get tickets

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

The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) announces its 2018 ICA Reads selection, Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions. An artful take on the book club, ICA Reads—now in partnership with local literary organizations GrubStreet and Mass LEAP—presents a book of critical and societal importance and an opportunity to gather for discussion and meet the author.

Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions is a short, insightful retelling of Luiselii’s personal experience as a translator for children migrating to the United States, predominately from Central America. Her innovative storytelling, structured around the forty official immigration questions that unaccompanied immigrant children facing deportation must answer, humanizes a fraught and contentious topic. Luiselli weaves together her personal stories with snippets she hears from immigrant children, highlighting the contradiction between the idea of America as a fiction for immigrants and the reality of racism and fear—both here and back home.

ICA Reads: Valeria Luiselli with Jill Medvedow, Thursday, April 5, 7 PM
Join Luiselli as she discusses the process of writing Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, the need for “mapping” stories, and her thoughts on the similarities between novels and contemporary art with Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director. Book signing to follow. Free admission, first come, first served; tickets available at the box office two hours prior to start of program.

About the Author
Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City in 1983 and grew up in South Africa. A novelist (Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth) and essayist (Sidewalks and Tell Me How It Ends), her work has been translated into many languages. In 2014, Faces in the Crowd was the recipient of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 award. The Story of My Teeth was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the 2015 Los Angeles Times Prize for Best Fiction.

About the ICA
An influential forum for multi-disciplinary arts, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston has been at the leading edge of art in Boston for 80 years. Like its iconic building on Boston’s waterfront, the ICA offers new ways of engaging with the world around us. Its exhibitions and programs provide access to contemporary art, artists, and the creative process, inviting audiences of all ages and backgrounds to participate in the excitement of new art and ideas. The ICA, located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, is open Tuesday and Wednesday, 10 AM–5 PM; Thursday and Friday, 10 AM–9 PM (1st Friday of every month, 10 AM–5 PM); and Saturday and Sunday, 10 AM–5 PM. Admission is $15 adults, $13 seniors and $10 students, and free for members and children 17 and under. Free admission for families at ICA Play Dates (2 adults + children 12 and under) on last Saturday of the month. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at www.icaboston.org. Follow the ICA at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) announced today one new appointment and three promotions within the museum’s curatorial staff. The promotions include Jeffrey De Blois to Assistant Curator, Ruth Erickson to Mannion Family Curator, and Jessica Hong to Assistant Curator. New to the ICA is Ellen Tani, who has been appointed Assistant Curator.
 
“Ruth, Jeff, Jessica, and Ellen each bring unique skill sets, varied interests, enthusiasm and energy to the ICA, and they will all play a central role in shaping the museum’s future program,” said Eva Respini, the ICA’s Barbara Lee Chief Curator. “These four talented, bright, and creative individuals will no doubt carry forward ICA’s mission to be a laboratory for new ideas.”
 
BIOS

Headshot of Jeffrey De Blois

Jeffrey De Blois
Since coming to the ICA in July 2015, Jeffrey De Blois has organized The Freedom of Information portion of First Light: A Decade of Collecting at the ICA, coordinated the Boston presentation of Walid Raad (organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York) and made key contributions to Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today (February 7-May 20) and its accompanying publication. He assisted with several exhibitions including Steve McQueen: Ashes, 2017 James and Audrey Foster Prize, The Artist’s Museum, Diane Simpson, and Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian: The Birthday Party. De Blois also coordinated the publications for The Artist’s Museum and Diane Simpson. His upcoming projects include organizing Caitlin Keogh (May 9-August 26) and coordinating Jason Moran (September 19, 2018-January 21, 2019), which originates at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
 

Headshot of ICA Curator Ruth Erickson

Ruth Erickson
Ruth Erickson first joined the ICA in 2012 as a Research Fellow for Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-57. She subsequently joined the museum as Assistant Curator and was promoted to Associate Curator in 2016. In her two and a half years as a curator, Ruth has organized or coordinated 10 exhibitions, including Nari Ward: Sun Splashed (originally from the Peréz Art Museum Miami), Ethan Murrow: Seastead, and Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian: The Birthday Party. Recently, Erickson organized Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 21st-Century Naturalist and edited its accompanying monograph. She additionally contributes to growing the ICA’s collection, coordinating the Collections and Exhibitions Committee, and overseeing the digitization of the collection. Her current and upcoming exhibitions include Wangechi Mutu: A Promise to Communicate (on view through December 31) and Kevin Beasley (May 9-August 26). 
 

Headshot of Jessica Hong

Jessica Hong
Jessica Hong has completed nine projects since joining the ICA in 2016. She is currently organizing Arthur Jafa’s first exhi­­bition in Boston and the ICA’s presentation of We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85 (June 27-September 30), originally from the Brooklyn Museum. Recently, she helped organize Wangechi Mutu: A Promise to Communicate, Mark Dion’s first U.S. survey, Dana Schutz, Nari Ward: Sun Splashed (organized by the Peréz Art Museum Miami), Gillian Wearing’s first presentation in Boston, Nalini Malani: In Search of Vanished Blood, Liz Deschenes, Geoffrey Farmer, and First Light: A Decade of Collecting at the ICA, including curating the Rineke Dijkstra/Nan Goldin portion of this landmark exhibition. Hong also contributed to the corresponding monograph for Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 21st-Century Naturalist—the artist’s first in over 20 years—and coordinated the production of Liz Deschenes’ first major publication. Furthermore, she helps manage acquisitions for the ICA’s fast-growing collection and oversees collection research.
 

