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Four remarkable new theater pieces and why you should see great performance more than once.

The Time-Based Art Festival (TBA), put on by the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (Oregon) for the past 13 years, is one of my favorite places to see new and experimental theater, dance, and music from around the world. Taking place throughout the city in theaters, parks, churches, abandoned warehouses—pretty much anywhere you can imagine—there is a casual vibe where artists and Portlandia folk come together to express their individuality and community.

This year I was able to be there for just a couple of days but caught a couple of great artist talks and four remarkable shows in that short time.

My first show was Requiem Mass: LGBT / Working Title. A labor of love by the composer (and Portland native) Holcombe Waller, the event took place in the Trinity Episcopal Cathedral and honored those whose lives had been cut short because of their sexual/gender orientation. The one-hour work had all the trappings of a mass—a procession down the aisle, readings, sermons—but it was really the music, with a choir of 40 community singers, a pipe organ, and an ensemble, that raised the spirit of the 300-plus attendees.

Next up was a real eye opener for me. Until the week before, I had never heard of the Italian choreographer Allesandro Sciarroni. The U.S. premiere he presented, FOLK-S, Will you still love me tomorrow is impossible to describe—and any attempt to do so only makes it sound deadly dull. It is anything but. As the audience enters, six dancers in silhouette on the stage perform rhythmic movement taken from a Bavarian folk dance (one of the dancers is wearing Lederhosen). After the audience is seated and the house lights dim and the stage lights come up, the dancers extend the movement across the stage. After a pause, one of the dancers says the dance will continue as long as there is at least one person seated in the audience and one person on the stage. I could go on, but to what effect? You have to see it. Suffice it to say that throughout the next 90 minutes or so, one goes through a range of experiences—humor, jet-lagged exhaustion, trying to figure out just how they are doing what they are doing, excitement, awe and, in the end, a powerful sense of empathy with both fellow audience members and the dancers on stage. 

The work that drew me to Portland this year was Lars Jan/Early Morning Opera’s The Institute of Memory (TIMe). I have seen other works by Jan and been seduced by the mystery he creates with text, performance, and media. In this latest work, which was first presented last spring but has undergone a substantial rewrite since, he sets out to uncover his father, who is a distant memory at most. A refugee from Nazi Germany, a fighter for the French resistance, and perhaps a spy for the CIA, his father looms as a shadow throughout Jan’s life, but only a few specific memories of him remain (including his giving him a Gore Vidal novel for Jan’s fifth birthday.) The search to find who his father really was takes him to the Polish Institute of National Memory, Massachusetts General Hospital, Washington, D.C., and Harvard, where the elder Jan was associated with the School of Government. The story is told simply with two actors, an amazing mobile light grid, some media, and Gorecki’s 3rd Symphony. Stay tuned. The ICA is a co-commissioner of this work through the National Performance Network, and we may well be presenting this in Boston.

As a rule, I wish we could all see performances more than once.

Finally, I was able to (re)see a work I had seen last spring in New York: Okwui Okpokwasili’s Bronx Gothic. Living in the intersection between dance, theater, and a visual art installation, the work channels the confusion and anxiety that an 11-year-old girl growing up in the Bronx might feel as her body transforms, her friendships complicate, and people start looking at her differently. The innocence of playing double Dutch collides with sexual assault in this very powerful performance.

As a rule, I wish we could all see performances more than once; as with great visual art, great performance reveals more upon every viewing. I can’t end this report without relaying what a powerful performer Okwui is. Her use of words and trance-like movement takes a story and burns it into your being. Upon first viewing, the work made me uncomfortable. But now that I’ve seen it a second time, I know that 11-year-old girl lives somewhere inside me.

From an over-the-top interpretation of Jean Genet’s The Maids to a notorious opera infused with the genius of artist William Kentridge, four productions worth traveling for.

The ICA’s Director of Performing and Media Arts and Assistant Director of Performing Arts share their top picks for New York theater this fall.

