Artist-in-Residence

Senga Nengudi

Senga Nengudi, Warp Trance, 2007. Multi-channel audio/video installation. Sound composition by Butch Morris. Photo credit: Aaron Igler.

During her residency at FWM, Senga Nengudi became interested inPennsylvania’s, and FWM’s, rich history with textile production. She visited several local textile mills—including MTL (Material Technology & Logistics), in Jessup, Pennsylvania; Langhorne Carpet in Penndel, Pennsylvania; and Scalamandré, then located in Long Island City, New York—and was intrigued by the repetitive motion and sounds of textile manufacturing. During these visits, with the generous cooperation of the mills, Nengudi collected video footage and sound recordings as well as hundreds of Jacquard punch cards. She then invited composer Butch Morris to take the audio recordings from the textile mills and turn the ambient sounds into a composition to accompany the video projections. The resulting installation, Warp Trance, a four-channel audio and video montage of sounds and images derived from industrial weaving mills, evoked ritual and trance with its repetitive motion and audiovisual rhythms.

Warp Trace was Nengudi’s first work employing video. She had long focused primarily on discarded, everyday materials with associations reaching further than a viewer might initially assume. The Jacquard punch card panels—onto which the Warp Trance video footage is projected—fit perfectly into this category. As well as being a revolutionary step in textile production, the Jacquard loom was also the first machine that used punch cards to control a sequence of operations. Consequently, the cards are considered the initial step in the history of computing hardware as well as a key conceptual precursor to the development of computer programming.

Artist Bio

American, born in Chicago, 1943. Lives and works in Colorado Springs, CO.

Senga Nengudi received a B.A. in art and dance and a M.A. in sculpture from California State University in Los Angeles, CA. She also studied Japanese Culture at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. Nengudi was at the forefront of the African-American avant-garde in New York and LA in the 1970s and 80s, including exhibitions at Just Above Midtown (JAM) gallery—a period that was revisited in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, NY (2022). Nengudi’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including at Museum of Contemporary Art (LA MOCA), Los Angeles, CA (1998, 2007), the 54th Carnegie International 2004–2005, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA (2004), the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, Texas (2005), Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL (2017), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY (2019), and Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, a traveling exhibition organized by Tate Modern in collaboration with Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, and Brooklyn Museum, New York (2017–2019). In 2005, Nengudi received both the Anonymous Was a Woman Award and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. A lifetime retrospective of the artist’s work, Senga Nengudi: Topologies, was presented at Lenbachhaus Munich, Germany (2019), Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Brazil (2020), and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA (2021).