History

Offices are rented at 114 State Street, and gallery space is provided by the Fogg and Busch-Reisinger Museums at Harvard University in Cambridge. 

The ICA relocates to 14 Newbury Street in Boston. Museum admission is 25 cents. 

The ICA relocates to the Boston Art Club at 270 Dartmouth Street. 

The Walker Art Center is founded. 

The ICA relocates to 210 Beacon Street. 

Modern Mexican Painters presents the work of Frida Kahlo, José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, among others. 

Founding trustees Thomas Metcalf and W.G. Russell Allen step in as acting co-directors while James Plaut leaves Boston to serve in the war. Plaut’s wartime activities (1942–46) include directing the Art Looting Investigation Unit, the intelligence unit of the storied “Monuments Men and Women” responsible for preserving the artistic and cultural achievements of western civilization from the destruction of war and theft by the Nazis.

Learn more about James Plaut’s service

The ICA relocates to 138 Newbury Street. 

Setting off heated debate in the art world, the museum changes its name from the Boston Museum of Modern Art to the Institute of Contemporary Art, disassociating itself from “widespread and injurious misunderstandings” the term “modern art” had accrued during the war era and aligning itself instead with the art of the time.

The ICA makes national news with a statement co-signed with the Whitney and MoMA that affirms the dedication of all three museums to the exploration of new frontiers in artistic practice. 

A survey of British art since the turn of the century features the work of eminent painter Francis Bacon and the young Lucian Freud, soon to become one of the most distinguished painters of the twentieth century. 

In one of the earliest U.S. retrospectives dedicated to Wassily Kandinsky, the ICA explores the artist’s foundational role in the development of abstraction, including 52 major paintings, among them 28 never before exhibited in this country.

ICA director James Plaut co-juries the 24th Corcoran Biennial, which travels from Washington, D.C., to Boston, introducing audiences to recent paintings by Adolph Gottlieb and Willem de Kooning, among others. 

The ICA moves to new quarters at 230 The Fenway. 

The ICA celebrates twenty years at the forefront of contemporary art in Boston with highlights from previous exhibitions. 

Selection 1957 inaugurates an annual exhibition program surveying New England artists, organized most years through 1964. 

Eminent art historian William Rubin organizes the first U.S. museum survey dedicated to Spanish painter Roberto Matta (sponsored by MoMA in collaboration with the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the ICA). 

Young Talent in New England takes art outside the museum: installed on the walls of a Stop & Shop store on Memorial Drive, the exhibition displays the work of regional artists and anticipates the growing interest in American consumer culture among pop artists such as Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol. 

Newly designed by architect and ICA founder Nathaniel Saltonstall, the Metropolitan Boston Arts Center, at 1175 Soldiers Field Road, becomes the museum’s home for two years.

The ICA relocates to 100 Newbury Street. 

The 32nd Venice Biennale signals the sensational arrival of American Pop art on the international scene. A concurrent exhibition at the ICA celebrates the artists representing the U.S. in Venice: John Chamberlain, Jim Dine, Jasper Johns, Morris Louis, Kenneth Nland, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella.

At an early moment in the history of electronic media and video art, Art Turned On brings together some of its leading pioneers, including Dan Flavin, Robert Whitman, and Fluxus artists Ay-O and Joe Jones. Marcel Duchamp attends the exhibition and takes a special interest in Jones’s Music Plant. 

Received ideas about mark-making, gesture, and authorship come under scrutiny in Painting Without a Brush, presenting works by Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Jackson Pollock, Jean Tinguely, and Andy Warhol, among others. 

The ICA organizes the second museum exhibition dedicated to Andy Warhol, with nearly 40 iconic works—soon to become touchstones of 20th-century art history—as well as staging a performance of the landmark intermedia work Exploding Plastic Inevitable by Warhol and the Velvet Underground. 

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago is founded. 

The ICA returns to 1175 Soldiers Field Road. 

Parkman House at 33 Beacon Street becomes the ICA’s new temporary home. 

With the exhibition Monumental Sculpture for Public Spaces, the ICA brings art into the public arena. Outdoor sculptural interventions by Alexander Calder, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Louise Nevelson, Claes Oldenburg, Mark di Suvero, and others spring up around the city. At City Hall Plaza, Robert Indiana erects a 12-foot-high steel version of his iconic work LOVE. 

The ICA moves to 137 Newbury Street. 

A transformed police headquarters at 955 Boylston Street becomes the ICA’s new home for the next 33 years. 

An exhibition observing the rise of postminimalism features work by Ree Morton and Hannah Wilke, among others.

A two-person exhibition pairs paintings by Joan Snyder and Pat Steir.

Photographs, maps, and drawings document Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Ocean Front (1974), their most recent public intervention. The ICA returns to the couple’s oeuvre in 1979, organizing a major survey of their urban projects. 

The ICA launches the Open City Youth Program, a precursor to the museum’s nationally recognized Teen Arts Education program.

The New Museum is founded. 

Paul Taylor Dance Company performs at the ICA with set and costumes by Boston-based artist Alex Katz.

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (LA MOCA) is founded. 

The ICA mounts Florine Stettheimer: Still Lifes, Portraits and Pageants, 1910–1942, a successor to her retrospective at Museum of Modern Art in 1946. Stettheimer is recognized as one of the most individualistic American painters of the era between the wars. 

