Booker's exhibition "Surface Pressure" opened at Sarasota Art Museum, presenting a range of her tire and mixed-media sculptures.
On November 4, 2019, the Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design opened Chakaia Booker: Surface Pressure, a major exhibition presenting a wide range of the artist's tire-based and mixed-media sculptural works. This exhibition arrived during the museum's inaugural year of operation, making Booker's inclusion a significant early moment in the young institution's exhibition history.
The show offered visitors a comprehensive look at Booker's evolving practice, spanning works that showcased her signature techniques of cutting, weaving, and reassembling rubber tires into intricate forms that ranged from wall-mounted reliefs to freestanding sculptural masses. The title Surface Pressure evoked both the literal physical process of manipulating rubber under tension and heat, and metaphorical readings of pressure — social, historical, environmental — embedded in her chosen material.
This exhibition continued Booker's decades-long engagement with themes of consumption, industrialization, and reclamation, while also reflecting her sustained relevance to a new generation of curators and museum visitors. Its presentation in Florida extended her geographic reach beyond the New York and Miami art circuits that had defined much of her earlier institutional recognition, further solidifying her status as a nationally significant American sculptor.