Chambre, by Jack Ferver and Marc Swanson 
New Museum, as part of the Crossing the Line Festival
Sep 23 – Oct 4

In the summer of 2009, the ICA hosted writer, choreographer, and director Jack Ferver and American visual artist Marc Swanson, as part of our Summer Stages Dance residency program. Last fall I had the opportunity to see their latest collaboration, Chambre, a wild take on Jean Genet’s The Maids, which serves as a point of departure for a farcical and haunting attack on our culture of celebrity and greed. Catch it while you can at the New Museum, where it’s running as part of the Crossing the Line Festival organized by French Institute Alliance Française.

Ferver refracts Genet through many lenses, including the gruesome facts of the real-life murders that inspired The Maids, Lady Gaga’s infamous courtroom deposition speech, role-play, and a manic fantasy escape to the City of Lights.

His wild imagination and over-the-top performance finds the perfect setting in Swanson’s mythic and evocative sculptures, which function both as freestanding art and a theatrical set, and will be on view as an installation at the New Museum during museum hours. —David Henry, Director of Performing and Media Arts
 

Glasser and Jonathan Turner: Charge
The Kitchen NYC
Oct 23–24

Electropop songwriter Glasser (aka Cameron Mesirow) will perform her lush, intimately epic songs at The Kitchen, accompanied by visual artist Jonathan Turner’s films and animations. Both artists explore the ways that technology intersects with the natural and human world; this show should be both visually and sonically gorgeous. —John Andress, Associate Director of Performing Arts
 

Twyla Tharp 50th Anniversary Tour
Presented by the Joyce Theater at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center
Nov 17–22

Unless we were paying close attention to dance 25 years ago, most of us know the iconic choreographer Twyla Tharp mostly for her work in ballet, Hollywood, television, and, of course, Broadway. For her 50th anniversary she has returned to her roots in modern dance and created three new works to celebrate her 50 years of dance-making in what is sure to be THE dance event of the fall. —David Henry, Director of Performing and Media Arts

Lulu
The Metropolitan Opera
Nov 5–Dec 3

Artist William Kentridge stages a new production of Alban Berg’s Lulu for the Metropolitan Opera. The opera tells the story of Lulu, a notorious femme fatale who lures men and women to their doom. Full of sex, obsession, and death (everything that makes opera great!), the production includes costumes, scenery, and animated projections that Kentridge designed for the revival of this early-twentieth century masterpiece. Especially recommended for those who saw—and were mesmerized by—Kentridge’s The Refusal of Time at the ICA last year. —John Andress, Associate Director of Performing Arts

Image credit: Jack Ferver in Chambre; image by Julieta Cervantes

A short (and definitely not comprehensive) list of exhibitions worth traveling for this season.

Making your way to New York this fall? ICA staff including Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director and Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator, let you in on what they’re seeing:

 

EDIT_Bauhaus.jpgFrom Bauhaus to Buenos Aires
MoMA
Through Oct 4

MoMA’s From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires is the first major exhibition exploring the work and relationship of two leading avant-garde photographers of the 1920s and beyond, Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola. Stern’s photomontages are a celebration of the progressiveness of the day, heavily influenced by a strong Leftist emphasis on social commentary, her Bauhaus tutelage, and a fascination with psychoanalysis and the female unconscious. Coppola, introduced to the Bauhaus by Stern after meeting her in Berlin, combines an enthusiasm for Surrealism and the uncanny with a politically motivated depiction of social reality. —Kate McBride, Marketing Associate

Image: Grete Stern (Argentine, born Germany. 1904–1999). Dreams No. 1. 1949. Gelatin silver print, 10 ½ x 9” (26.6 x 22.9 cm). Latin American and Caribbean Fund through gift of Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis in honor of Adriana Cisneros de Griffin. © 2014 Galería Jorge Mara-La Ruche

Ron Nagle
Matthew Marks Gallery
Through Oct 24

Simply one of the best sculptors, and painters, working today. Nagle is not shown enough in museums or on the East Coast, though the deft, humorous, and deliciously weird forms of his exquisitely colored ceramic sculptures say as much about bodies, human behavior, architecture, abstraction, and the sheer power of individualized beauty as anything else on public view. —Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator

