get tickets

Advance tickets are now available for visits through September 1. Book now

“The internet has introduced a new way of seeing and being,” says Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator at the ICA. “It’s affected how we shop, eat, date, travel, our social behaviors, our political machines, and how we create and consider art,” both online and off. The exhibition Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today, on view February 7–May 20, 2018, brings together more than 60 artists and collectives of different generations and backgrounds to take a look at this ubiquitous influence.  

We spoke with Eva about the inspiration for Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today, its relevance, and why she considers the show site-specific to Boston.

Can you talk about what you mean by “internet”?

Great question. When we talk about the internet, it can be many things. It is a physical thing: a set of cables, wires, and protocols operated by disparate software and hardware. And it is also a social and political construct, a set of social practices and exchanges that have wide-ranging effects. The internet has changed how we consume information, exchange goods, conduct research, present our private and public selves, understand our bodies, date, shop, make friends, travel, and eat. It has transformed attitudes and mores, affected how societies see themselves and others, and how we see ourselves. It has influenced every facet of our lives and virtually every field and industry, including art.

This exhibition looks at the internet as a social and political construct—as a lens to understand our current moment. Art reflects the ideas of our time, and with this exhibition, we hope to offer insights on some of the complex issues of our digital age: How has the internet influenced art and how it circulates, how it is valued? How has the internet changed our understanding of privacy? How have network technologies changed our understanding of what it means to be human, and our perception of reality? What do we make of this powerful medium, which still holds so much promise, but is also a sign of a world divided, full of anxiety, operating at a breakneck pace, and competing for our increasingly distracted attention? Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today addresses the profound influence of the internet on art. Rather than presenting an exhibition of technology, we hope to explore how all art—whether painting or moving images, sculpture or photography, websites or performance—has been radically transformed by the cultural impact of the internet.

Was there an aha moment when you knew you wanted to do this exhibition?

I had been thinking about this exhibition for quite some time. Around 2006, I began hearing about a certain kind of art, called post-internet art. This inadequate and misleading term was coined to describe art made in the “wake” of spending time surfing the internet, and is generally used to describe a group of artists born in the 1980s working in London, Berlin, and New York. This term has been applied to a wide variety of art practices, from screen-based work to painting, sculpture, and performance. Although I reject this term (as do most of the artists in this exhibition), I was intrigued by much of the work being made under this moniker. The attributes of post-internet art—immersive space, multiple visualities and perspectives, the use of digital markers in real space—are not new. Many of these conditions have been pioneered by performance and video artists in the 1960s and 70s, and ideas of dematerialized art practices were similarly established by conceptual artists in the 1970s. But the new cultural and technological conditions introduced by the internet make vital its ongoing examination. This exhibition does not propose these contemporary works as a radical break with the past, but attempts to establish relevant historical links between a new generation of artists and their predecessors. While the technologies may have changed over generations, for artists many of the concerns have been the same.

You’ve described this show as site specific. How so?

Greater Boston has a rich history in technology. The first email was sent from Cambridge. The term “cloud” was first coined in relation to the internet in an MIT research project. Facebook was invented here. The ICA commissioned video art for WGBH-TV in the 1980s, including from artists such as Nam June Paik, who is featured in Art in the Age of the Internet. The context of technological innovation in this town provides a crucial background for this exhibition. For me this exhibition is sited in the city of Boston and has special meaning here. 

Another way that I think about site-specificity with this exhibition is with the commission of a new virtual reality piece by the Canadian artist Jon Rafman. Rafman has used virtual reality technology in several art works, requiring users to don Oculus Rift goggles to access an immersive 360-degree viewing experience. This emerging technology offers radical new models of visuality, not unlike the major shift witnessed by the introduction of cinema around the turn of the twentieth century. For the ICA, Rafman has created a site-specific virtual reality work for the museum’s John Hancock Founders Gallery, whose floor-to-ceiling windows offer a sweeping view of Boston Harbor. Rafman developed a virtual depiction of the site, so the museum’s architecture and the surrounding seaport are characters in the work, collapsing real and virtual space.

Rafman is most interested in how VR technologies can fundamentally change subjectivities, anxieties, and fears. He has said: “I question whether it is useful anymore to talk about a clear dichotomy between the virtual and the real, as most of our lives are happening in front of a screen.” For me, this work, and the blurring of the virtual and real, point to a big part of the contemporary condition of living online.

You’ve also described the show as having several different platforms.

For me this project has three expressions: the exhibition, catalogue, and website. Each of these is a medium-specific exploration of the topic. With the exhibition, I thought a lot about the physical manifestation of the ideas, and it is designed to consider the physical encounters with works of art. While there are many screen-based works in the exhibition, there are also paintings, sculptures, and photographs. The book is a scholarly manifestation of the project, with more than 15 scholars and artists weighing in on the topic. The book looks and acts like a book—that is, a scholarly resource with longer-form essays and historical references—and the design is one of classic book design, as opposed to “digital” type. The web platform looks and acts like a website; its design does not mimic a book. The information on the website is shorter form, it is an aggregator of information and can be updated throughout the exhibition, functioning as a real-time mirror to the physical manifestation of the exhibition.

This exhibition is already more than two years in the making—perhaps a long time in Internet years. Is there a different resonance to some of the works today than when you first envisioned the show?

Much has changed since we began this project more than three years ago: Brexit, this rise of Black Lives Matter from rallying hashtag to social movement; the election of Donald Trump; the Oxford Dictionary choosing “post-truth” as 2016 word of the year. All of these events have been heavily influenced by how we use the internet to circulate information, share news, and understand our world. The technologies and visual conditions of the internet continue to transform at an accelerated rate, exemplifying what curator and writer Hans-Ulrich Obrist has termed the extreme present. Visual culture now, in our immediate digital epoch, does much more than hold a mirror up for us: it is instrumental in creating our realities. Art in the Age of the Internet was conceived to respond to our shifting, infinite present by exhibiting and examining artworks that represent multivalent artistic strategies, whether romanticism or cynicism, optimism or pessimism, nostalgia or antipathy; what we often encounter is a complicated combination of them all. I would say continually adapting to this extreme present has been both the pleasure and challenge of working on a topic that is so timely. As is the case with many thematic exhibitions, Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today is an incomplete account. This project aspires to being neither the first nor last word (as if that were even possible).

 

“The ICA’s willingness to be forward-looking engages my imagination and encourages my commitment and long-term support.”