The ICA organizes Art and Dance, examining a century of exchange between visual art and dance from 1890 to 1980, featuring works by dozens of artists, including Merce Cunningham, Marcel Duchamp, and Yvonne Rainer.

The Pérez Art Museum Miami is founded. 

In conjunction with the ICA’s 50th anniversary, the museum launches a landmark project including a major print catalogue and three exhibitions around Dissent: The Issue of Modern Art in Boston. This important project analyzes the distinct attitudes and ideas, during the first half of the 20th century, that set Boston modern art apart from the mainstream as defined by New York City. 

Pioneering performance and conceptual artist Chris Burden receives his first U.S. museum survey, organized by the Newport Harbor Art Museum and shown at the ICA.

Milena Kalinovska joins the ICA as director, serving in that position until 1998. 

WIth works by such artists as David Hammons and Glenn Ligon, Malcolm X: Man, Ideal, Icon explores the cultural and political legacy of one of the most galvanizing African-American leaders in U.S. history.

The ICA introduces Boston audiences to the productions of filmmaker Steve McQueen. 

Curated by Catherine de Zegher, Inside the Visible acknowledges under-recognized contributions by women artists in the 20th century, with works by Louise Bourgeois, Lygia Clark, Eva Hesse, Nancy Spero, and Carrie Mae Weems. 

New Histories spotlights contemporary artists of African and African American descent whose work addresses the history and daily realities of racism, such as Isaac Julien, Kara Walker, and Fred Wilson. 

One of Brazil’s most influential contemporary artists, conceptualist Cildo Meireles, receives the first major U.S. museum exhibition of his career. 

Enterprise reflects the emergence of Relational Aesthetics (the term first coined in 1996), featuring work by Rikrit Tiravanija, and, in their first U.S. museum show, Vanessa Beecroft and Liam Gillick. 

Jill Medvedow launches Vita Brevis at the museum, an ongoing series that commissions local, national, and international artists to create temporary works of art in public settings. Krzysztof Wodiczko and Jim Hodges are among the first artists to receive commissions. 

The ICA wins a citywide bid to develop a new building for the museum on Boston’s Fan Pier. 

Cornelia Parker receives her first museum solo exhibition in the U.S. 

After a competitive selection process, New York architecture firm Diller Scofidio is commissioned to design the new ICA. 

The ICA opens its new world-class, 62,000-square-foot building designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro on Boston’s waterfront, and establishes a permanent collection of 20th- and 21st-century art with works by Paul Chan, Marlene Dumas, Mona Hatoum, Christian Jankowski, and Cornelia Parker. 

The ICA presents the world premiere of Looky by the Mark Morris Dance Group.

The ICA organizes Anish Kapoor’s first U.S. museum survey in more than 15 years, and presents the first museum survey of Tara Donovan’s work. 

In conjunction with Shepard Fairey: Supply and Demand, the first museum survey of one of the most influential street artists of our time, the artist creates public artworks at sites around Boston and a new mural for the ICA.

Jenny Holzer presents a new text projection on the exterior of the ICA as part of her collaboration with Bessie Award–winning choreographer Miguel Gutierrez. 

ICA commissions and hosts the world premiere of Body Against Body by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company.

Brazilian twin-brother street artist duo Os Gemeos are the first artists to create a mural on a large Big Dig ventilation structure on the Rose Kennedy Greenway, in partnership with the Greenway Conservancy. The mural, depicting a boy in brightly colored clothing, accompanies the artists’ first solo exhibition in the U.S.

This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s, featuring artwork by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, the Guerrilla Girls, Jeff Koons, Robert Mapplethorpe, Richard Prince, Gerhard Richter, Doris Salcedo, Cindy Sherman, and Tseng Kwong Chi with Keith Haring, receives wide critical acclaim, attracting record crowds. 

The influential Fiber: Sculpture 1960–Present considers cultural and critical forces shaping abstract fiber art with works by 34 artists including Magdalena Abakanowicz, Françoise Grossen, Eva Hesse, Sheila Hicks, Lenore Tawney, Rosemarie Trockel, and Haegue Yang.

The ICA presents Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957, the first comprehensive museum exhibition on the influential school in the United States. The exhibition features works by more than 90 artists, including Anni and Josef Albers, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, Ruth Asawa, Robert Motherwell, Gwendolyn and Jacob Knight Lawrence, Charles Olson, and Robert Creeley, as well as archival materials, a soundscape, and a piano and a dance floor for live performances including recreations of rediscovered work by Merce Cunningham.

The ICA presents the first mid-career survey of the work of Boston-born artist Liz Deschenes, whose singular and influential achievements in photography and sculpture consider light, color, and the relationship between the mechanics of seeing, image-making processes, and modes of display. 

The ICA organizes the first U.S. survey of the work of artist Mark Dion. Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 21st-Century Naturalist examined 30 years of his pioneering inquiries into how we collect, interpret, and display nature. A highlight of the exhibition, the installation The Library for the Birds of New York/The Library for the Birds of Massachusetts, brought live canaries and finches to the galleries.

The ICA presents the first comprehensive American exhibition of artwork by celebrated choreographer William Forsythe. Visitors are invited to physically interact with the works.

In the Watershed, John Akomfrah’s Purple, an immersive six-channel video installation co-commissioned by the ICA, makes its U.S. premiere.