Headshot of Ellen Tani

Ellen Tani
Ellen Tani comes to the ICA from the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, where she is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow. There, she teaches classes using objects from the museum’s collection and acts as a key member of the curatorial team. She organized the exhibition Art and Resolution: 1900 to Today and advises collaborations with student and faculty. She also contributes to the museum’s strategic collecting plan, leads faculty workshops, and has developed a major public tagging initiative of the museum’s extensive collection. She is currently developing Second Sight: the Paradox of Vision in Contemporary Art (Spring 2018), whose catalog she authored and edited. Her research engages the fields of American art, black studies, race & ethnicity, design, and conceptual art. Her writing has appeared in American Quarterly, Art Practical, Daily Serving, Temporary Art Review, The Chart, as well as the exhibition monographs of Charles Gaines and Senga Nengudi.
 
About the ICA
An influential forum for multi-disciplinary arts, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston has been at the leading edge of art in Boston for 80 years. Like its iconic building on Boston’s waterfront, the ICA offers new ways of engaging with the world around us. Its exhibitions and programs provide access to contemporary art, artists, and the creative process, inviting audiences of all ages and backgrounds to participate in the excitement of new art and ideas. The ICA, located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, is open Tuesday and Wednesday, 10 AM–5 PM; Thursday and Friday, 10 AM–9 PM (1st Friday of every month, 10 AM–5 PM); and Saturday and Sunday, 10 AM–5 PM.  Admission is $15 adults, $13 seniors and $10 students, and free for members and children 17 and under. Free admission for families at ICA Play Dates (2 adults + children 12 and under) on last Saturday of the month. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at www.icaboston.org. Follow the ICA at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

All photos by Liza Voll.

14 Boston-area arts organizations partner on ambitious, region-wide cultural collaboration dedicated to art and innovation, highlighting Boston as a center of technology

This winter, cultural organizations throughout Greater Boston are partnering to present an ambitious, region-wide exploration of art and technology, announced Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA). Aligned with the ICA’s sweeping exhibition Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today opening February 7, this extraordinary collaboration will offer the public concurrent exhibitions, performances, screenings, and programs at area cultural organizations, all exploring the relationship between art and technology. The organizations partnering with the ICA are:

“Art in the Age of Internet, 1989 to Today gives us the opportunity to examine all the forms of connectivity made possible by the internet, as well as to work in partnership with colleagues and institutions in Greater Boston,” said Medvedow. “The rich history of tech innovation in Boston makes this an ideal place to raise questions about community, privacy, networks, identity, surveillance and speed in a dynamic citywide experience.”
 
“The context of technological innovation in Greater Boston provides a crucial backdrop for the ICA exhibition and our collaboration—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,” said Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator and organizer of the ICA’s exhibition. “The exhibitions and programs presented by the partner institutions enrich the ICA’s exhibition by providing additional opportunities for audiences to connect with the topic of art and technology.”

aiai.icaboston.org
Audiences and scholars around the world can learn about Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today via a dedicated web platform. The extensive site will bring extended content and varying perspectives to the exhibition, and will virtually connect the activities of area partners.

PROJECT OVERVIEW

At the ICA
Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today explores the widespread cultural impact of the internet on art. Featuring a broad range of works across a variety of mediums—including painting, performance, photography, sculpture, video, and web-based works—the exhibition considers the extensive effects of the internet on artistic practice and contemporary culture. Themes explored in the exhibition include emergent ideas of the body and notions of human enhancement; the internet as a site of both surveillance and resistance; the circulation and control of images and information; possibilities for new subjectivities, communities, and virtual worlds; and new economies of visibility amplified by social media.
 
The exhibition features the work of 60 artists, collaborations, and collectives, including Cory Arcangel, Dara Birnbaum, Harun Farocki, Lizzie Fitch/Ryan Trecartin, Juliana Huxtable, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Trevor Paglen, Nam June Paik, Frances Stark, Cindy Sherman, Hito Steyerl, and Anicka Yi. 
 
Exhibition-related programming includes an artist talk with award-winning artist Trevor Paglen in conversation with historian of science Jimena Canales, as well as a robust schedule of performances, organized by David Henry, Bill T. Jones Director of Performing and Media Arts, and John Andress, Curator of Performing Arts. These programs include Sounding the Cloud, a music performance by renowned composers Neil Leonard, Stephen Vitiello, and Scanner that explores what “the cloud” might sound like; Annie Dorsen’s The Great Outdoors, which is presented in an inflatable planetarium, inviting the audience to imagine the internet as a celestial place; and Ryan McNamara’s MEƎM 4 Boston: A Story Ballet About the Internet, an immersive, museum-wide experience that aims to recreate the feeling of surfing the web. For details about these programs, visit icaboston.org
 
Art in the Age of the Internet is organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, and Jeffrey De Blois, Curatorial Associate. It is on view February 7 through May 20, 2018.

At Berklee College of Music
Berklee is sponsoring an interdisciplinary arts seminar designed to further expose music students to visual and performing arts. Students will visit the ICA exhibition, attend artist talks at the ICA, and hold regular off-campus meetings on-site at partner institutions. The seminar will culminate in “Binge Watch,” a public performance by Berklee students that explores the use of digital tools for musical expression, on Thursday, May 10 from 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Neil Leonard, Artistic Director of the Berklee Interdisciplinary Arts Institute, will lead the seminar.

At Boston Cyberarts
Artificial Creativity: Neural Network and Augmented Intelligence Art, explores new tools born of artificial intelligence research that artists are using to make unique new work. Neural network art is a tool for artistic embellishment and creation. In its most common visual form, it combines the imagery of one image and the style of another to create a third hybrid image. Neural networks are a biologically inspired form of computing which, unlike classical computer algorithms, are not programmed directly by human operators but instead learn from large amounts of example data. Other augmented intelligence programs like ‘bots,’ are used to respond in creative ways to human inquiries. The exhibition also explores augmented intelligence used in the creation of music. Artists include Mike Tyka, Mario Klingemann and Jessica Brillhart, among others. Brillhart presents her virtual reality video, Deep Dream VR. Klingemann’s work features a machine running real-time feedback loops, generating work in the present moment.