Nan Tull, a 1980 graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts, is a Boston-based painter currently represented by Soprafina Gallery. A founding member of the Fort Point artists’ 249 A Street Cooperative in 1983, Nan maintains a studio and her practice there. She has steadily supported the ICA as a member over decades and recently made the generous decision with her husband, Frank Wezniak, to include the ICA in their estate plans through a bequest. We sat down with Nan to talk about her history with the ICA.

How did you first become involved at the ICA?

My interest in the ICA stems back many decades. Around 1972 I saw Ed Kienholz’s installation The Beanery and, at the time, thought it was definitely not my thing. Nevertheless, the experience stuck with me—it was my introduction to installation art.

From that point forward, I began to look to the ICA for the new and different in art and have visited the ICA regularly ever since.

What have been some of your favorite ICA moments?

Ironically, another installation, the 2000 exhibition of Cornelia Parker’s work—many ICA-goers know her for her piece Hanging Fire (Suspected Arson)—ranks as one of my favorites!

Why is the ICA important to you?

As an artist exhibiting in Boston over the past 35 years, I appreciate that the ICA has always shown the work of contemporary women artists. The ICA’s Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women stands as a prime example of support for women in the arts and includes many favorites: Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, and Kiki Smith, to name a few.

Why have you chosen to include the ICA in your annual giving?

The ICA’s willingness to be forward-looking engages my imagination and encourages my commitment and long-term support. In that regard, I think the Watershed, the new, raw, industrial space in East Boston, will be an exciting new venue with its focus on experimental work and public-art projects.

What motivated you and Frank to include the ICA in your estate plans?

We want the art of our time to be available to as many people as possible in Boston. Including the ICA in our estate plans means that we are able to continue to help the ICA in the future when we are no longer here to offer that support.

To learn more about including the ICA in your estate plans, contact the Development Office at 617-478-3183 or jspsociety@icaboston.org.

This month, after 34 years, the Barbara Krakow Gallery formally became the Krakow Witkin Gallery, remaining in its longstanding location on the 5th floor of 10 Newbury Street in Back Bay. The name change recognizes the close partnership of Barbara Krakow and Andrew Witkin, who have worked together for 18 years, and as partners for the past 14, as well as signaling Witkin’s leadership for the future. Together, this dynamic team has created an exhibition program focused on conceptual and minimal art of the late 20th and 21st centuries; published catalogue raisonneés of the prints of Sol Lewitt, Kiki Smith, Donald Sultan, and Elizabeth Murray, as well as forthcoming publications on Mel Bochner and Liliana Porter, and have used their expertise and patience to build relationships and collections across Boston.

This, then, is an opportune moment to recognize the transformation of contemporary art in Boston and the role played by Barbara Krakow in this evolution. She is Boston’s most celebrated art dealer, as renowned for her critical eye as she is for her role as a champion of and educator in contemporary art. Two generations of Bostonians have learned from her and her exhibitions. Many have built their collections on her advice and service, establishing significant holdings of contemporary art in Boston-area homes and institutions. Others have received the equivalent of an art history degree from her – walking with her through the small gallery space, studying individual works to focus and exercise the art of looking. Still others have come for advice and conversation, seated in her office on one of two Mies van der Rohe chairs, her feet up on a Frank Gehry footstool, surrounded by her extensive library of books and drawing on her extensive knowledge of Boston and the world of art and artists. A sampling of the artists to whom she is committed charts a survey of key moments in recent art history: Josef Albers, John Baldessari, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Daniel Buren, Robert Cottingham, Tara Donovan, Dan Flavin, William Kentridge, Annette Lemieux, Allan McCollum, Stephen Prina, Kay Rosen, Kate Shepard, Lorna Simpson, Shelburne Thurber, Suara Welitoff and many, many more.

In the 34 years since Krakow began her eponymous gallery, Boston has transformed from a contemporary art backwater into the lively city it is today. Krakow estimates that from a few contemporary art venues in 1983, greater Boston has now grown to boast 150 active in the area. Much attention has been paid to the influx of new museum directors, and we are all the beneficiaries of new leadership at the MFA, Gardner Museum, Harvard Art Museums, deCordova, and now Tufts and the Rose. Talented new curators, too, have enlivened Boston’s art scene. There are also new entrepreneurial endeavors, advocacy campaigns led by Mass Creative, and renewed energy in contemporary dance, with William Forsythe’s five-year residency at the Boston Ballet and Peter DiMuro’s revival at the Dance Complex, as well as new initiatives and spaces under design at the Huntington and the A.R.T. David Howse at Emerson brings performance-based work from around the world, and the BSO and Andris Nelsons champion new music in Boston and at Tanglewood. But the change is more than a list of names and places. Important contemporary collections have been created; art schools have grown, moved and merged; each of the city’s art museums has built and expanded; and committed philanthropists and strong Boards of Trustees, Advisors and Overseers have been built. Boston is beginning to be a place as committed to the future of art as it is to its past.

You are likely to see Barbara Krakow and Andrew Witkin at all our museums and performance venues, but Krakow’s influence is not restricted to Boston. Adam Sheffer, director of the prestigious Cheim & Read Gallery in New York and president of the Art Dealers Association of America, has known Barbara since he was a young man growing up in Wellesley, Massachusetts. As he puts it, “No one has brought the global art world to Boston and Boston to the global art world quite like Barbara. Together with Andrew, she has added immeasurably to Boston’s artistic legacy and, without question, to its future as a vital center for the art of our time.”

Much of Krakow’s reputation has been built on the strong relationships she has had with some of the most important artists of the late 20th century. Sol Lewitt, Fred Sandback, and Mel Bochner were close friends of Barbara and represented by the Gallery. Jenny Holzer, Julian Opie, and Liliana Porter are consistent presences on the gallery’s exhibition schedule. Equally important, Barbara’s clients and associates have benefitted from her deep and prolonged exploration of works of art, and her willingness and desire to talk to anyone with curiosity about the practice and philosophy of art.

As the Barbara Krakow Gallery enters its new iteration as the Krakow/Witkin Gallery, it is fitting to recognize Barbara’s contribution and the history of contemporary art that she has helped shaped in and for Boston. As the beneficiary of hours of advice, counsel, and friendship both personally and through Barbara’s work for the ICA as a longstanding member of our Advisory Council, I value the education on art that I have received. Even more important, I cherish the wisdom of her experience; the value she places on integrity, relationships, and hard work; and the deep and lasting commitment she has made to Boston. I can’t wait to see what she and Andrew will undertake together.

 

 

The artist talks art, science, nature, cosmology and the sublime in advance of his exhibition Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 20th-Century Naturalist.

