Booker and Kepple: Extra Texture

When people look at her art, Chakaia Booker says, they tend to see a single color: black. That's because the sculptural works she's making these days -- five of which are on display at the National Museum of Women in the Arts -- are formed from discarded rubber tires: useless things made beautiful.

One, called "Acid Rain," was recently purchased by the museum after appearing in the 48th annual Corcoran Biennial last year. Like the rest of the pieces in Booker's show (part of the museum's "Forefront" series of single-gallery exhibitions devoted to emerging and mid-career artists), it's a handsome object: big, forceful, richly textured, a little bit wild. As Booker points out during a gallery walk-through, though, it's not just black, but subtle grays, browns, even silvers. "It's not just the one color that you might be thinking," she says.

There's a temptation to read more into her statement -- racial metaphors, for example -- than the African American artist is willing, or able, to discuss. "The different tonalities of the rubber," the wall text reads, "are linked to issues of African American identity as well as to the history of the color black in modern art from Kasimir Malevich to Louise Nevelson and Frank Stella."

But that's curator-speak. Ask the artist directly about such a notion, and she'll own up to consciously thinking about little more than such issues as how much the darn things weigh, or how she's going to get them into or out of her studio. There are themes of environmentalism (recycling); politics (Booker was a Rutgers sociology major in the mid-1970s); and feminism (the labial folds of rubber often evoke Georgia O'Keeffe) at play here, but Booker says she's uncomfortable talking about content. She'd prefer to leave that to the critics, art historians and her audience.

That's because her works, as she puts it, are "infinite." She doesn't want there to be any "rules" or "limitations." This goes for our interpretation of them, as well as for their creation.

Working in what she calls a "palette of textures" rather than color, Booker alludes, in her art, to African scarification, dreadlocks, skin, issues of class and labor, even the rehabilitation and empowerment of marginalized groups.

She may not want to talk about these ideas. She doesn't have to. Her art articulates them for her, even as it dazzles the eye.

The paintings of Kevin Kepple, on view at Addison/Ripley Fine Art, are similarly seductive. Unlike Booker's work, though, Kepple's glue-and-ink-on-birch-panel abstractions utilize both hue and texture.

Working in a palette of mostly gemlike greens, reds and oranges (with a smattering of cool blue-ish whites and white-ish blues that evoke porcelain), Kepple creates unexpected depth by laying down multiple glazelike layers of semi-translucent color in a signature motif of coiled, undulating circles. Think of mattress springs that have been sunk just below the surface of a pool of sunlit root beer, or pineapple juice, or algae-clogged pond, and you'll begin to have an imperfect sense of their luminescent, liquid depths.

You may want to lick them, or break their glossy surface by dipping your fingers in. They glow.

They are not, at least compared with Booker's art, overtly content-driven. Which is not to say they're content-free. Like the Washington Color School painters, in whose lineage Kepple is at least a grandnephew, and like the work of Washington stalwart Robin Rose, whose studio assistant Kepple once was, this is retinal art. It's more than easy on the eyes; it's almost promiscuous beauty.

Sure, it's about color, and surface and material. But you also get the feeling that Kepple's pictures, unlike Narcissus, are in love with more than their own reflections. At times, they evoke place. "Little Conemaugh," "Iron City II" and "Tioga," particularly, suggest interpretations of the artist's native Pennsylvania. At other times, our own mortality is brought to mind, as with the dried-blood reds of "Suture" or, at the other extreme, the bone-white pallor of "Bloodless."

It's art with a pretty face, yes, but a brain and a heart to boot.

FOREFRONT: CHAKAIA BOOKER Through Sept. 4 at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1250 New York Ave. NW (Metro: Metro Center). 202-783-5000. http://www.nmwa.org. Open Monday-Saturday 10 to 5; Sundays noon to 5. $8; students and seniors $6; members and visitors 18 and younger free; free admission the first Sunday and Wednesday of the month.

KEVIN A. KEPPLE: NEW PAINTINGS Through June 17 at Addison/Ripley Fine Art, 1670 Wisconsin Ave. NW. 202-338-5180. http://www.addisonripleyfineart.com. Open Tuesday-Saturday 11 to 6. Free.