Zanele Muholi: Isibonelo/Evidence 
Brooklyn Museum
Through Nov 1

Zanele Muholi is an activist who makes stunning, unforgettable photographs of the LGBTI communities in South Africa, who are under constant threat of violence and discrimination in their country. Often printed in large-format and displayed in disarming grids, her photographs capture the individuality, defiance, beauty, and complexity of her subjects in a way that registers across the expanses of silent galleries. —Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator

Image (at top): Zanele Muholi (South African, born 1972). Ayanda & Nhlanhla Moremi’s wedding I. Kwanele Park, Katlehong, 9 November 2013, 2013. Chromogenic photograph, 10 7/16 x 14 9/16 in. (26.5 x 37 cm), framed. © Zanele Muholi. Courtesy of Stevenson Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York 
 

Berlin Metropolis: 1918–1933
Neue Galerie
Oct 1–Jan 4, 2016

As a former Berliner, I’m drawn to most things having to do with this dynamic and fascinating city. But this exhibition is something really special: a multifaceted endeavor bringing to life one of the most progressive, prolific, and ultimately disastrous cultures in history, a time marked by sexual emancipation, artistic experimentation, and an intoxicating modernity in art, design, film, jazz, and more. Chronologically—and even thematically—it also leads right into our big fall exhibition Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957, and with artists and teachers escaping Germany around this time and landing at BMC, I bet we’ll see some threads of influence. —Kris Wilton, Creative Content Manager
 

Swedish Wooden Toys
Bard Graduate Center Gallery
Through January 17, 2016

I’d also really like to see this exhibition of Swedish toys. With playthings from the 17th through the 21st centuries, I bet it’ll be a really interesting lens through which to consider changes of all kinds—in manufacturing, design, conceptions of childhood, pedagogical theory, societal roles, materials, materialism… And be really cute to boot. —Kris Wilton, Creative Content Manager

Walid Raad _ We decided to let them say “we are convinced” twice. It was more convincing this wayWalid Raad
MoMA
Oct 12, 2015–Jan 31, 2016

I am extremely excited to see the new Walid Raad exhibition, opening next week at MoMA and organized by our Barbara Lee Chief Curator Eva Respini. Raad, a Lebanese-born artist living and working in NY, tackles insistent questions about history in his photographs, videos, sculptures, and performances: Who writes history? Who excavates, who archives, who constructs our understanding of war and conflict? Raad’s work is painfully relevant today, especially as we witness the thousands of refugees fleeing Syria and ask who will write their histories. The ICA is proud to present Walid Raad to Boston audiences when it travels to the ICA in January 2016. —Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director

Picasso Sculpture
MoMA
Through Feb 7, 2016

This fall, I will be waiting in line for the Picasso Sculpture exhibition that just opened at MoMA. It is not every day that Roberta Smith (of the New York Times) calls a show a “once-in-a-lifetime event.” And I say this with some authority, since stalking, or as I like to term it, “assiduously following” art critics, is part of my official job capacity! —Colette Randall, Director of Marketing and Communications

Walter De Maria, The New York Earth Room
141 Wooster Street
Open fall, winter, and spring

One of my favorite things about fall: The Earth Room re-opens! It is a natural respite in the middle of a brick and mortar city. Go, breathe, and enjoy—it’s a delight. —Anna Lyman, Chief of Staff

ICA staff let you know where they’ll be this fall. 

From beloved artists who’ve appeared at the ICA to up-and-comers we can’t wait to check out, ICA Staff share Boston-area picks not to miss.