Artificial Creativity is organized by George Fifield, Director of Boston Cyberarts, with Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg of the Google Brain Team. The exhibition is sponsored by Google and will be on view January 12 through February 18, 2018.
 
At the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University
Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University (CCVA) presents talks with pioneering new media artists Lynn Hershman Leeson and Dara Birnbaum. Both talks are organized by Dan Byers, John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Director, and Daisy Nam, Assistant Director, at the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts. Lynn Hershman Leeson’s talk takes place at 6:00 PM on February 8, 2018, and Dara Birnbaum’s at 6:00 PM on March 29, 2018.
 
At deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum
On view at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, located in Lincoln, MA, are two concurrent exhibitions. Screens: Virtual Material features work by six leading contemporary artists who are confronting how conditions of vision, belief, and behavior are powerfully shaped by the presence of screens in our daily lives. Artists include Brian Bress, Marta Chilindron, Liza Lou, Matt Saunders, Josh Tonsfeldt, and Penelope Umbrico. Cool Medium: Art, Television & Psychedelia, 1960-1980 includes paintings, sculptures, and prints that reveal dynamic intersections between the visual languages of psychedelic experiences and color television as both grew in popularity during the post-war period. Artists include Yaacov Agam, Paul Laffoley, Alan Shields, and Harold Tovish, among others.

Screens: Virtual Material is organized by Sarah Montross, Associate Curator at deCordova, and will be on view through March 18, 2018. Cool Medium: Art, Television & Pyschedelia, 1960-1980, organized by Sarah Montross and Scout Hutchinson, Curatorial Assistant, will be on view through March 11, 2018.
 
At Harvard Art Museums
The Harvard Art Museums present a new installation by JODI, the pioneering artist collective formed in 1994 by Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans. One of the most influential artists working in the age of the internet, JODI will produce a new interactive project that plays with the histories of games and collections. It will be on view in the Harvard Art Museums’ Lightbox Gallery, a collaborative space for digital projects on the museums’ uppermost level.
 
The installation is organized by Mary Schneider Enriquez, Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, and Chris Molinski, Associate Research Curator for Digital Initiatives, at the Harvard Art Museums. It will be on view February 7 through April 23, 2018.
 
At Harvard Film Archive
Harvard Film Archive presents Caught in the Net: The Early Internet in the Paranoid Imagination, a series of film screenings that examines the cultural origin story of the internet as lodged within the paranoid imagination. This film program emphasizes the consistency of cultural fears around the internet, while also charting the ways in which these fears have shifted over time.
 
Films include: Blue Thunder (John Badham, 1983), From yu to me (Aleksandra Domanović, 2013–14), WarGames (John Badham, 1983), Electric Dreams (Steve Barron, 1984), Johnny Mnemonic (Robert Longo, 1995), The Ghost in The Shell (Mamoru Oshii, 1995), Strange Days (Katheryn Bigelow, 1995), Level Five (Chris Marker, 1997), eXistenZ (David Cronenberg, 1999), Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2001), Southland Tales (Richard Kelly, 2007).
 
Caught in the Net is organized by Haden Guest and Nathan Roberts, and will be screened March 9 through March 18, 2018.
 
At Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Artist Judith Barry has created a new work for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum as part of the museum’s series of semi-annual site-specific commissions for contemporary artists. For her installation on the Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade, Barry has chosen to work with some of the hundreds of drone images circulating on the World Wide Web depicting refugees fleeing their homes and seeking a new life elsewhere. Looking up, these asylum seekers greet the seemingly effortlessly hovering drone with a mixture of relief and elation—even though the drone is unmanned and not human, and even though the resulting encounter is no guarantee of a rescue or of entry into another country. By orienting one of these boats vertically and populating it with the upward turned faces taken from these photographs, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Façade can act as a beacon: the faces forming a procession, illuminating the sky. 
 
Judith Barry is organized by Pieranna Cavalchini and will be on view January 17 through June 27, 2018.
 
At MIT List Visual Arts Center
Before Projection: Video Sculpture 1974–1995 shines a spotlight on a body of work that has been largely overlooked since its inception, and explores the connections between our current moment and the point at which video art was transformed dramatically with the entry of projective, cinematic installation into the gallery space. As artists were probing the new medium in the early 1970s, many were making single-screen tapes for monitor display but, increasingly from the 1980s onwards, created elaborate environments assembling large numbers of monitors in architectural configurations, video walls, or room installations incorporating other objects. In concert with developments in technology, video editing and effects were getting more sophisticated. Unlike cinematic projection, these works were less interested in pictorial space and narrative but rather articulated a range of concerns related to the medium of television, the still and the moving image, seriality, figuration, and identity. This exhibition will present a re-evaluation of monitor-based sculpture since the 1970s and serve as a tightly focused survey of works that have been rarely seen in the last twenty years. Like Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today, this exhibition examines how available technologies become materials for a range of formal and thematic artistic concerns. Artists in the exhibition include Dara Birnbaum, Ernst Caramelle, Takahiko Iimura, Shigeko Kubota, Mary Lucier, Muntadas, Nam June Paik, Tony Oursler, Adrian Piper, Diana Thater, and Maria Vedder.
 
Before Projection: Video Sculpture 1974-1995 is organized by Henriette Huldisch, Director of Exhibitions and Curator, MIT List Visual Art Center. It will be on view February 8 through April 15, 2018.
 
