"Mass Transit" launched in Indianapolis as Chakaia Booker's largest outdoor urban exhibition and her first project composed of works made specifically for a community.
In the fall of 2018, Chakaia Booker unveiled Mass Transit, a landmark public art project installed at the Julia M. Carson Transit Center and surrounding sites in Indianapolis, Indiana. This project marked a genuine milestone in Booker's decades-long career: it became her largest outdoor urban exhibition to date, surpassing the scale of prior presentations including her acclaimed 2004 Storm King Art Center show.
Even more significantly, Mass Transit represented the first time Booker created a body of work composed entirely of artworks made specifically for a community, rather than existing sculptures adapted for a new venue. This shift reflected a deepened engagement with site-specificity and public accessibility, situating her monumental tire sculptures within the everyday infrastructure of urban transit — a space traversed daily by working-class residents, commuters, and travelers of Indianapolis.
By embedding her sculptures within a functioning transit hub, Booker extended her long-standing themes of labor, movement, and industrial reclamation into a context where art and daily civic life intersected directly. The project underscored her commitment to public engagement beyond traditional museum and gallery walls, bringing large-scale contemporary sculpture into direct dialogue with a broad, non-specialist public audience.
Mass Transit stands as a defining achievement in Booker's career, illustrating her evolution from gallery and sculpture-park exhibitions toward ambitious, community-embedded public commissions that redefined the possibilities of her signature tire-based practice.