Converging Lines: Eva Hesse And Sol Lewitt
Addison Gallery of American Art
Through Jan 10, 2016

Two of the late 20th century’s most important artists, Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt shared a close and generative friendship. If curator Veronica Robert’s insightful, generous catalog is any indication, this exhibition will not only elucidate the artists’ shared and diverging aesthetic and conceptual concerns, but also their friendship, an oft-overlooked aspect of artistic creativity also at the center of the ICA’s upcoming Leap Before you Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957. —Dan Byers, Senior Curator

I also recommend Converging Lines: Eva Hesse And Sol Lewitt! The selected art creates a correspondence focused on a visual/personal relationship illuminating the genesis of conceptual art. —Ruth Quattlebaum, Tour Guide

Laura McPhee, The Home and the World
Carroll and Sons
Through Oct 31

As a photographer myself, I’ve been a big fan of Laura McPhee’s work for a while now, especially her projects River of No Return and Guardians of Solitude. She teaches at MassArt and she’s one of my favorite Boston area photographers. I just learned about this series The Home and the World, in which she photographs gorgeous domestic architecture in Kolkata, India. I can’t wait to check it out at the gallery. Her prints are beautiful and if you want to see all the marvelous details, you really need to see them in person. —Chris Hoodlet, Membership Manager

Language vs Language
Sol Koffler Graduate Student Gallery at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence
Sep 15–Oct 11

The Sol Koffler Graduate Student Gallery is a great place to see what RISD students are putting out throughout the year. This fall’s exhibition, Language vs Language, is a group exhibition exploring “language, translation, and intercultural space.” RISD’s grad student open studio events are amazing also—the chance to see hundreds of artists’ work—but details for the fall event haven’t been released yet, it seems. —Africanus Okokon, Interpretive Media and Adult Education Coordinator
 

EDIT_2015-thekriegcycle-kollwitz.jpg

The Krieg Cycle: Käthe Kollwitz and World War I
The Davis Museum at Wellesley College
Through Dec 13

I’m fascinated by woodcuts in general—and how they so evocatively show the traces of the artist’s hand and the hours of painstaking work. I can’t wait to see this exhibition of woodcuts by the wrenching East German artist Käthe Kollwitz from her print series Krieg (War), published nine years after her son was killed in battle in World War I. I expect to be awed, inspired, rattled, heartbroken, and galvanized, in equal measure. — Kris Wilton, Creative Content Manager

Image: Käthe Kollwitz, The Parents (plate 3) from the portfolio “War,” 1923. © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Makeover!
Sübsamsøñ
Oct 7–24 

Sübsamsøñ and the BLAA (Boston LGBTQIA Artist Alliance) teamed up for Makeover!, a show of 18 Boston-affiliated or -based artists whose work considers reshaping, modifying, and updating the self. With the recent loss of a permanent space, the BLAA is undergoing its own makeover and this exhibition is an exciting first look at the organization’s new direction. [Disclosure: I have work in this show. See it here.] Come to the opening reception! Friday, Oct 9 from 6–8 PM. —Lenny Schnier, Education Department Assistant
 

24th Drawing Show: Feelers
Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts
Oct 9–Dec 20

For the 24th installment of the Mills Gallery’s annual Drawing Show, the BCA enlisted guest curator Susan Metrican (one quarter of the 2015 ICA Foster Prize recipient kijidome). The 56 artists in the exhibition explore the possibilities of existing in a two-dimensional reality through drawing’s inherent encounter with flatness. [Full disclosure: I have work in this show too.] Come to this opening reception too, Fri, Oct 9 from 6–8 PM! —Lenny Schnier, Education Department Assistant

Rosa Barba: The Color Out of Space
MIT List Visual Arts Center
Oct 23, 2015–Jan 3, 2016

Rosa Barba’s much-needed first survey exhibition in North America, at MIT’s List Center, includes a diverse range of works made over the last ten years. The exhibition premieres Barba’s latest work, The Color Out of Space, a film that incorporates images collected over the past year from the Hirsch Observatory at Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute, which expands on the artist’s sustained interest in different registers of time. —Jeffrey DeBlois, Curatorial Assistant

 

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Lorraine O’Grady: Where Margins Become Centers
Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University
Oct 29, 2015–Jan 10, 2016

Lorraine O’Grady, born in Boston in 1934, has been one of the more perceptive observers of contemporary culture since bursting onto the New York scene in the 1980s. I am excited to witness her energetic and critical engagement with questions of race, gender, and class across six bodies of work brought together in this survey exhibition. —Ruth Erickson, Assistant Curator

Image: Lorraine O’Grady, Miscegenated Family Album (Sisters I), 1980/1994. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates.
 