At the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) hosts a program in collaboration with the Berklee Interdisciplinary Arts Institute on Thursday, May 10 from 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM, as part of The Nancy Lee Clark Concert Series Sound Bites, organized by Kristen Hoskins, MFA Curator of Lectures, Courses, and Concerts. Berklee students will perform “Binge Watch,” reflecting on creating music in the age of the internet. This program highlights “addictive music” and students will explore the use of computers, smart phones, and tablets as tools for musical expression.
 
At the Museum of Science, Boston
The Museum of Science, Boston presents four talks as part of its Cyber-INsecurity series. Cyborgs, Futurists & Transhumanism: A Conversation considers a transhumanist future on Wednesday, March 28, 2018 at 7:00PM; Cyberattacks & Information Terrorism: The Next World War? investigates whether the United States is prepared for the worst-case scenario today and in the future on Wednesday, April 11 at 7:00PM; Robot Sex: Connection, Privacy & Ethics in the 21st Century probes the difficult questions we will need to address as human-robot relationships evolve in the coming decades on Wednesday, April 25, at 7:00PM; and at CryptoParty: A Crash Course in Digital Hygiene, Somerville Cryptoparty and other privacy activists will demonstrate good cyber-habits and practical tools of digital security on Wednesday, May 9 from 6:30 to 9:00 PM.

Cyber-INsecurity is organized by Lisa Monrose, Producer, adult programs and James Wetzel, Co-Producer, adult programs.

At Peabody Essex Museum
The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA presents PlayTime, the first major thematic exhibition celebrating the role of play in contemporary art and culture. 40 works by 20 leading contemporary artists—including large-scale installations, sculpture, photographs, video and tactile interactives—examine how play catalyzes creative expression, enchants the ordinary, and helps us understand ourselves in new ways.

PlayTime is organized by Trevor Smith, the Peabody Essex Museum’s Curator of the Present Tense, and will be on view February 10 through May 6, 2018.

At the Rose Art Museum
The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University presents an exhibition focusing on the unconventional publication Blueprint for Counter Education, a boxed set of posters and texts that introduced the tools for a radical pedagogical model. Its open-ended charts and diagrams mapped a world of ideas, from the avant-garde to the postmodern, in a form that presaged the internet, allowing readers to chart a course of thinking and discovery that anticipated the prevalence of search engines, social media, and the quick connection of the hyperlink.
 
This exhibition is organized by Caitlin Julia Rubin, Assistant Curator of the Rose Art Museum, and will be on view March 2 through July 8, 2018.
 
At Tufts University Art Galleries/School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts
Tufts University Art Galleries is hosting a two-campus presentation of Jillian Mayer’s Slumpies. “Sculptures that work for you,” Slumpies are designed to support visitors’ bodies as they use their portable screens and smartphones. They are a post-posture sculptural solution that leans towards an idea of function, relieving the human form of the duty of supporting its own neck while acknowledging our ever-increasing relationship with mankind’s best invention. Mayer will visit Tufts for a public lecture, a filming and virtual reality workshop with students, and a post-workshop screening in February 2018.
 
This exhibition is organized by Dina Deitsch, Director and Chief Curator of Tufts University Art Galleries. It is on view January 16 through April 15, 2018.

Major support for Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today is provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
 
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
 
Additional support is generously provided by Edward Berman and Kathleen McDonough, Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser, Karen Swett Conway and Brian Conway, Robert Davoli and Eileen McDonagh, Fotene Demoulas and Tom Coté, Bridgitt and Bruce Evans, Vivien and Alan Hassenfeld, Jodi and Hal Hess, Kristen and Kent Lucken, Kim and Jim Pallotta, Ted Pappendick and Erica Gervais Pappendick, Charles and Fran Rodgers, Mark and Marie Schwartz, and Charlotte and Herbert S. Wagner III.

NEA logo

 

(Boston, MA—November 13, 2017) The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) will open the ICA Watershed, a new seasonal space for art, with a major project by internationally renowned artist Diana Thater, announced Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director of the ICA, today. Opening in summer 2018, the ICA Watershed is located across Boston Harbor from the ICA in the Boston Shipyard and Marina in East Boston. The ICA will provide a boat to bring visitors between both locations.

“With the opening of the Watershed, the ICA once again transforms the cultural landscape of Boston and its waterfront through contemporary art,” said Medvedow. “The Watershed is a new opportunity for artists and audiences to experience the industrial, maritime, and social history of Boston, build a connection between the neighborhoods of East and South Boston, and activate our beautiful harbor through art, water transportation, and public access.” 

Thater’s installation will reflect on the fragility of the natural world, transforming the ICA Watershed through light and moving image projections. The installation will center on Thater’s artwork Delphine, reconfigured in response to the Watershed’s raw, industrial space, and coastal location. In this monumental work, underwater film and video footage of swimming dolphins spills across the floor, ceiling, and walls, creating an immersive underwater environment. As viewers interact with Delphine, they become performers within the artwork, their own silhouettes moving and spinning alongside the dolphins. Grounding the sea of projections is a composite video wall, a grid of nine cube monitors displaying a single glowing image of the sun. The Diana Thater installation is organized by Barbara Lee Chief Curator Eva Respini. 

“Diana Thater’s strategies of intensified color and visually stunning moving images will offer visitors an extraordinary introduction to the Watershed and raise urgent questions about the impact of human intervention on the environment,” said Medvedow.

