This thesis considers the sculptures and performance works of the artist Senga Nengudi (b. 1943) during the 1970s and 1980s. Nengudi’s practice uses abstraction to render the body and bodily forms. In Nengudi’s performances, performer’s bodies are concealed by costuming and masking which render their forms as bodily abstractions. In Nengudi’s sculptures she uses materials and shapes which reference the body but which are abstracted to the point that they cannot definitively be considered bodies. Nengudi’s representations of bodily forms signify as racially Black and often reference Black femininity due to the artists’ recurrent use of nylon pantyhose to make her sculptures and to make her performers' costumes. I analyze how Nengudi’s works trouble the complex processes through which raced and gendered positionalities are ascribed onto bodies and their artistic representations. The thesis’s first chapter considers how gender is represented in the abstracted bodies of Nengudi’s early sculpture and her "R.S.V.P." series sculptures, which began in 1976. The chapter also considers how gender and race are performed in Nengudi’s work through an analysis of her 1978 performance "Ceremony For Freeway Fets." The second chapter situates a group of solo performance works created by Nengudi during the late 1970s and early 1980s within discourses of identity, Black art, and Black feminist art of the period.