 

ICA: You grew up in New Bedford, and you’ve created work there that’s featured in the exhibition and now included in the ICA’s collection. How has your Massachusetts upbringing figured into your work and methodology overall?

Mark Dion: I was born in New Bedford and lived there in my early years but I really grew up in Fairhaven, which is on the other side of the Acushnet river. Fairhaven is where I went to school, though I spent huge amounts of time with my cousins rampaging in New Bedford. There was a microcosmic aspect of the area when I grew up. We could play in farms, fields, and forests and then on beaches and salt marshes, moving to gritty industrial wastelands and abandoned mills, garbage dumps and barges. It was like a world in miniature, and entirely accessible by bicycle. Sadly the farms, forests, orchards, and fields have largely been turned into strip malls and housing developments. Many of the abandoned mills and shipwrecks are gone as well.

I think that experience of watching places we loved go under the bulldozer was quite profound and shaped aspects of my environmental sensibility. You cannot watch an ancient beech grove be plowed down to make a cookie-cutter housing development without feeling some rage, even as a child.

The important presence of history in the area profoundly shaped my consciousness and aesthetic. Fairhaven and New Bedford are not museum towns, although rich in architecture and history. They are places where people work side by side with the past. Living there, it was easy to absorb and develop a sensitivity for the fabric of history that is inclusive, that has continuity. This past was also very class-conscious in my family, who were mill workers, soldiers, and laborers.

What draws you to nature and the natural world in your work?

To be clear, my work is not so much about nature as it is ideas about nature. In the same way, my artistic endeavor is not so much an “art and science approach,” as it is an “art and history of science approach.” I am an environmentalist and believer in the importance of the conservation and protection of wild things and wild places. My art is an attempt to try to understand how our society has evolved a suicidal relationship to the planet. The key to understanding this is in the history of ideas. So my work references, mocks, highlights, shadows, and critiques these ideas. For example, works like Scala Naturae, and The Classical Mind (which is a new work for the ICA exhibition), examine the pernicious aspects of hierarchical, human-centered taxonomies that prevailed for so long in the Western tradition and became the intellectual justification for the domination of nature, racism, and other expressions of repressive power. In some ways I want to map how it is that we have arrived in such a jeopardous place in relation to the natural world.

In your practice, you often borrow or appropriate scientific methods. For you, what’s the relationship (or line) between art and science? Are you trying on the role of scientist in your various studies and excavations, or is there a different relationship?

I am definitely an artist and not a scientist. Still, my worldview comes from science rather than from a religious place. Science is my cosmology, and it is very good at explaining what the world is. It does not tell us much about what our obligations, attitudes, and feelings about the world are. Art is pretty useful to interrogate some of those aspects of human experience in a complex way. Art and science have different tools; for science it is a rigorous set of rules for testing ideas which are repeatable and verifiable. For art we can use a rich vocabulary of humor, irony, metaphor, and beauty to express hard-to-pin-down states like ambivalence, melancholy, rapture, mourning, a sense of the sublime.

So I see art and science as natural allies. Certainly we share many of the same enemies—prejudice, ignorance, intolerance, doctrine, fanaticism. Art and science work extremely well toward common causes.

I see art and science as natural allies.

Do you consider yourself an activist? Do you hope to shift viewers’ relationship to the natural world?

I do not consider myself an activist, however I am entirely allied with environmental activism. I think to build a progressive culture of nature, participation from a wide variety of disciplines is needed. Science certainly is critical, but it does not have a monopoly on the culture of nature. To build a culture of nature that features regeneration over destruction, sustainability over depletion, nurturing over domination requires input from a diverse collation of thinkers, makers, and doers. Art is one of many areas which can be important to this constellation.

However, the world in which contemporary art mostly dwells is a cosmopolitan one. Issues of the culture of nature and environmentalism are rarely primary concerns for the sophisticated urban denizens of the art world. There has not been a significant exhibition of contemporary art concerning landscape and ecology in the major art museums across the country in decades. Yet increasingly there are a number of compelling visual artists committed to exploring the vital global environmental changes of our time. Some of these are artist-activists and others approach the issues from the traditional space of the studio. I would argue that there is room for both strategies and numerous others.

What is the role of humor in your work?

As an artist who works on topics like the ocean and tropical forests, there is not a lot of positive news on the horizon. My perspective is an increasingly pessimistic and dark one. Humor is one of tactics I employ to be able to discuss some seriously demoralizing topics. I am not afraid to discuss concrete issues in my work, but like my artistic mentors like Hans Haacke and Martha Rosler, I know the power of humor to undercut the authority of my own didacticism. Humor is a tool, but it is also a pleasure.

I think I am a pretty funny guy. Like many people from blue-collar Massachusetts, I have a dark humor, heavily slathered with irony, sarcasm, and skepticism. I think this is a defense we have evolved against disappointment. We have an uncanny built-in bullshit detector and radar for hypocrisy and corruption. However, it easy for this to turn to cynicism, which can be debilitating to a maker of things. At the same time, as an artist who contemplates environmental histories, it is easy for me find myself perched on a rather high horse. My Commonwealth of Massachusetts skepticism assures that I don’t take myself too seriously. I keep my mother’s anti-authoritarian wise voice in the back of my mind. She was a great ego deflater when it was necessary.

In the past you’ve spoken about the importance of the amateur or dilettante, of nerd culture. Can you speak to that?

I guess I am an enthusiast for enthusiasts. I have a great deal of respect for those who take an active roll in the construction of their desire motivated by curiosity. The marriage of Reason and Eros opens up constructive possibilities. Birders, rock hounds, volunteer archaeologists, activists, citizen scientists, amateur painters, hobby builders, people motivated by love rather then money are pretty exciting to me. All the more so because there seems to be a narrowing of systems of value, to validating only capital on one hand and increased specialization and professionalization on the other. So the space for the intellectually curious generalist seems to be not merely noble but also a place of great pleasure, passion, and potential camaraderie. Amateurs also seem capable of making contributions precisely because they defy conventions and institutionalization. They can think outside the traditional boundaries of a discipline.

There’s a timelessness to many of your works. What makes them contemporary?

We live in a time quite obsessed with history. There are reenactment cultures, popular enthusiasm for archaeology and genealogy; historic dramas on screens or on the page are numerous. So to me the examination of history is quite contemporary. Yet there is always the discourse of power lurking in the expression of history, whether that is the pernicious discourse of blood or the kind of fake claims of a time that it was once more idyllic. Thus in dealing with history, nostalgia must be avoided at all cost. To me, nostalgia is tied to an unexamined expression of a golden age when things were better, more simple, and everyone knew their place. The so-called “good old days” were not good for many, obviously; they were a time of exclusion and oppression for most of us. While my work is often historical, it is never nostalgic.