About the ICA Watershed
In summer 2018, the ICA will expand its artistic programming across Boston Harbor to the Watershed, a new space for art in the Boston Shipyard and Marina in East Boston. Award-winning firm Anmahian Winton Architects (AW) has been engaged to design the renovation of the facility, a former copper pipe factory, and restore the historic building for new use. The ICA will present artworks and public programs seasonally in the newly renovated 15,000 square-foot space while continuing year-round programming in its Diller Scofidio + Renfro-designed facility in Boston’s Seaport District. The Watershed will be a raw, industrial space for art unlike any other in Boston. In addition to a flexible space for exhibitions, programming, and workshops, the Watershed will house an orientation gallery introducing visitors to the historic shipyard complemented by a waterside plaza that will serve as a gathering place with stunning harbor views. Admission to the ICA Watershed will be free for all. Read more.

About the artist
Diana Thater (b. 1962, San Francisco) received a BA in Art History from New York University before receiving her MFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. She has had major solo exhibitions at leading institutions, including the Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul (2017); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2016); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2015); Kunsthaus Graz, Austria and Natural History Museum, London (2009).

Her work was featured in the 56th Venice Biennale at The Azerbaijan Pavilion as well as several Whitney Biennials (1995, 1997, and 2006), and is represented in prominent museum collections worldwide, including The Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), and Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam). Among her numerous notable awards, Thater has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2005) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1993). A prolific writer and educator, Thater lives and works in Los Angeles, where she teaches at the Art Center College of Design.

About the ICA
An influential forum for multi-disciplinary arts, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston has been at the leading edge of art in Boston for 80 years. Like its iconic building on Boston’s waterfront, the ICA offers new ways of engaging with the world around us. Its exhibitions and programs provide access to contemporary art, artists, and the creative process, inviting audiences of all ages and backgrounds to participate in the excitement of new art and ideas. The ICA, located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, is open Tuesday and Wednesday, 10 AM–5 PM; Thursday and Friday, 10 AM–9 PM (1st Friday of every month, 10 AM–5 PM); and Saturday and Sunday, 10 AM–5 PM.  Admission is $15 adults, $13 seniors and $10 students, and free for members and children 17 and under. Free admission for families at ICA Play Dates (2 adults + children 12 and under) on last Saturday of the month. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at www.icaboston.org. Follow the ICA at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

From painting to performance to virtual reality, sweeping exhibition features work of an international, intergenerational group of artists, including Cory Arcangel, Dara Birnbaum, Harun Farocki, Lizzie Fitch/Ryan Trecartin, Juliana Huxtable, Trevor Paglen, Nam June Paik, Frances Stark, Hito Steyerl, and Anicka Yi.

Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today
The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston
February 7–May 20, 2018

Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today is the first major thematic group exhibition in the United States to examine the radical impact of internet culture on visual art. Featuring 60 artists, collaborations, and collectives, the exhibition is comprised of over 70 works across a variety of mediums, including painting, performance, photography, sculpture, video, web-based projects, and virtual reality. Themes explored in the exhibition include emergent ideas of the body and notions of human enhancement; the internet as a site of both surveillance and resistance; the circulation and control of images and information; the possibilities for exploring identity and community afforded by virtual domains; and new economies of visibility accelerated by social media. Throughout, the work in the exhibition addresses the internet-age democratization of culture that comprises our current moment. Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today is organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Jeffrey De Blois, Curatorial Associate.
 
“Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today shows the extraordinary changes in contemporary art that have developed alongside the rise of the internet. Our exhibition looks at the implications of these changes—and our understanding of self, privacy, community, and virtual and physical space—and the ways that artists convey, explore, and challenge them,” said Jill Medvedow, the ICA’s Ellen Matilda Poss Director.

“Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today explores 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,” said Respini. “The exhibition also establishes important historical links between ideas pioneered by artists before the internet age and artists working today.”

The earliest work in the exhibition is from 1989, the year that Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory outside of Geneva, Switzerland. This development, and others that followed in quick succession, modernized the internet, and in the process radically changed our way of life―from how we shop, make friends, and share experiences, to how we imagine our future bodies and how nations police national security. The development of the internet after 1989 engendered the introduction of new digital technologies, allowing for the now ubiquitous platforms for social media and communication, and the massive proliferation of images of all kinds, drastically altering the ways in which we access and generate information. 1989 also marked a watershed moment across the globe, with significant shifts in politics, geographies, and economies. Events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and protests in Tiananmen Square signaled the beginning of our current globalized age, which cannot be imagined without the internet.
 
Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today is divided into five thematic sections: “Networks and Circulation,” “Hybrid Bodies,” “Virtual Worlds,” “States of Surveillance,” and “Performing the Self.”
 
In “Networks of Circulation” artists working with objects, images, and materials aggregated from the endless stream of information proliferating online and off explore the widespread social and political impact of our previously unimaginable level of interconnectivity, often pointing to how an accelerated image economy increasingly structures our everyday experience.
 
The age-old question “what does it mean to be human?” remains critically important, and takes on new urgency in today’s technologically mediated societies. Artists in “Hybrid Bodies” explore various related subjects, as well as how the body remains a site for politics, history, and contestation amidst the increasing complexity of science, politics, and international relations.
 
In “Virtual Worlds,” artists explore the aesthetic possibilities of computer-generated spaces as sites of production and inquiry, even as they mark the increasing elision between the virtual and the real in everyday life.
 
In “States of Surveillance,” artists employ a variety of strategies to examine the wide-reaching effects of surveillance technologies while pointing to paths of resistance.
 
The artworks in “Performing the Self” explore the extraordinary visibility afforded to individuals and groups moving within digital networks as well as their far-reaching effects offline.

The exhibition will feature a newly commissioned site-specific virtual reality installation by artist Jon Rafman. The ICA’s architecture and location on Boston Harbor feature prominently in the work, collapsing real and virtual space in a dreamscape that unfolds over eight minutes.

