RSVP Untitled

Part of a vanguard generation of artists who emerged during the turbulent decade of the 1960s, Senga Nengudi has been challenging the boundaries between sculpture and performance art for over five decades. In 1974, inspired by her pregnancy and the elasticity of women’s bodies, Nengudi began to experiment with used pantyhose. She suspended pairs from the ceiling, stretched them between walls, filled them with sand to allow gravity to exert its force, and pulled them tightly over objects. Round, heavy forms, such as those in R.S.V.P. Untitled, evoke breasts and testicles, while the nylon material itself—ubiquitous and universally under- stood—referenced women’s bodies in a uniquely personal way. On the subject of her choice of material, Nengudi said at the time, “I am working with nylon mesh because it relates to the elasticity of the human body. From tender, tight beginnings to sagging
end. . . . My works are abstracted reflections of used bodies.” The impermanence of Nengudi’s fragile objects remain an important reference point for performance art as it developed during the 1970s. As she later summarized, “My art is like a butterfly landing on one’s knee. . . . The moment is fleeting—but remembered.”