So when I make works which reference historical moments, I want them to be pretty specific: to frame a particular character, moment, and set of ideas. I use linchpin figures in the history of natural history as a way of tracing the evolution of values, attitudes, and assumptions about nature.

Your practice is both research-oriented and process-based. Do your works more often start with an image or an idea? A sense of the process, or of the final product?

Images are critical, and so is conventional research, but the most important starting point is always place. The work is mostly contextual in nature, and listening to place, to the original site of project or sculpture, is the first step for me. I search the history for paradigmatic characters, events, anomalies, moments which encapsulate an essential aspect of what makes this context or place different, curious, or important. I think I have developed a pretty good sensibility of understanding place through much exercise and practice. Of course when I arrive someplace, I am not empty-handed. My own suitcase of concerns and the history of my work come with me and are a kind of lens that I see a place through. Therefore the white walls of galleries are challenging for me. The ICA exhibition will be particularly interesting because it does focus on works of a more sculptural nature but weaves them between works which have site-specific origins.

Most of my ideas about what to do in a particular context come pretty quickly. It does not take more then a day or two for me to get a sense of what to want to make. From there the ideas go into my sketchbook and get worked out in draft form. The next step is to make finished drawings using my trusty red-and-blue pencil. These help me communicate my ideas to the production team, curators, and community stakeholders, but are also for me where the ideas really take form. Much of the creative aspect of my process is concentrated in these simple drawings. They are also often where the pleasure in making is focused.

The most important starting point is always place.

How important is considering the background in the understanding of the piece? Can the work standing before the visitor be complete without knowledge of the process behind it?

Many works do not require the back story and can be viewed as sculpture, installation, printmaking, or drawing in a pretty uncomplicated way. However, most of my work is quite narrative, and much of it takes the lead from history. Therefore there is a burden on many works to bring the viewer up to speed. If I do a work about William Bartram, Alfred Russel Wallace, Rachel Carson, or Aristotle, the viewer has to have some idea who those people were in a basic way to engage the piece. So it may be less about understanding the process and more about having some basic foundation about the historic events and persons. It is not so different from Robert Rauschenberg’s work on Dante or Frank Stella’s work on Moby Dick—if one knows the novel, they can get more out the art. However, the viewer still can have a challenging and thoughtful experience without having encountered the reference text.

Some of your works recall the traditional Wunderkammer. How do they differ or depart from that tradition?

For me, Wunderkammer are a very specific historical phenomenon—the 16th- and 17th-century collections that flourish across Europe. They predate the fields of science, art, and other organizational disciplines that flourish in the Enlightenment. They are idiosyncratic, with no two being precisely the same in order or contents. These collections reflect the early confusion and chaotic violence of the colonial period, rather than ideological museums. While it may be possible to think about them as the incubator of science, it is just as true to imagine them as the sanctuary of magic and the hermetic tradition.

What draws me to these collections is the challenge that they present to our systems of order, hierarchy, and material categorization. They privilege hybridization; the interplay of the natural and artificial, the totem and the specimen, and macrocosm and the microcosm. They were also quite discursive spaces which encouraged participation, trading, and handling of objects. A visit to the cabinet of curiosity was not a passive experience, like visiting a late 20th-century museum, but an immersive one which doubtlessly involved all the senses and was full of speculation and wonder. Those are precisely the aspects of this tradition that I think can be productive to revisit today.

 

When Julliard graduate Simone Dinnerstein found herself in her 30s without the sort of bookings and prospects she’d hoped for, the pianist took matters into her own hands. Pregnant with her first child, she devoted herself to a daunting piece of music that had captivated her since her youth, Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

Notoriously demanding, the piece became the focus of a months-long spiritual quest. Dinnerstein eventually raised money from family and friends to make a recording, samples of which she sent to potential managers. She rented Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall to play the piece for those who were interested, a performance the New York Times described as having “a level of coloration beyond the palette Bach knew.” Critics took notice, recording label Telarc bit, and within a week of its commercial release in 2007, Dinnerstein’s Variations hit No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard Classical chart. It was named one of the best albums of the year by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the New Yorker.

Bessie Award–winning choreographer Pam Tanowitz has likewise distinguished herself, as a “modern choreographer much admired for the way she recharges classical steps” (New York Times). Active since 1992, she formed her company, Pam Tanowitz Dance in 2000, creating challenging, critically acclaimed dances that have been performed at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, the Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process series, Dance Theater Workshop, Baryshnikov Arts Center, and the Joyce Theater, among many others. She’s frequently compared to Merce Cunningham, for the challenging and unique physicality of her work, and Mark Morris, for its pronounced musicality. 

This summer, Dinnerstein, Tanowitz, and seven dancers will occupy the ICA’s Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater for a Summer Stages Dance @ the ICA/Boston residency July 10–15. They’ll return to the ICA to perform New Work for Goldberg Variations in December.

We spoke with Dinnerstein and Tanowitz about collaboration, risk, failure, and moving beyond the obvious. 

Both of you are known for your rigor, risk-taking, and bringing fresh approaches to classical forms, but your work is very different. What drew you to one another?

SD: I thought Pam had such an interesting way of integrating live music. The dancers respond to the music, but in a non-literal way. Sometimes I’ve found that choreography can seem a bit obvious—not understanding what’s lying underneath the music, just going with the step-by-step play of each beat as opposed to other elements like line, shading, and syncopation. 

PT: Thank you! It’s important to me that there’s a relationship between the dance and music that isn’t obvious. 

Pam, you haven’t worked with classical music much before.

PT: I did one piece in 2011 to Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy, but I gravitate more toward new music and living composers. This collaboration is exciting for me because I’m pushing different things in my work. I think it’s important to not always do the same – just because I like something doesn’t mean I have to do it for the rest of my life.

Pam, has working with the Goldberg Variations changed your thinking or your movement? 

PT: Simone’s been playing the Goldberg Variations for 15 years. To have her in the room is great because when you’re choreographing, you have your dancers, but really you’re making all these decisions alone. Now I can say, “What do you think about this with this variation?” Or she’ll see a movement and say, “Oh, why don’t you try it with this, not this?”  

SD: Pam and I met before we started working with the dancers to really talk about the structure of the piece: the canons, some of the mirrors, the mathematical concepts that Bach is exploring—the musical, more theoretical background. Something we have in common is that we both like to start with a real intellectual understanding of what we’re doing, but then we tend to be guided by our instincts. I like that it starts from knowledge, and goes toward the unknown. 