Art + Tech: A Citywide Collaboration
Art in the Age of the Internet is the lead exhibition in a region-wide exploration of art and technology. Fourteen art organizations and educational institutions will offer a range of exhibitions, performances, film screenings, and talks all exploring the relationship between art and technology in celebration of the Boston area’s rich history of technical innovation.

Artist List
aaajiao (Xu Wenkai) (b. 1984, Xi’an China)
Cory Arcangel (b. 1978, Buffalo, NY)
Ed Atkins (b. 1982, London, United Kingdom)
Alex Bag (b. 1969, New York, NY)
Judith Barry (born 1954, Columbus, OH)
Gretchen Bender (b. 1951, Seaford, DE)
Frank Benson (b. 1976, Norfolk, VA)
Dara Birnbaum (b. 1946, New York, NY)
Lee Bul (b. 1964, Seoul, South Korea)
Antoine Catala (b. 1975, Toulouse, France)
Kate Cooper (b. 1984, Liverpool, United Kingdom)
Simon Denny (b. 1982, Auckland, New Zealand)
DIS (collective, founded 2010)
Aleksandra Domanović (b. 1981, Novi Sad, Serbia [former SFR Yugoslavia])
Gregory Edwards (b. 1981, Rocky Point, NY)
Harun Farocki (b. 1944, Nový Jičín, Czech Republic [former Czechoslovakia])
Cao Fei (b. 1978, Guangzhou, China)
Lizzie Fitch/Ryan Trecartin (b. 1981, Bloomington, IN and Webster, TX)
Celia Hempton (b. 1981, Stroud, United Kingdom)
Camille Henrot (b. 1981, Paris, France)
HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN? (collective, founded 2013)
Juliana Huxtable (b. 1987, Bryan-College Station, TX)
Pierre Huyghe (b. 1962, Paris, France)
JODI.org (collaborative founded c. 1995)
Jon Kessler (b. 1957, Yonkers, NY)
Josh Kline (b. 1979, Philadelphia, PA)
Oliver Laric (b. 1981, Innsbruck, Austria)
Mark Leckey (b. 1964, Birkenhead, United Kingdom)
Lynn Hershman Leeson (b. 1941, Cleveland, OH)
Olia Lialina (b. 1971, Moscow, Russia [former Soviet Union])
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (b. 1967, Mexico City, Mexico)
M/M Paris (Mathias Augustyniak and Michael Amzalag) (b. 1967, Cavaillon, France and 1968, Paris, France)
Jill Magid (b. 1973, Bridgeport, CT)     
Michel Majerus (b. 1967, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg)
David Maljkovic (b. 1973, Rijeka, Croatia [former SFR Yugoslavia])
Mike Mandel and Chantal Zakari (b. 1950, Los Angeles, CA and 1968, Izmir, Turkey)
Ryan McNamara (b. 1979, Phoenix, AZ)
Mariko Mori (b. 1967, Tokyo, Japan)
Rabih Mroué (b. 1967, Beirut, Lebanon)
Albert Oehlen (b. 1954, Krefeld, Germany)
Laura Owens (b. 1970, Euclid, OH)
Trevor Paglen (b. 1974, Camp Springs, MD)
Nam June Paik (b. 1938, Seoul, South Korea)
Sondra Perry (b. 1986, Perth Amboy, NJ)
Paul Pfeiffer (b. 1966, Honolulu, HI)
Seth Price (b. 1973, East Jerusalem, Israel)
Jon Rafman (b. 1981, Montreal, Canada)
Pamela Rosenkranz (b. 1979, Uri, Switzerland)
Thomas Ruff (b. 1958, Zell am Harmsbach, Germany)
Julia Scher (b. 1954, Los Angeles, CA)
Cindy Sherman (b. 1954 Glen Ridge, NJ)
Taryn Simon and Aaron Swartz (b. 1975, New York, NY and 1986, Highland Park, IL)
Avery Singer (b. 1987, New York, NY)
Frances Stark (b. 1967, Newport Beach, CA)
Hito Steyerl (b. 1966, Munich, Germany)
Martine Syms (b. 1988, Los Angeles, CA)
Wu Tsang (b. 1982, Worcester, MA)
Amalia Ulman (b. 1989, Buenos Aires, Argentina)
Penelope Umbrico (b. 1957, Philadelphia, PA)
Anicka Yi (b. 1971, Seoul, South Korea)
 
Publication
The exhibition is accompanied by a generously illustrated scholarly publication, co-published with Yale University Press, which will be a major resource and scholarly contribution to the field. The publication features a range of established and emerging scholars, critics, and curators, including Kim Conaty, Lauren Cornell, Tim Griffin, Caitlin Jones, Caroline A. Jones, Thomas J. Lax, Omar Kholeif, Gloria Sutton, and the exhibition’s organizers. The catalogue also features topical conversations between artists Lynn Hershman Leeson and Hito Steyerl, Paul Pfeiffer and Josh Kline, and Martine Syms and Wu Tsang,
 
Web Platform
Art in the Age of the Internet is also accompanied by an extensive web platform, designed by Wkshps, which will expand on the themes and works in the exhibition by including additional content, such as special projects by artists in the exhibition.

Exhibition Press Preview
February 6, 2018 | 9:30AM-11:00AM
Media are invited to attend a tour of the exhibition led by Respini. RSVP to Margaux Leonard, mleonard@icaboston.org.

Exhibition-related programs
Join us for thought-provoking programming featuring talks by artists and relevant experts, exhibition tours, parties, family activities, and networking opportunities. A full list of exhibition-related programs can be found here.

