Senga Nengudi is a performance artist, installation artist and sculptor. She often expresses her ideas about the human body through her work. The quote below is from our 2013 Oral History interview with Senga Nengudi conducted by Elissa Auther.

SENGA NENGUDI: I’ve always been intrigued with materials that are connected to time and place, materials that people basically think, Okay, I can tape something—I can put something together with it; I can use it to prep for painting a wall or something like that. And I like to take those materials and find other uses for them, so that in the same vein, people know that they can expand themselves, that they don’t have to be viewed as one thing and kept in that box.

It was the cheapest thing; that’s why I used a lot of stuff, like paper tarps that I would get from the paint store. I could utilize them very quickly. They were very large, and they allowed me to do a lot of things in a grand manner, so that’s why I used them. They were cheap; they were only like two dollars a piece, and the tape was like 49 cents. So I then wanted to explore elements, say like an African culture and so on. I always loved the costumes and so on. And so in that way, I could do it very quickly.

ELISSA AUTHER: So you’d just tear off pieces of the tape and adhere them to yourself?

SENGA NENGUDI: Mm-hmm. [Affirmative.] I kept doing that. Then once my body was covered, then I moved with it in the studio.

ELISSA AUTHER: So there was a dance element?

SENGA NENGUDI: Always. Oh, I should say always a movement element to pretty much everything I did. And I just can’t say enough about these photographers, because without that kind of documentation, it just would have been lost.

—-
📸: Unknown photographer. Contact sheet with portraits of Senga Nengudi for Contextures (exhibit catalog), circa 1978. Senga Nengudi papers, 1947, circa 1962-2017

On the twelfth day of GIFmas, my true love gave to me: Twelve windowpanes, eleven sparkly trees, ten ornaments, nine blinking lights, eight nuns a-running, seven ladybugs, six nesting envelopes,  FIVE HULA HOOPS … four flopping fish, three stacked sheep, two Tarzans, and (sing it with us) a PEACOCK IN A PINE TREEEEEEE!!!

Un-Ichi Hiratsuka Christmas card to Prentiss Taylor, ca. 1970. Prentiss Taylor papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

On the eleventh day of GIFmas, my true love gave to me: Eleven sparkly trees, ten ornaments, nine blinking lights, eight nuns a-running, seven ladybugs, six nesting envelopes,  FIVE HULA HOOPS … four flopping fish, three stacked sheep, two Tarzans, and a peacock in a pine tree.

Judy Petacque holiday card to Kathleen Blackshear and Ethel Spears, 197-?. Kathleen Blackshear and Ethel Spears papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.