PT: I wanted to learn everything I could from Simone. I was doing all this research, and then I almost wanted to forget it all, knowing that it’s in there somewhere.

SD: Pam is saving choreographing the aria until she finishes choreographing everything else, or at least that’s the plan right now. Now she’s starting to realize why that’s what she wanted to do: the aria provides the groundwork for the variations, but in order to find the aria, she had to go through the variations. I think that’s going to make the whole piece have a kind of integrity, which will be really beautiful.

Simone, you’ve been playing this piece for 15 years, and you’ve known it since you were practically a child. Are you seeing the music in new ways through this collaboration?

SD: Absolutely. Not that I was ever sick of it, but it’s really made me see it in a different way. There’s an abstract element to watching dance, so I feel the music coming to life three-dimensionally, and the shapes it’s taking are different than I would’ve thought. When I first was working on the piece, I went toward bringing out the asymmetry. It’s very, very symmetrical, but there’s an underlying asymmetry. Pam has also been bringing that out, and I realized that for maybe the past ten years or so, I’ve gradually become more symmetrical. 

PT: You also played it for the Paris Opera Ballet, in a different way for them, and now you’re playing it in a different way that we’re working on together. The first day of rehearsal, you said, “I play it differently now than I did ten years ago.” It’s cool how you have been evolving and changing with all these different experiences that you’ve had with it.

Simone, in 2001 you said, “I didn’t become a musician to become a historian. I became a musician because the music speaks to me today as I am right now.” Have you changed as a person, a musician, or both since you’ve started playing the Goldberg Variations?

SD: My life has entirely changed. I learned the piece more than 15, 16 years ago when I was pregnant with my son. Everything changed by becoming a mother and then things changed again very, very much when I released my recording. The piece is really significant to me. It’s reflective and it caused changes in my life.

PT: It’s like a touchstone. You keep coming back to it changed. It becomes something else.

How do you take a piece of music that’s been experienced by so many different people in so many different ways, and make it contemporary?

PT: That’s actually the question I’m asking myself as I make it. What do I have to add to this continuum of history? What do I have to add to the pot? What am I saying about this? I think it circles back to how we’re treating the music and the relationship of the structures of the dance and the music. There’s also the movement. My whole career is based on using known steps that are so-called balletic, or so-called traditional, which we perform and frame in different ways. 

Pam, you wrote that one of the biggest challenges of this collaboration is grappling with the iconic achievements of, and inevitable comparisons to, Glenn Gould’s recording and Jerome Robbins’s dance production.

PT: You cannot make work in a vacuum. That’s how I feel in general about being aware of all my dance history. When I first started working on this, I said to Simone, “I cannot believe I’m doing this. Jerry Robbins!” But once I actually started working, that all fell away. 

SD: And of course it’s been recorded a million times too. I had to stop listening to everything when I started learning the piece. It was so strong in my head, the way Gould played, that I never would’ve been able to play it if I kept listening to him. I had to wash it out and then react to the music itself and see what it showed me. As a classical pianist, that’s the biggest challenge: to have a genuine, authentic response to the music without thinking too much about the performance history of it.

Simone, you talked about kind of studying piece’s structure, theory, and mathematics. But when you’re playing, it almost looks like there’s no intellect in it at all. It looks channeled through you, and there’s a real physicality in how you play. That’s really interesting in terms of you working with dancers and a choreographer.

PT: I see what you’re saying. It’s amazing to have Simone in the room. The piano is in the middle of the space for the whole piece, and there’s dancing all around it, but there are also times where it’s very spare, so you can focus on Simone and that physicality that you’re talking about.

SD: I’ve always thought of music as being very physical and having a dance in it, having a lot of breath in it, and movement. When we were rehearsing recently I suddenly had this moment of realization, something I had forgotten about: I was led to the piano through dance. I took ballet when I was five. I was very serious about it and absolutely wanted to do it. There was this pianist who played in class, and I just completely fell in love with the piano from hearing her play Chopin. That’s what made me ask to play the piano.

Pam, you wrote that you wanted to create something inherently dangerous with this collaboration.

PT: Playing this piece and choreographing to this piece are both risky, and really exposing. The field that we’re in, you don’t know if something’s going to work until it’s in public. If it doesn’t work, it’s too late.

You’ve spoken publicly about a piece that you said had not worked.

PT: Yeah, I go around talking about that piece. There was a whole New York Times article about how I failed. People called me and said, “I can’t believe you admitted that. You should stand up for your piece.” I was like, “But I’m telling the truth. It didn’t work.” I set myself up for a really hard task, and that failure made me learn—I learned so much about what kind of work I wanted to keep making.

You’ll both be in residence at the ICA for a week this summer. How will you spend it?

PT: We have a lot of work to do. I have to choreograph. When I’m done, the dancers and Simone have to create a community onstage and a relationship. They’re conscious of each other and they look at each other. It all has to be integrated, besides working on the tempos and things.

Have there been any big surprises for either of you in the collaboration? Anything different from what you expected?

SD: I was very surprised that there’s not really timing.

PT: I don’t count.

SD: We don’t count. Pam doesn’t count. The dancers don’t count. I didn’t expect that at all.

PT: I never count… I feel like that restricts things happening.

SD: Your dancers are incredibly musical. They hear how the music is flowing and they adjust to it in different ways, which is really beautiful.

PT: That’s the whole point of having living, breathing dancers with a living, breathing musician on the stage. If it was robotic and counting and precise, it takes a little bit of the life out.

It seems like a really strenuous piece for the dancers, even mentally.

PT: Oh yeah. They’re not used to me working with music in this way. They’re musical, but it’s different, so we’re all learning, and it’s really pushing all of us.

This interview was condensed and edited.

New Work for Goldberg Variations was commissioned by Duke Performances/Duke University and Peak Performances/Montclair State University, co-commissioned by Opening Nights Performing Arts/Florida State University and Summer Stages Dance at the Institute for Contemporary Art/Boston, and received creative development support from the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (MANCC) at Florida State University, The Yard at Martha’s Vineyard, the NYU Center for Ballet and the Arts, and New York City Center.

New Work for Goldberg Variations was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. General Operating support for Pam Tanowitz Dance was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project with funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

NEFA logo

Summer Stages Dance @ the ICA/Boston is made possible, in part, with the support of Jane Karol and Howard Cooper, David Parker, The Aliad Fund, George and Ann Colony, and Stephanie McCormick-Goodhart.