Actually, everything this fall at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard

What other organization can get away with a program that combines the elegantly cerebral institutional interventions of Martin Beck, the participatory and public boat building of Mare Liberum, the stunning monotypes of Dutch graphic design giant Karel Martens, Josiah McElheny’s walking mirrors, and film screenings by Boston-born and LA-based Kerry Tribe, not to mention exhibitions by an artist long overdue (Lorraine O’Grady) and prescient (Shahryar Nashat). And that’s not even everything. —Dan Byers, Senior Curator

The ICA looks abroad with exhibitions featuring Walid Raad; Nalini Malani; and Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian

When I arrived in Boston six months ago to take the post of Barbara Lee Chief Curator at the ICA, the long, cold days of winter provided me with the time and space to think about ICA’s future program of exhibitions, performances, talks, and events. The Internet has allowed for the virtual erasure of geographic boundaries and easy exchange and access to information, products, images, communities, and visual cultures from anywhere with an Internet connection. In today’s globalized world, I believe it is imperative for American museums to examine art beyond the United States and Western Europe to make connections with the various histories, traditions, artists, and institutions outside our own country. This can be achieved by exhibiting artists from around the globe, but also by expanding our web reach, with images and dialogues that can be accessed by anybody, anywhere, anytime.

This year the ICA is launching a series of exhibitions and programs by a roster of international artists that address a variety of issues in contemporary art. In December we will host The Birthday Party, the first exhibition in an American museum of three Iranian artists based in Dubai; in February, we will open the first American mid-career survey of Lebanese artist Walid Raad; and in summer, we will present an all-encompassing installation of the Indian artist Nalini Malani. In The Birthday Party, Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian will transform the gallery space into a total installation that includes the trio’s work in sculpture, video, painting, and collage, which brings together an impressive array of references and objects—from zaar music and mermaids to the work of Louise Bourgeois, and Hassan Sharif. Raad’s work in photography, video, sculpture, and performance, which weaves together fact and fiction, examines how we write, construct, and remember history, specifically the histories of regions in conflict. Malani, India’s leading artist and a committed activist, will present her enthralling multimedia installation In Search of Vanished Blood, which tells the story of a struggling female artist and visionary. Each of the exhibitions will be accompanied by a rich array of educational offerings and programs that will allow our audiences—both local and virtual—to engage with these artists’ work and ideas.

Of course we will keep exhibiting the work of artists closer to home, including Chicago-based sculptor Diane Simpson (opening December); Canadian artist Geoffrey Farmer (opening April); and the Boston-born, New York–based photographer Liz Deschenes (opening July). Made under a diverse range of geographic, political, social, and aesthetic circumstances, these exhibitions together present a wide range of approaches to the artistic, political, social, and cultural flux that have shaped the current global landscape.

 

The legendary and eccentric collector changed art history forever. 

A patron of the arts; a confidante, friend and lover to the modern masters; and a dedicated and ambitious art collector, Peggy Guggenheim was larger than life. New documentary Peggy Guggenheim – Art Addict, by director Lisa Immordino Vreeland, details the exceptional, international life of a woman who broke the rules both publicly and privately. Centered on recently recovered tapes of Peggy Guggenheim’s last interview, this film explores the vision amid tragedy of an iconic woman who eschewed tradition in both her collection and social life.

