
Installation view: Las Vegas Ikebana: Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi, 2024.
Las Vegas Ikebana: Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi
February 15 - May 19, 2024
Traveling to the Columbus Museum of Art at The Pizzuti, July 18, 2025–January 11, 2026
Las Vegas Ikebana: Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi is curated by Allie Tepper,
visiting associate curator. The exhibition is organized for the Cooley by Tepper with director
Stephanie Snyder.
“Don’t be Scared”: A Talk on the Art of Collaboration by Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi, with opening remarks by exhibition curator Allie Tepper, and closing commentaries by Dr. Leslie King Hammond and Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims—presented as part of the Stephen E. Ostrow Distinguished Visitors in the Visual Arts program, Reed College.
Saturday, February 17, 2024, 2:00 pm, Performing Arts Building Atrium,
followed by a reception at the Cooley—all events free and open to the public
See-See Riders (2024), a new performance choreographed by Senga Nengudi and danced by sidony o'neal and keyon gaskin, presented in the exhibition
Friday, February 16, 2024, 3:00 pm
Saturday, February 17, 2024, noon
Saturday, March 23, 2024, noon
*Limited seating, to attend please email cooleyperformance@gmail.com
Las Vegas Ikebana: Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi is the first museum retrospective on the pioneering collective and cross-disciplinary 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 five-decade collaboration and lifelong friendship. 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, performances, videos, objects, artists’ books, and conceptual correspondences, forging a vital 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 year 2000 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. Since the mid-’80s, the two artists have lived on opposite sides of the country, keeping their connection alive through a long-distance exchange that embraced new media such as video and mailed, conceptual correspondences. Las Vegas Ikebana: Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi assembles a breadth of never-before or rarely seen materials including video, artists’ books, ephemera, photography, drawings, collages, sculptures, live performance, and newly commissioned works.
Publication
The exhibition is accompanied by the first monograph on the artists’ collaborations, co-published by Pacific and the Cooley Gallery, Reed College. The volume is edited with text by Allie Tepper, and includes archival materials alongside contributions by Maren Hassinger, Senga Nengudi, Dr. Leslie King Hammond, Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims, Kemi Adeyemi, Sampada Aranke, Steffani Jemison, and Stephanie Snyder. For more information, and to purchase the book, please visit D.A.P. / Distributed Art Publishers.
We gratefully acknowledge the generous lenders that made this exhibition possible: Maren Hassinger; Senga Nengudi; Amistad Research Center, New Orleans, LA; Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, DC; Susan Inglett Gallery, New York; Thomas Erben Gallery, New York; Sprüth Magers, New York; and Ulysses Jenkins.
For information about the exhibition and publication, please contact curator
Allie Tepper: allietep@gmail.com