Dear Friends,
 
As directors of Boston’s art museums, we serve as stewards of the public trust. So, we are alarmed at reports that the National Endowment for the Arts is under threat of being abolished, along with the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Each of these entities champions art and culture in communities across America.
 
In Boston, NEA and NEH funding has been instrumental at each of our museums, supporting our extensive programs of public access, teaching and scholarship, conservation, collection and exhibition. NEA and NEH grants supported the digitization and cataloging of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s singular collection; acquisition funds for works of art by American artists of color in The Heritage Fund for a Diverse Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the forthcoming exhibition Animal-Shaped Vessels from the Ancient World: Feasting with Gods, Heroes, and Kings at the Harvard Art Museums; the restoration of American artist Kenneth Noland’s only public art piece at MIT; and transformative art education programs for Boston public school middle and high school students at the ICA. 
 
Federal support has been a critical piece of the puzzle for museums in our shared mission to foster knowledge, create cultural exchange, generate jobs and tourism, educate our youth, ignite the imagination of our audiences and nurture the creativity of working artists. Across the country – in communities small and large, urban and rural – the NEA and NEH help to guarantee access to the arts and the preservation and presentation of diverse cultural expression. The prestige and visibility of the NEA and NEH connects our entire cultural community, though we are well aware of the outsized influence of federal dollars at our most vulnerable arts institutions across America.  
 
On Wednesday, our colleague Thomas Campbell of the Metropolitan Museum of Art wrote an op-ed in the New York Times eloquently outlining how every museum relies not only on financial support but also on the advocacy of the NEA to strengthen communities through the arts.
 
We share the belief that access to the arts is at the core of a democratic and equitable society. During this moment of heightened national discord, the elimination of the NEA and NEH is not a cut our country can afford.
 
Art is, at its best, a dialogue. We hope that you’ll participate in the conversation about the importance of federal funding for the arts and join us as stewards of the public good.

Peggy Fogelman, Norma Jean Calderwood Director, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Paul Ha, Director, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director, Institute of Contemporary Art
Martha Tedeschi, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director, Harvard Art Museums
Matthew Teitelbaum, Ann and Graham Gund Director, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

“Meredith Monk is a legend.”

This February, the ICA brings the incomparable vocalist, composer, and multidisciplinary artist Meredith Monk to Boston for the first time in more than twenty years. She will be joined onstage by the celebrated poet Anne Waldman, a leader in the beat and experimental poetry scenes since the 1960s.

Now 74, Monk has been a mainstay of experimental music and performance for more than 50 years, creating multi-disciplinary works that combine music, theater, movement, and film since the 1960s. A pioneer in “extended vocal technique,” she has broken ground in exploring the voice as an instrument that she believes can “unearth feelings, energies, and memories for which there are no words.”

Beloved by audiences and lauded by critics, Monk is the winner of the National Medal of Arts, a MacArthur “genius” grant, and several Guggenheim Fellowships.

One day, I just had a revelation that the voice could be an instrument… that it could move like my hand moves, that it could be like the spine, that it could jump, that it could turn, that it could fall … that within it were all these feelings that we don’t have words for.

—Meredith Monk
 

She released her most recent album, On Behalf of Nature—a meditation on ecology and climate change that the New Yorker called “visceral and ethereal, raw and rapt”—in November 2016. 

Anne Waldman, a prolific poet, playwright, activist; the recipient of multiple awards; and the author of more than 40 collections of poetry and poetics, including Fast Speaking Woman (1975) and Marriage: A Sentence (2000), was a founder and director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in New York and co-founded with Allen Ginsberg the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado.

Waldman kicks off the evening in three parts with a performative reading from her “Entanglement Variations,” with visuals of paintings by Pat Steir and sound composition by Ambrose Bye. Monk will then perform several selections of her work with members of her longstanding Vocal Ensemble. The evening culminates in an original collaborative duet between the two artists.

We spoke with John Andress, Curator of Performing Arts and a musician himself, about these phenomenal artists and what we might expect from their performance.

Recently promoted to Curator of Performing Arts, you’ve been doing the music programming at the ICA, among other things, for several years. What do you look for when choosing acts to bring to the ICA?

I respond enthusiastically to artists who create a new and unique landscape, either sonically or visually, that I, as the viewer or listener, can enter. Through extraordinary, detailed, and rigorous invention, the artists I most admire devise a theatrical world that is uniquely original. During a live performance, the artist and audience step into what seems like a new universe together, where the confines of the theater dissolve, time stops, and it feels like the work is created right in that moment. That quality is incredibly difficult to achieve, but when it does, it’s electric.

This season we’re featuring Meredith Monk, one of the most celebrated experimental musicians and cross-disciplinary artists of her generation. Why is she a good fit for the ICA?

Meredith Monk is a legend; a genius, according to the MacArthur Foundation. And she has not performed in Boston in more than two decades! That alone seems reason enough to present her work at the ICA. But setting aside the numerous awards and accolades she has received throughout her 50 year career, Monk is a unique and singular figure in music. She is a vocalist, a composer, and an interdisciplinary artist, creating solos, chamber pieces, multimedia operas, and orchestral works—and her incredible extended vocal techniques have expanded the possibilities of composition for the voice. Her work cannot be labeled as merely classical, experimental, or vocal; it exists beyond the boundaries of a single genre.

Monk has quite an unusual way of composing, and of notating, music. Can you talk about that?

When composing, Monk brings fragments of ideas to rehearsals—maps or cells—rather than a notated score. Working closely with her fellow singers, the Meredith Monk Vocal Ensemble, the musicians improvise, investigate, and manipulate Monk’s ideas, crafting the work through collaborative exploration. Though it can be transcribed into a proper notated score, the music exists most accurately and viscerally in the body of the performer, much like the way a choreographer makes work with a company of dancers.

Monk’s work is unusually difficult to categorize—in 2012, the Guardian called her unclassifiable—but can you talk about some of the wells she’s drawing from?

In that same Guardian article, Monk’s music is described as simultaneously ancient and modern. It’s as if the sounds were pulled from the past while foreseeing the future. Monk rose to prominence in the 1970s and has often been compared to other minimalist composers like Phillip Glass and Steve Reich, but her music emphasizes ritual and repetition in a way that almost feels liturgical.

In this performance, she’ll be joined by Anne Waldman, the acclaimed poet, activist, educator, performer, and committed collaborator. How important is the act of collaboration to the work of these two artists?

Throughout their careers, both artists have routinely collaborated with colleagues working in other genres. Waldman has worked with visual artists Richard Tuttle and Elizabeth Murray, the dancer Douglas Dunn, and musicians Don Cherry and Steve Lacey. Monk has collaborated with visual artist Ann Hamilton, filmmaker and dancer Shen Wei, and, of course, numerous musicians. I think for both artists collaboration acts as a catalyst and opens up new possibilities and creative pathways to follow.

