A person with long beaded braids and a yellow hat smiles as they create a 2-D artwork

Destiny Doorways: Creating the Doors We Walk Through

Feb 10, 2024 – Jun 14, 2024

We opened new doorways with Boston artist and former ICA Teen Mithsuca Berry, inviting participants to design their own visual or written affirmations using some of the artist’s favorite mediums, including paint, textiles, and poetry. Destiny Doorways featured colorful botanical motifs that evoke the winding pathways you might follow in different parts of your life. Each doorway reveals a message and is an invitation to reflect on a new journey to transformation. What pathways have you taken? Which doorway will you open? 

Paper shadow puppets lit against orange wall

Shadow Play

Jul 15, 2023 – Dec 31, 2023

In this installation by Boston artist Lily Xie, we invited participants to step into the dark and explore form, transformation, and light through shadow puppets. Who could you be in the shadows? What would you take with you into the darkness? Shadow puppetry, or shadow play, has roots in several Asian cultures and has spread and shape-shifted into many contemporary forms and practices across the world. Through this diasporic art form, Xie opens the portal for thinking about what is possible when we step into the dark.

 

Can you see me?

Oct 2, 2022 – Jun 11, 2023

In this presentation designed by Boston artist Elisa Hamilton, dive into an immersive hands-on art-making project involving photography, photo transfers, and self-exploration. Hamilton creates art that inspires joy and creativity and most importantly, invites you to participate. Through these collaborative artworks, we explore themes of community, identity, and making. This installation prompts you to reflect on aspects of your identity through image and what we choose to share about ourselves.

Bridging Creativity: Art Lab from Home to Here

Feb 19, 2022 – Sep 5, 2022

This Art Lab installation presents four Boston-based artists — Mel Taing, LJ-Baptiste, Mithsuca Berry, Maya Erdelyi — who developed activities for the Art Lab at Home website and art kits during the 2020 COVID lockdown. These artists work in a range of styles and mediums, and are connected in their abilities to spread joy through creativity. We invited visitors to sculpt, draw, reflect, collage, create, think, and dream. We are excited to make art together and to continue to expand the ways that we can create art with all of you, in person or from afar.

Threads of Connection

Feb 15, 2020 – Feb 18, 2021

This tapestry collaboration by local artist Merill Comeau recognizes the building of community found within the age-old practice of gathering to assemble fabric pieces in quilting bees. This interactive project celebrates and reflects on people’s many different backgrounds and experiences. In-person visitors to the Bank of America Art Lab have been invited to collaborate in the making of the tapestry and share their stories in the museum’s own quilting bee. Visitors participating from home are invited to create your own quilt square using materials you have on hand – fabric, paper, recycled materials, or even just digital! See virtual quilt

Dennis Nance: Character Study

Oct 13, 2018 – Mar 17, 2019

Artist Dennis Nance, who has been described as a “wizard of word, wardrobe, and wonder,” makes wearable sculptures that bring a sense of humor and play to our everyday surroundings. In Character Study, visitors of all ages are invited to explore pattern, texture, materials, and develop their own unique character ideas. These ideas were displayed as ‘character study’ cards in Art Lab. Nance then created a wearable sculpture based off a character card designed by an ICA visitor.

ICA Kids and Family programs are supported, in part, by Vivien and Alan Hassenfeld, the Hassenfeld Family Foundation, the Willow Tree Fund, and Raymond T. & Ann T. Mancini Family Foundation.