Major support for Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today is provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
 
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
 
Additional support is generously provided by Edward Berman and Kathleen McDonough, Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser, Karen Swett Conway and Brian Conway, Robert Davoli and Eileen McDonagh, Fotene Demoulas and Tom Coté, Bridgitt and Bruce Evans, Vivien and Alan Hassenfeld, Jodi and Hal Hess, Kristen and Kent Lucken, Kim and Jim Pallotta, Ted Pappendick and Erica Gervais Pappendick, Charles and Fran Rodgers, Mark and Marie Schwartz, and Charlotte and Herbert S. Wagner III.

NEA logo

Annual Fashion-Themed Event Includes Looks From Baja East’s S18 Collection and Designs from ICA Teens

On Oct. 6, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) celebrates Boston Fashion Week with a special fashion-focused edition of First Fridays, featuring brand Baja East and the Boston-based concept store All Too Human. The museum’s annual fashion-themed First Fridays will showcase looks from Baja East’s Spring 2018 collection, which debuted only weeks earlier in New York and Paris. Baja East designers John Targon and Scott Studenberg will be at the ICA to discuss their practice, inspiration, and journey as artists and designers in a series of mini conversations. The designers have invited NY-based DJ—and fashion-world favorite—Mike Nouveau to perform at the event.

The First Fridays event will also launch a unique collaboration between Baja East and the ICA Teen Arts Council—a co-designed, custom sweatshirt to be sold exclusively at All Too Human and the ICA Store. During the evening event, the collaborative sweatshirt will be sold alongside other Baja East products, with proceeds going to the ICA’s Teen Arts Education Program.

The collaboration marks the start of Baja East and All Too Human’s BE UNITED campaign, which seeks to create a positive social platform through art and fashion to celebrate, learn about, and respect our shared experiences. “Given what’s going on in the world today, from gender and race inequality, to Hurricane Harvey, the lens that youth are growing up in can appear dismal. BE UNITED is a social initiative to address these things in a way that is timely, relevant, impactful and inspiring,” said Targon, founder and creative director of Baja East.

EVENT DETAILS

When and Where
Friday, October 6
5-10 PM at the ICA (25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA 02210)

About Baja East
LOOSE LUXURY – a new kind of fashion and lifestyle concept pioneered by Baja East, the globally inspired luxury brand based in New York City, established in October, 2013 by Scott Studenberg and John Targon. Embodying a “go anywhere” attitude, the duo combines west coast laid-back cool with a city street edge in pieces that are as elegant as they are effortless. The brand built a name for itself effortlessly blurring the lines between men’s and women’s with its core concept of ambisexual dressing that continues to thrive. Over the course of 15 seasons they have developed new layers of red- carpet-ready to off-duty dressing, specifically targeted to women. Baja East is coveted on and off the red carpet by celebrities like Kim Kardashian, Lady Gaga, and Gigi Hadid.

About All Too Human
ALL TOO HUMAN is an experiential fashion and lifestyle boutique for both men and women with exceptional local and international fashion design as its focus, selling only the most interesting and current collections from a blend of emerging and stand out brands. ALL TOO HUMAN also acts as a show space for various creative mediums such as Home Furnishings, art and events. “With fashion at as our core, ALL TOO HUMAN seeks to push the limits of creative engagement and expressionism through collaboration, installations and special programming,” states Jessica Knez, Owner of ALL TOO HUMAN. “We’re a creative space, and believe in the distinct overlap between art and fashion. ALL TOO HUMAN is always discovering, encouraging and promoting partnerships between artists and designers, in all forms.”

About the ICA
An influential forum for multi-disciplinary arts, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston has been at the leading edge of art in Boston for 80 years. Like its iconic building on Boston’s waterfront, the ICA offers new ways of engaging with the world around us. Its exhibitions and programs provide access to contemporary art, artists, and the creative process, inviting audiences of all ages and backgrounds to participate in the excitement of new art and ideas. The ICA, located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, is open Tuesday and Wednesday, 10 AM–5 PM; Thursday and Friday, 10 AM–9 PM (1st Friday of every month, 10 AM–5 PM); and Saturday and Sunday, 10 AM–5 PM.  Admission is $15 adults, $13 seniors and $10 students, and free for members and children 17 and under. Free admission for families at ICA Play Dates (2 adults + children 12 and under) on last Saturday of the month. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at www.icaboston.org. Follow the ICA on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Visitors of all ages can experiment and create art about Boston Harbor in this immersive laboratory

The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) has invited artist Evelyn Rydz to create an interactive art installation in the museum’s Bank of America Art Lab, opening October 7. Titled Salty > Sour Seas, Rydz’s new project turns the Bank of America Art Lab into an art studio and scientific laboratory where visitors can investigate, experiment, and create work while considering the museum’s unique site on Boston Harbor. Rydz conceived of Salty > Sour Seas to raise awareness about the effects of carbon dioxide on microscopic phytoplankton that live in the earth’s changing oceans and seas. These small but mighty organisms create about half the planet’s oxygen and help feed many animals. Human activities, however, are affecting phytoplankton and the oceanic ecosystem by warming water temperatures and increasing levels of acidification. Using pH test paper, participants can test various liquid acidity levels—including that of Boston Harbor—and see acidity as a changing visual element within their process of investigating and art making.

Salty > Sour Seas will be open on Saturdays and Sundays from 12-4pm, from October 7 through March 11.  The activity is free for all visitors with museum admission.

