Senga Nengudi (née Sue Irons; born September 18, 1943)[1] is an African-American visual artist and curator.

She is part of a group of African-American avant-garde artists working in New York City and Los Angeles, from the 1960s and onward.

[5] She then spent a year studying at Waseda University in Tokyo, in the hopes of learning more about the Gutai Art Association.

[7][8] Nengudi was part of the radical, avant-garde Black art scenes in both New York City and Los Angeles, during the 1960s and 1970s.

[4] In the late 1970s, Nengudi worked under Brockman Gallery's CETA-funded arts program, where she met Maren Hassinger.

This program allowed Nengudi and Hassinger to create Ceremony for Freeway Fets, a performance with artists David Hammons, Franklin Parker and others who were part of Studio Z.

[12] Other members of Studio Z included Ronn Davis,[13] Duval Lewis, RoHo, Barbara McCullough, Houston Conwill, and Joe Ray (artist).

[14] In 1978, Nengudi paired with Hassinger for a performance piece in which the two artists improvised movement while entangled inside a large web of pantyhose.

She often combines African, Asian and Native American art forms in particular for her performance pieces and staged photographs.

While her oeuvre highlights issues surrounding gender, race and ethnicity, Nengudi's work focuses on the ways in which everyone is negatively affected by these systematic forces and her pieces attempt to foster cross-cultural inspiration for men and women alike.

Furthermore, Nengudi's "R.S.V.P" sculptures differed greatly from most of the art work made popular by her artistic peers in Los Angeles and New York.

In the final installation, Nengudi projected video footage onto a vertical screen of punch cards in a space with ambient sound from the audio recordings.

She has also curated exhibits, including the solo show of Kira Lynn Harris at the Cue Art Foundation in New York in the spring of 2009.

Her solo shows include Senga Nengudi (1971), California State University, Los Angeles; Vestige: The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus’ S.D.