For sculptor Chakaia Booker, her first career-guiding artistic inspiration was a kind of baptism by fire. Thirty years ago, during the city's rough old days, she was living in an East Village apartment (the same one she inhabits today), and the streets were burning. Trash, buildings, and especially cars—each night, it seemed, flames engulfed another one. Booker, in her late twenties and itching to express herself, was intrigued—not by the destruction, but by the transformation of the cars' tires. "Once they would burn, you would get different effects," she says, recalling the attraction of the melted tread. "I would go by these cars after they cooled and just begin to scrape... More >>>