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Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art

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Chakaia Booker

El Gato

June Ahrens

Used and Worn

Still Standing

Nick Cave

Amalgam (brown)

Bruce Dorfman

Enso

The Weight of Light

Jaume Plensa

The Androgen

Elias Sime

Tightrope: On the Edge

Donald Sultan

Spike Acanthe, July 5, 1993

Tensile Strength Exhibition Checklist_FINAL_10-27-2022.pdf

Tensile strength, in science and engineering, is the resistance of a material to breaking under tension. Engaging with this definition, this exhibition displays a selection of works from the Kemper Museum Permanent Collection that embrace material fragility and/or endurance. The art featured in this gallery is stretched, snapped, salvaged, worn, assembled, and transformed either by human intervention or by forces of nature.

In part, this exhibition calls upon the history of assemblage and the found object, popularized by avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century such as Dadaism and Conceptual art. These influential movements developed as a result of the immense trauma of global war and rapid industrialization. Following in this legacy, the artists on view utilize everyday materials—tar, rubber, glass, soap, flora, and computer parts—or create works that approximate everyday life by combining materials in unexpected ways, such as the sculptural replica of a weathered building, House at Christmastime, Greensboro, Alabama (1993–94), by William Christenberry (American, 1936–2016). In doing so, these artists respond to their environments, breathing new life into the materials that they have carefully sourced and animated.

This exhibition arrives at a moment of deep social tension and infrastructural adversity in the United States. Tensile Strength marks our current state of fragility by focusing on the impermanent but lasting materials within our everyday lives. These materials, which often serve as apt representations of our lived experiences, wear and break under duress, but nonetheless persist through steady care, collection, and reinvention.

Tensile Strength is organized by Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and curated by Krista Alba, assistant curator.

Tensile Strength

Chakaia Booker (American, born 1953), El Gato, 2001, rubber tires and wood, 48 x 42 x 42 inches. Bebe and Crosby Kemper Collection, Museum purchase, Enid and Crosby
Kemper and William T. Kemper Acquisition Fund, 2004.12.01. © Chakaia Booker. Photo: E. G. Schempf, 2017.