Beyond Side by Side: intermediality in Senga Nengudi's collaborations

While Senga Nengudi and Maren Hassinger’s collaborations have garnered considerable scholarship and are reflected in recent exhibitions and publications on their respective practices, the wider collaborative structure of their work and artistic development has yet to be fully explored. This essay considers the fruitful relationships between Nengudi, Hassinger, Cheryl Banks, David Hammons, Franklin Parker, and Ulysses Jenkins, positing collaboration as a vital strategy for fostering a distinctly intermedia art. By probing archival material including the photographic documentation of group performances, individual statements, and correspondence, the analysis demonstrates how members of this Los Angeles-based artistic circle helped one another understand media categories in ways that defied the hegemony of Western modernism. It also seeks to establish the artists’ shared view of photographic documentation as a collaborative experience and a means of visualizing the process of pushing the limits of one medium with another.