Las Vegas Ikebana: Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi
February 15–May 19, 2024
Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, Portland, OR
Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi, Video Letters, September 17 and September 19, 1998 (stills), 1998, video, 48:18 min. Courtesy the artists and Susan Inglett Gallery, NYC, Sprüth Magers, and Thomas Erben Gallery. The video was conserved and remastered by the Cooley Gallery, Reed College, for the exhibition Las Vegas Ikebana: Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi, curated by Allie Tepper.
Las Vegas Ikebana: Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi is the first museum exhibition focused on the pioneering collective and cross-genre practices of artists Maren Hassinger (b. 1947, Los Angeles) and Senga Nengudi (b. 1943, Chicago). Since their first encounter in Los Angeles in 1977, Hassinger and Nengudi have developed an expansive body of time-based collaborations that span nearly five decades. Exceeding categorization, their works are grounded in performance, conceptual ideas, and a passionate exploration of the body in motion—tied to their shared training in movement languages developed by choreographers such as Lester Horton and Rudy Perez. While maintaining rigorous solo practices rooted in sculpture and installation, together the artists developed suites of dances, performance events and happenings, videos, and conceptual correspondences. Through this work they vitalized their personal commitments to one another, and to their artistic practices, forging a crucial system of support in periods of institutional neglect. Las Vegas Ikebana: Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi explores the longevity and transformative nature of the artists’ collaborations, as they evolved across decades, geographies, and media. Created in close dialogue with the artists, the exhibition is a reflexive record of their work and history, and an enactment of their ongoing practice, built through an ethos of love.
The title “Las Vegas Ikebana” is derived from a concept that the artists developed in the late ’80s that drew from Hassinger’s experience working in a flower shop in Los Angeles and Nengudi’s exploration of Japanese aesthetic forms. The phrase “Las Vegas Ikebana,” was privately exchanged between Hassinger and Nengudi to describe and catalyze many of their creative expressions for years to come. As Nengudi notes, she liked the term for “the absurdity of it, and how it stirs one’s thought processes.” The phrase also encompasses many aspects of the artists’ individual and collective work such as their interests in improvisational compositions, ritual, impermanence, popular culture, humor, eroticism, and the natural world.
The exhibition includes early work made in Los Angeles in the 1970s and ’80s, including Hassinger’s performances with Nengudi’s seminal series R.S.V.P. (1977–present)—and events made with associates including Ulysses Jenkins, Franklin Parker, Harmon Outlaw, May Sun, and the collective of Black artists known as Studio Z. It also draws crucial attention to lesser-known works from the 1990s and 2000s, following their departures from Los Angeles. Amidst personal challenges and newfound geographic distance between them, the artists embraced new media such as video and mailed, conceptual correspondences. Las Vegas Ikebana: Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi assembles a breadth of materials including video, rare artist books and ephemera, photography, drawings, as well as select sculptures and newly commissioned works.
Las Vegas Ikebana: Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi is curated by Allie Tepper, associate curator. It is organized for the Cooley by Tepper with director Stephanie Snyder.
Related programs
Saturday, February 17, 2PM, Performing Arts Building Atrium, Reed College
“Don’t be Scared”: A Talk on the Art of Collaboration by Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi, presented as part of the Stephen E. Ostrow Distinguished Visitors in the Visual Arts program, with opening remarks by exhibition curator Allie Tepper, and closing commentaries by Dr. Leslie King Hammond and Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims
See-See Riders (2024), a performance choreographed by Senga Nengudi and danced by sidony o’neal and keyon gaskin, presented in the exhibition
Friday, February 16, 3PM
Saturday, February 17, 12PM
Saturday, March 23, 12PM
*limited capacity, to attend please email cooleyperformance@gmail.com
Publication
The exhibition is accompanied by the first publication on Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi’s work, edited by Allie Tepper, co-published by the Cooley and Pacific, and designed by Pacific, forthcoming in the fall of 2024. A scholarly resource and conceptual sourcebook on the artists’ shared creative practice, the richly-illustrated book includes newly commissioned conversations and essays by Tepper, Maren Hassinger, Senga Nengudi, Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims and Dr. Leslie King Hammond, Kemi Adeyemi, Sampada Aranke, and Steffani Jemison, as well as extensive archival material.
Press
Lowery Stokes Sims, “Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi’s Storied Art Collaboration,” Hyperallergic
Ella Ray, “How to Say Friendship: Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi at the Cooley Gallery,” Variable West
Hannah Krafcik, “Process and Destiny at the Cooley Gallery,” OregonArtsWatch