  1. Peggy Guggenheim had no art history background.
  2. Peggy’s father, Ben Guggenheim, died tragically on the RMS Titanic. He gave his life vest away.
  3. A black sheep of her family, with a love for shock, Peggy shaved off her eyebrows in high school. This rebellious act was considered so avant-garde it became a trend.
  4. At her first gallery, Guggenheim Jeuene, the young collector gave an exhibit of children’s art inspired by her daughter’s love of painting. It was the first show Lucien Freud ever exhibited in.
  5. During World War II Guggenheim spent time in Paris collecting art for a new modern art museum she planned to open in London. She requested the Louvre’s assistance in protecting the works for the duration of the war. The Louvre declined, saying the works were not worth saving. Instead a man helped her ship the whole collection to America, listed as household objects such as sheets, blankets, and casserole dishes.
  6. Guggenheim gave Hans Hoffman, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Wassily Kandinsky and many more their first shows.
  7. Peggy Guggenheim hated her nose and was one of the first people to have plastic surgery. She had the doctor stop in the middle of the procedure because it was so painful, and he apparently didn’t succeed in getting her the nose she wanted. She decided to never have this botched nose job fixed.

Learn more when Peggy Guggenheim—Art Addict screens at the ICA Sep 18 + 19.

The surprising connections between two renegade institutions—Black Mountain College and the ICA—and how they impacted the course of art history

As we near the opening of the ICA’s major exhibition Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957, a number of people are asking me “why?” and “how?”

“Why?” is the ICA, a museum dedicated to contemporary art and artists, organizing an exhibition on Black Mountain College (BMC)—a small experimental college that operated in the hills outside Asheville, North Carolina, from 1933 to 1957?

And “how?” is BMC relevant to today’s discussions on culture, education, citizenship, and democracy?

The answers are in the ICA’s own history. The ICA was founded in 1936, just three short years after Black Mountain College was established. From the outset, the ICA was a renegade in its total embrace of the art of its time and in its belief that a progressive and liberal plurality of the arts was essential to a thriving culture/civic life. Black Mountain College was founded with a similar philosophy, which insisted on the centrality of artistic experience to preparing students for full participation in our democratic society. Now, almost 90 years later, experimentation, interdisciplinarity, collaboration, risk and failure, and experiential learning—key tenets of both BMC and the ICA—are central to conversations in education reform, workforce development, creative economies, innovation, and placemaking.

The ICA decided to organize the exhibition Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957 to explore and understand the enormous and outsized influence this tiny experimental college wielded on postwar culture in the United States. Not only do the BMC years chart the move from modern to contemporary art in the 20th century, many of the ideas incubated there pervade contemporary art now. The global influences this exhibition reveals as central to Black Mountain College—from Asia, through John Cage and Ruth Asawa; from Latin America, through the travels of Josef and Anni Albers; from Europe, through the artists who fled Nazi Europe—created what exhibition curator Helen Molesworth calls a cosmopolitanism of ideas, artists, and individuals.

The title Leap Before You Look reflects the daring spirit of experimentation that defined BMC and that permeates the ICA today.”

The now-famous names that populate 20th-century artistic practice—Anni and Josef Albers, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Ruth Asawa, Robert Motherwell, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Dorothea Rockburne, Ray Johnson, Ben Shahn, Aaron Siskind, Robert Rauschenberg, Gwendolyn and Jacob Lawrence, Stan VanDerBeek, and many more—were all part of the dynamic and often volatile cultural, educational, and artistic exchanges and collaborations of Black Mountain College.

In the BMC community, experiments in mixed media, assemblage, dance, found sounds and objects, architecture, photography, and film challenged the dominant tropes of painting and sculpture. The first “happening” occurred at Black Mountain College with Theater Piece No. 1, which is being reimagined at the ICA this fall. Merce Cunningham collided with John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg, and incorporated chance procedures and visual art into his work (his 1957 piece Changeling will be performed in our galleries throughout the exhibition). The art of assemblage—Rauschenberg’s first designated Combine painting was made there—and the pioneering aesthetics of collage and found materials are evident in Stan VanDerBeek’s films, and in Cage’s use of everyday sounds.

