Las Vegas Ikebana: Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi
Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, Portland, OR
February 15–May 19, 2024
Travels to: The Columbus Museum of Art at The Pizzuti, Columbus, OH
July 18, 2025–January 11, 2026
Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi, Video Letters, September 17 and September 27, 1998, 1998, video (color, sound), 48:18 min. Courtesy the artists and Susan Inglett Gallery, New York, Sprüth Magers, and Thomas Erben Gallery
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 connection 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 experimentation and support.
The title Las Vegas Ikebana is derived from a concept that the artists developed in the early 2000s 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 work R.S.V.P. Performance Piece (1977)—and events made with associates including Ulysses Jenkins, Franklin Parker, Houston Conwill, David Hammons, and the loose 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
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 monograph to survey the work of Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi’s, edited by Allie Tepper and co-published by Pacific and the Cooley, forthcoming in January 2025. The publication assembles a plethora of never-before or rarely seen artworks and ephemera alongside images of the exhibition and a new performance titled See-See Riders, choreographed by Nengudi. Newly commissioned essays by critics, curators and artists trace the performative and conceptual working method of the two artists in distinct historical periods. The book includes a never-before-published 1987 conversation between Hassinger and Nengudi; an extensive oral history between the artists and their longstanding supporters, curators Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims and Dr. Leslie King Hammond; and original essays by the volume’s editor and exhibition curator Allie Tepper, critics Kemi Adeyemi and Sampada Aranke, and artist Steffani Jemison—all of whom expand upon the artists’ crucial system of support that persisted in periods of institutional neglect. A complete annotated chronology of the artists’ collaborations, as well as exhibition and performance histories, also accompany the book.
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
Sidony O’Neal, “Top Ten,” Artforum
“Portland Artists and Curators on their Favorite Shows from 2024,” Portland Monthly