What will you be looking and listening for at the performance?

First and foremost, I’m excited to see two peerless artists perform together at the ICA. Both Waldman and Monk have been extraordinarily influential in their respective fields, inspiring their contemporaries and forging new paths for younger poets and musicians. What kind of magical alchemy will occur when they perform together? I, for one, am eager to see. 

 

“I want to do my part, humble as that part might be!”

William Ruhl is a Principal at Ruhl Walker Architects in South Boston. He supports the ICA in the present as a member, and has made plans to support us in the future by including the ICA in his estate plans with a bequest. We spoke to Will about his involvement at the ICA.

William Ruhl

How did you first become involved at the ICA?

I got to know the ICA after moving to the Boston area after graduate school in 1988. I taught a design studio at the Boston Architectural Center and the ICA was in its original building around the corner on Boylston Street. I didn’t really become actively involved with the ICA until the new Diller Scofidio + Renfro–designed building was built on the waterfront, close to where I had been practicing architecture for more than 15 years. I’m a huge fan of the building as well as the art within! I became a member of the Director’s Circle soon thereafter and look forward to becoming even more involved in the near future.

The ICA may focus on the most provocative art of our time, but it also manages to humanize the art.

What have been some of your favorite ICA exhibitions over the years?

Too many to list! But some highlights include Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957, especially Anni Albers’s Monte Alban; Fiber: Sculpture 1960–present, including Elsi Giauque’s floating Spatial Element; and Tara Donovan’s extraordinary exhibition in 2008 including her sculpture Nebulous, which was woven from strips of Scotch tape.

What do you feel the ICA does differently?

Boston and surrounding cities and towns have a long history of collecting and displaying art, but the ICA takes that many steps further by also engaging the broadest possible sense of community through the widest imaginable range of contemporary media. The ICA may focus on the most provocative art of our time, but it also manages to humanize the art.

Why is the ICA important to Boston?

Boston and Cambridge have an amazing collection of world-class art museums, but none match the ICA’s connection to our own time or thoughts of the future possibilities of art.

What have been some of your favorite ICA programs over the years?

I am a huge fan of the Artist’s Voice talks. William Kentridge’s talk in 2014, Mark Bradford’s in 2010, Damián Ortega’s in 2009, and Anish Kapoor’s in 2008 were all extraordinarily inspiring but also at times hilarious.

Why did you decide to include the ICA in your estate plans?

Having worked closely with community, wildlife, and educational nonprofits over the decades as both a parent and an architect, I have learned firsthand how much it takes to keep our nonprofit institutions going! Major donors are critical, of course, but so are medium and smaller donors. There is no amount that is too small, and it takes thousands of people to keep arts organizations such as the ICA going for future generations. I want to do my part, humble as that part might be!

Why do you think leaving a bequest to the ICA is important?

Bequests provide for substantial future influxes of funds, providing a lifeline for the ICA, but also allow me to continue to help the ICA after I’m gone.

To learn more about leaving a bequest to the ICA, please read more here, contact us at 617-478-3183 or jspsociety@icaboston.org.

Works that have especially moved (or impressed or confused or startled or surprised) us

As we celebrate the ICA collection’s first 10 years in First Light: A Decade of Collecting at the ICA, staff members have been trading stories about which works have made the biggest impressions on them over the years. Here ICA staff talk about which works in the collection have moved, impressed, or stuck with them the most.

Almerisa series by Rineke Dijkstra

I’ve always been fascinated by photography’s particular relationship to time—the present in the moment of its taking and then, almost immediately, the past, history, and death. It’s like a life cycle in one image. Rineke Dijkstra’s portrait series of a Bosnian refugee named Almerisa captures a child growing up and ends with a photo of Almerisa holding her own child. When I first saw the series in Dikstra’s survey exhibition at the Guggenheim, I was struck by how each image perfectly captures a phase of adolescence through very simple means: the discomfort of being twelve, the thin confidence of being sixteen. The pose and outfit (always chosen by Almerisa) convey so much about the emotional terrain of childhood. I wish all of our school pictures could possess such truth and intimacy rather than the generic quality that comes from a request to “smile” and quickly move on. —Ruth Erickson, Associate Curator

An installation of women's shoes embedded in five narrow cavities in a white wall covered by a translucent, tinted skins.

Atrabiliarios by Doris Salcedo

I am haunted by Doris Salcedo’s Atrabiliarios. When I first saw it a few years ago, it felt like a punch in the stomach. Since then, it is like tinnitus in my ear — a constant background hum reminding me that all is not well. The work is almost invisible as it recedes into the wall, but it screams of pain and injustice. The delicacy of the stitching and the shoes of the disappeared women belie the violence that was their fate. They are quiet now, but I can’t help but hear them. —David Henry, Bill T. Jones Director of Performing Arts

DeLuxe by Ellen Gallagher

Raised in an environment where black men and women were not well represented outside of their community through verbal and visual signifiers, I find DeLuxe a representation of and a confrontation against this. I appreciate Gallagher’s ability to draw me in through clever appropriation and collaged accoutrement—glitter, crystals, foil paper, and gold leaf—in order to confront this black representation and give way to the possibility of a new representation. DeLuxe is beautiful and dark all at once. —Liana Mestas, Development Coordinator

Ennead by Eva Hesse

I have always admired the brilliance and tenacity of Eva Hesse. Ennead represents to me a radical approach to making and experiencing art. It bombards my mind and eyes with questions regarding its materials, construction, and placement. Ennead is also a personal reminder of the artist’s strength. The work was created at a pivotal time in her life, between an extended trip to Germany — a place she had been forced to escape — in 1964 and her untimely death in 1970. Through works like Ennead, the creator and her boldness persevere. —Monica Garza, Director of Education 

A spherical sculpture made of golden artificial straw and decorated with straw ornaments and artificial plants.