The title of the exhibition—Leap Before You Look, taken from a poem by W.H. Auden—reflects the daring spirit of experimentation that defined BMC and that permeates the ICA today. The ICA has long embraced the porousness between architecture, visual arts, dance, media, and the presentation of pioneering and emerging artists in its exhibitions. Equally important, the ICA echoes the educational pedagogy of Black Mountain College in dedicating itself to arts education as a strategy to invest in our future artists, audiences, and electorate as well as a more equitable education for urban youth. Through immersive art-making courses, interactions with visiting artists, and a shared responsibility for peer programs, teens experience learning by doing at the ICA—a critical aspect of BMC as well.

Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957 is an overdue and sweeping project, including 281 objects, archival materials, in-gallery dance and music, a comprehensive catalogue, symposia, course curricula, and a digital library of timelines and readings. It presents original scholarship on a key period in 20th-century cultural history that encourages us to think deeply about learning and community, culture and collaboration, experimentation and interdependence, and the world we could create anew. With this exhibition, the ICA takes a magnificent leap, celebrating the move from modern to contemporary, connecting the past to the present and, we hope, opening a vision for the future.

When we visited in March, artist Steve Locke’s modest, pleasingly cluttered live/work space in Hyde Park was dominated by the works he’d been preparing for his ICA show: several small paintings of men sticking out their tongues, mounted on brightly decorated pedestals using metal pipes, as well as one large wall painting, leaning near his kitchen.

This is the first major museum exhibition for Locke, who, at 50 years old and 20 years into his artistic career says, “I’m hitting my stride in my practice.” Organized by Helen Molesworth, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, the exhibition also includes an installation of multiple paintings recalling earlier polyptychs and a neon work bearing the show’s title, there is no one left to blame.
Locke showed us around his studio, cheerfully discussing his work and upcoming exhibition.

ICA: Congratulations on your exhibition. What will we be seeing?

SL: I’m showing all new work. Helen could show anybody she wants to. She’s sort of taking a risk on showing me, so I wanted to have all new work for her.

Let’s talk about your work. Most of these paintings are mounted on pedestals and pipes, so that they’re freestanding. Why?

For my second solo show at Samson, You Don’t Deserve Me, I really wanted to do something that moved the whole idea of painting forward. I’m in love with Rauschenberg, like everybody else, and I started thinking of the history of painting being about the history of signage and wondering, if this painting didn’t have the wall, how would it exist in the world? So I started figuring out how to make the paintings behave in a way that makes them feel autonomous. I was making these weird drawings with heads and spikes that connected them to the ground, and then I thought, I can just make a line in space: I can use the poles to draw, to connect the things to earth. And then they just came one after the other.

Why paint men with their tongues sticking out?

It’s hard to make a painting of a man and not have him look important. So I came up with this weird gesture. I like that they’re not heroic, and not attached to any body. They’re floating around in the atmosphere, waiting to possess somebody, or get inside your head and transform you. I’m painting out of my own nightmares: I think a lot of the images are grotesque and frightening, like a head on a spike. That notion of something that’s alive and dead at the same time comes up in the work. It’s like Medusa, when she has her head cut off and her tongue is lolling out.

Do you use models?

Early in my career, I had people who were nice enough to give me their likenesses to work with. But as the paintings got more and more grotesque and violent, I thought, I really don’t want to do that to anyone I know.

One work, Requiem, is so much quieter and more subdued than the others.

That’s central to the loss that a lot of the work is about: the loss of that particular time in life, of a particular kind of beautiful subject. A lot of it has to do with the AIDS epidemic, and being 50 years old, and knowing that most of my peers are either living with HIV or dead. I have a photo of a group of my friends on the Cape here in the studio, and now almost all these people are gone. There are other pieces that are about that, but this one addresses it directly.

You said a lot of your friends are living with HIV now. It must be so hard.

You sort of feel like the last of the Mohicans. It was just awful. You’d hear so-and-so has a head cold, and four days later they were gone. No one knew why or how, and no one would help. What was so terrific about the ’80s show, was seeing that addressed.1 Because the history of that time hasn’t really been written yet; people who lived through it are actually getting past being traumatized enough to really talk about it. I had lunch with one of the guys in the photo a few weeks ago, and we were like, “Did that really happen?”