开始将它们与她小时候遭受的性虐待联系起来，她甚至没有告诉她的母亲。“我从来没有真正提到过它，因为我不想让我的作品被狭隘的镜头看待，”Nengudi 说。“但我认为其中有一些因素与这种虐待有关。”

She was between 10 and 13 years old and living in Los Angeles. It was one of her mother’s boyfriends. She feared talking about it, because he had threatened to kill her mother if she did. In remembering this period, Nengudi expressed appreciation for the way her mother, who was also being abused by the boyfriend, brought her into the decision-making process. When Nengudi’s mother had enough money to leave the relationship, she had two choices — purchase a car or rent a new home. She asked Nengudi what she wanted to do. “I said, ‘If we get a car, then we can run away,’ and she says, ‘OK, that’s what we’ll do,’” Nengudi said.
她年龄在 10 到 13 岁之间，住在洛杉矶。那是她妈妈的一个男朋友。她害怕谈论这件事，因为他威胁说，如果她这样做了，就杀了她的母亲。在回忆这段时期时，Nengudi 对她的母亲（也受到男朋友的虐待）将她带入决策过程的方式表示感谢。当 Nengudi 的母亲有足够的钱离开这段关系时，她有两个选择——买车或租新房。她问 Nengudi 她想做什么。“我说，'如果我们有车，那我们就可以逃跑了，'她说，'好吧，这就是我们要做的，'”Nengudi 说。

The pandemic has made Nengudi reflect more about what had happened to her as a child, because she’s been thinking about children for whom home is not a safe space: What will happen to them, to their bodies? For more than half her life, in her distortions of the human form, she has been exploring how we occupy our own bodies. “I often say, the psyche as well as the body can, you know, stretch and come back into shape,” she said. “But sometimes it doesn’t.” This may not have been the original intention of the works, but it is what they have become: a story of bodies in transformation, acting and being acted upon, doing their best to exist in the world.
这场大流行病让 Nengudi 更多地反思了她小时候发生的事情，因为她一直在思考那些家不是一个安全空间的孩子：他们、他们的身体会发生什么？在她生命的一半多时间里，在她对人类形态的扭曲中，她一直在探索我们如何占据自己的身体。“我经常说，你知道，心理和身体都可以伸展并恢复原状，”她说。“但有时它不会。”这可能不是作品的初衷，但这就是它们所成为的样子：一个关于身体在转变、行动和被行动中的故事，他们尽最大努力存在于世界上。