The Intermediate – Inceptive Sphere by Haegue Yang

Haegue Yang’s The Intermediate—Inceptive Sphere (2016), which recently entered our collection, is both visually and conceptually compelling and a work one must experience firsthand. You have to crouch down to get a sense of the piece, its tactility, and the rich textures of the materials. Though near to the ground, the work has a palpable presence, as it poetically expounds upon the global, exploring the supposed, and fraught, East/West binary. Collecting and employing materials ranging from the banal, here plastic straw, to folk or ritualistic objects, such as a Korean bride’s headpiece and bells used in shamanistic rituals, Yang creates an “intermediate” space, somewhere between the real and artificial, civilization and nature, as well as the human and spirit worlds, and a space you’re invited to enter and engage with. —Jessica Hong, Curatorial Assistant

Silueta Works in Mexico by Ana Mendieta

It is incredible to work for a museum that has one of my all-time favorite works of art in its collection: the Silueta Works in Mexico by Ana Mendieta. In this series, Mendieta blends performance and photography, human and nature, presence and absence in a series that makes you reflect on your relationship to the earth. In these sublime images, Mendieta’s immersion into the landscape of Mexico and the traces that remain show how powerful the forces of nature are in comparison to humanity. Ana Mediata’s work has had a major influence on my own art practice and her work continues to inspire me today. —Chris Hoodlet, Marketing Manager

A small, bronze sculpture of a conical spiral with arms and legs suspended from a wire hovering over a slate disk.

Spiral Woman by Louise Bourgeois

In a 2008 documentary, artist Louise Bourgeois, then 96, quipped in her thick French accent, “My emotions are inappropriate to my size.” I’ve never forgotten that line. Small in stature but bursting with chutzpah, Bourgeois said making art was a way of taming her demons.

Encountering Bourgeois’s work is like a kick in the gut. Part of a series Bourgeois continued over decades, this Spiral Woman, with its diminutive female figure entombed and twirling suspended in midair, pulses with the forces that run through all the late artist’s evocative work: emotion, pain, sexuality, trauma, need, sensitivity, anger, compassion. Its honesty and intensity are infectious, and refreshing. An outlet for the famously tempestuous artist, her impassioned work lives on as a kind of salve for viewers as well. —Kris Wilton, Associate Director of Creative Content and Digital Engagement

Hanging Fire by Cornelia Parker

Cornelia Parker’s Hanging Fire, suspended at the entrance of the show, introduces a mode of thinking critical to the collection. More than half of the works in the ICA’s collection are by women, and many pieces in First Light tackle issues of race, gender, violence, and the related politics of art-making. A well-composed moment of explosion, Hanging Fire deconstructs the dark nature of the fire and extracts beauty from its charred wood orbits. Our contemporary moment of deconstructing norms and systems of oppression requires us to collectively pause, in the midst of the chaos of pain and misunderstanding, to discuss and think, and feel empathy. Given the charged nature of some of the works on view, I find Hanging Fire to be a meditative place to begin. —Lisa Purdy, Visitor Assistant

A sculpture of two glazed white teacups on matching saucers. The cups are fused together to appear conjoined, as are the saucers.

T42 by Mona Hatoum

The impact T42 had on me when I saw it for the first time was out of proportion with its diminutive size and delicate aesthetic. The punny title makes you feel as though you’re in on the joke. You then realize that the joke may in fact be on you, on the expectations and assumptions of coupling, a coupling that perhaps creates codependence, eradicates individuality, and, presented in this manner, borders on the ridiculous. T42 is play on the hypercivilized teatime that’s almost too intimate to feel comfortable. A graceful combination of sweet and discomforting, this piece makes me wonder, is there really a way we can both negotiate this vessel lovingly and fairly? Can it really go right? —Kate McBride, Marketing Assistant

An installation of five ceramic plates displayed on five shelves and printed with the sayings

Untitled by Kerry James Marshall

Kerry James Marshall’s five white, porcelain dinner plates from the multiple Untitled (1998) are printed with Civil Rights slogans such as “We Shall Overcome” and “Black is Beautiful.” Art historically the plates evoke Judy Chicago’s iconic feminist installation The Dinner Party (1974–79), but their political thrust makes me think of the meme that circulated around the 2012 election with African-American laborers next to a photo of the White House and the text, “We Built It.” Who are our objects of leisure and consumption made by and for? Were they made according to ethical labor practices, and if they could speak—as Marshall’s plates appear to—what stories would they tell? —Sam Adams, Curatorial Fellow

Untitled by Doris Salcedo

Doris Salcedo’s untitled work of 1998 is heavy, her manipulation of familiar furniture utterly negating any sense of home and safety. It is akin to piecing together a monument, making the moment of recognition kinetic. At once the question shifts from “What is this?” to “What happened?” —Frank Redner, Visitor Assistant Lead

Rückenfigur by Glenn Ligon

One of my favorite works in the ICA Collection is one I’ve not yet seen installed in Boston. I first encountered Glenn Ligon’s Rückenfigur at the Whitney in 2011. Soon after, ICA Trustee Bridgitt Evans and her husband Bruce promised this seminal work to the ICA. Our collection has and continues to be predominantly comprised of gifts of art from a generous group of individuals who believe that works of great importance – like this – belong in the public realm for audiences to enjoy for generations to come. Rückenfigur is a simple neon sign that reads “America.” The title, “back figure,” is echoed in both the darkened typeface that creates the illusion of approaching the sign from behind, and in the complex interconnectedness of racial and national identity that our country navigates. I spent a long time in front of that work at the Whitney, and have thought of it often since, particularly over the past year. For me, Ligon’s neons evoke equal parts despair and hope; overwhelming the viewer with bold gestures toward the unfulfilled promise of the United States while simultaneously acknowledging, if not insisting, that the viewer is herself an active participant in shaping its future. I still remember the charged feeling in the room, and in my stomach, when the ICA’s Board of Trustees approved the acceptance of this work, Ligon’s first in our collection. It seemed incredibly relevant then, and perhaps more so now. I look forward to seeing it take its place in our galleries in the years to come. —Katie Mayshak, Director of Development

A sculpture composed of a colorful costume covering the body of a mannequin a chandelier-like headpiece decorated with ceramic birds and strings of beads.

A sculpture made of very thick, beige rope or cordwoven together to resemble an abstracted inchworm on a concrete floor.

A color photograph of an older light-skinned woman wearing a yellow blouse and black pants and laughing widely while seated on the edge of a bed.

Soundsuit by Nick Cave, Inchworm by Francoise Grossen, and Lil Laughing, Swampscott, MA by Nan Goldin

I love this trio of works. For a time they were relatively near each other in the gallery, and once I connected them, they just made me smile. Each has a big personality on their own, but together they turn into a vibrant motley crew. I created the following activity that the Teen Arts Council will do this week with all three artworks… “These three pieces went on a cross-country road trip together. Where did they stop along the way? What did they do? Who drove? Who was the DJ? What music did they play? What was the final destination of their epic journey and why? Use your answers to these questions to create a visual “journey map” of their trip.” —Carlie Bristow, Teen Programs Assistant