Born in Newark, New Jersey, Booker lives and works in Manhattan and Allentown, Pennsylvania. She has exhibited in group and solo exhibitions, nationally and internationally.
Her first experience with shearing and cutting was in her teens, when she began to make her own clothes. To this day, her fashion signature is her own wearable art - a large elaborately wrapped headdress. She doesn't belabor the meaning of her work, but said the varied tones of the rubber parallel human diversity, while the treads suggest images as varied as African-Americans, the slavery experience, African scarification and textile designs. The discarded tires is a nod to industrialization and environmental concerns.
Booker received a B.A. in sociology from Rutgers University in 1976, and an M.F.A. from the City College of New York in 1993. She gained international acclaim at the 2000 Whitney Biennial with It’s So Hard to Be Green (2000), her 12.5 x 21 foot wall-hung tire sculpture.
Booker has received numerous awards and grants including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005, the Pollock-Krasner Grant in 2002, the Anonymous Was a Woman Grant in 2000, the Johnnie L. Cochran, Jr. Art Fund Award in 1999 and a 1994 Commission, through the NASA Art Program at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
In 2014 the sculptures were in New York City’s Garment District. And can you guess what NYC called her work….“The Sentinels!”
