Artistic Collaborations: Senga Nengudi & Maren Hassinger

Artland’s “Artistic Collaborations” series offers an insight into some of the art world’s most inspiring and unique artistic collaborations. This week, we will examine the boundary-breaking work in sculpture, dance and performance by Senga Nengudi and Maren Hassinger. The two artists lived and worked in Los Angeles during the 1970s, and were involved with the loose artist collective Studio Z as part of a rich artist community where people would go to work in their own studios, and then come together to share and exchange their work. Nengudi and Hassinger both initially wanted to be dancers, and ended up as sculptors who created performances in an utterly original combination of arts. In their artistic collaboration, they were able to explore the dance that was so much a part of both of them.

Senga Nengudi and Maren Hassinger – Studio Z

In 1970s LA, a community of black artists formed the loose artist collective Studio Z.
They came together in the studio of artist David Hammond, which occupied a former dancehall. Hammond offered Nengudi to share the studio with him, and it soon became a place where various artists came together to collaborate on performance ideas and practice. Among the artists involved with Studio Z were David Hammond, Senga Nengudi, Maren Hassinger, Barbara McCullough, and John Outterbridge. As Nengudi explains: “We made our own beautiful world, even though the art establishment was not recognising us particularly at the moment. Because LA is very multicultural, we were able to work as people of colour, in our own special way, the way we wanted to. We were able to enjoy our culture, be our culture, experience our culture in new ways together, which the establishment didn’t have time for… We each had our own careers but our time together provided communal support when there was little support to be had outside of ourselves.” The artists would each work on their own projects, and then come together to exchange with each other, and experiment with their work.
These meetings also led to natural collaborations, and Nengudi and Hassinger found in each other long-term collaborating partners. Hassinger’s practice includes sculptures, videos and performances, merging her background in fibre arts, sculpture and dance. Nengudi also works with a wide range of media, with a focus on sculptures that combine natural and synthetic materials to explore connections between the body, the spirit, visual arts and dance. Together, they explored their shared interest in movement and performance.  

Senga Nengudi and Maren Hassinger – R.S.V.P.

In 1977, Nengudi and Hassinger did their first public performance collaboration together, connected to Nengudi’s sculptural work R.S.V.P. (repondez s’il vous plait), initially created in response to the physiological changes in Nengudi’s body following the birth of her child. Nengudi’s sculptural work is characterised by her love of one material in particular: nylon pantyhose. She stretches the pantyhose, ties them, fills them with sand, and suspends them in space, creating “performance objects”.
The pieces are haunting, sensual and tactile, and recall the complexity, vulnerability and strength of the human body. The elements Nengudi works with are elasticity and resilience, seemingly containing all of life’s issues. In more recent iterations, she examines the emotional changes we experience as we age through these works.

Nengudi called the piece R.S.V.P. because she wanted people to respond to it, to activate the work. This is exactly what Hassinger did during the performance, becoming a part of the piece, and moving back and forth with it, as though she and the nylon were partners in a dance. Smoothly weaving and contorting her body through the nylon web, Hassinger created a moving dialogue with Nengudi and her performance object. At times, Nengudi and Hassinger would work according to a plan, but often, they would improvise in preparation of the actual performance.
They also performed together, two sculptors who had wanted to be dancers found themselves dancing with a sculpture.