Meet the Artist on Saturday, October 7 and Saturday, March 10 from 2-4pm
On these dates, visitors can join Rydz for a sour phytoplankton popsicle tasting. The tastings will allow visitors to explore the unexpected sourness of taste and the unwanted souring of seas, creating a common point for questions and conversation on ideas of ocean acidification and the future of ocean ecosystems. The phytoplankton popsicles will be colored with microalgae to create a blue-green color, flavored with lime juice for acidity, and dipped in Atlantic sea salt for a salty surface. More information at icaboston.org

Also On View
Salty > Sour Seas will be open during the ICA’s exhibition Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 21st-Century Naturalist (October 4-December 31). Dion has forged a distinct, interdisciplinary practice by exploring and appropriating scientific methodologies to question how we collect, interpret, and display nature. This monumental exhibition spans 30 years of the artist’s work and brings together several hundred objects—including live birds, books, curiosity cabinets, plant and animal specimens, vintage photos, and much more—for a rare look at the unique course of the artist’s practice.

About the Artist
Over the last decade, Boston-based artist Evelyn Rydz has focused her work on contemporary coastlines and ways our everyday lives impact are impacted by changing oceans. Exploring perceptions of scale, her work draws connections between everyday actions and lasting impacts, fleeting and geologic time, unstable and fixed conditions. The artist’s work has been exhibited the Palmer Art Museum, Penn State University (forthcoming); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Tufts University Art Gallery; a Smithsonian Traveling Exhibition at the Anchorage Museum, Alaska, USC Fisher Museum, L.A., and CDC Museum, Atlanta; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park; Maseeh Hall, MIT, Cambridge; Julie Saul Gallery, NY; El Parque Cultural del Caribe, Barranquilla, Colombia; and Brattleboro Museum, Vermont. Rydz has led community art projects as visiting artist at the MFA, Boston; the ICA, Boston; and MOCA, North Miami. She is currently an Associate Professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

About the ICA
An influential forum for multi-disciplinary arts, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston has been at the leading edge of art in Boston for 80 years. Like its iconic building on Boston’s waterfront, the ICA offers new ways of engaging with the world around us. Its exhibitions and programs provide access to contemporary art, artists, and the creative process, inviting audiences of all ages and backgrounds to participate in the excitement of new art and ideas. The ICA, located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, is open Tuesday and Wednesday, 10 AM–5 PM; Thursday and Friday, 10 AM–9 PM (1st Friday of every month, 10 AM–5 PM); and Saturday and Sunday, 10 AM–5 PM.  Admission is $15 adults, $13 seniors and $10 students, and free for members and children 17 and under. Free admission for families at ICA Play Dates (2 adults + children 12 and under) on last Saturday of the month. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at www.icaboston.org. Follow the ICA at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Exhibition surveys over four decades of Nixon’s prolific career, featuring The Brown Sisters series shown with other works from same year.

 

This December, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens Nicholas Nixon: Persistence of Vision, a survey of the Boston-based artist’s prolific career. Including 113 works, the exhibition is organized around Nixon’s remarkable ongoing project The Brown Sisters, a series of group portraits of his wife and her three sisters taken annually since 1975. The Brown Sisters will be presented in its entirety—including a new portrait from 2017 making its U.S. debut—and each portrait will be paired with other photographs made by Nixon in the same year, drawn from various bodies of work. Together these pictures allow viewers to both take in the visual sweep of passing time through The Brown Sisters series, and delve more deeply into each year through close looking. Accompanying the exhibition is an extensive audio guide narrated by the artist, giving audiences insights into the various bodies of work completed by Nixon over the last four decades. The exhibition is organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Jessica Hong, Curatorial Associate, and will be on view from December 13, 2017 through April 22, 2018. 

“In his numerous series, Nixon gets to know his subjects while photographing them, making the role of time, inherent to the medium of photography, an integral part of the content and process of his work,” says Respini. “Amidst today’s increasingly frenetic pace of life and digitally mediated social relations, Nixon’s pictures invite us to slow down, look, and reflect on the nature of human relationships.” 

Other works in the exhibition include, among others, additional family photographs; self-portraits; images from his hallmark series of people with AIDS or near death; studies of students at schools such as the Perkins School for the Blind outside of Boston or his son’s elementary school in Cambridge, MA; and Boston cityscapes.

Working exclusively on film, Nixon uses a large format 8×10 inch camera, affording his pictures an unparalleled clarity of detail and description.  He often photographs his subjects at close range, encouraging a sense of intimacy in the act of photographing and looking. Organized in collaboration with the artist, the selected photographs demonstrate the breadth of Nixon’s practice and dedication to revealing the incredible moments in the everyday. Together with The Brown Sisters, these compelling pictures are a testament to Nixon’s persistence of vision.
 
About the artist
Based in Boston since the 1970s, Nicholas Nixon was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1947. The artist earned a B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1969 and an M.F.A. from the University of New Mexico in 1975. He has been awarded three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and two Guggenheim Fellowships. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) (2014/2006), the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2010), the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (2006), the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (2005), and the Cincinnati Art Museum (2005). His work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the MoMA in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, among many others. The ICA presented exhibitions of Nixon’s work in 1982, Nicholas Nixon’s New Contact Prints, and in 1983, Nicholas Nixon: Photographs From One Year, and has also collected his work.

About the ICA
An influential forum for multi-disciplinary arts, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston has been at the leading edge of art in Boston for 80 years. Like its iconic building on Boston’s waterfront, the ICA offers new ways of engaging with the world around us. Its exhibitions and programs provide access to contemporary art, artists, and the creative process, inviting audiences of all ages and backgrounds to participate in the excitement of new art and ideas. The ICA, located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, is open Tuesday and Wednesday, 10 AM–5 PM; Thursday and Friday, 10 AM–9 PM (1st Friday of every month, 10 AM–5 PM); and Saturday and Sunday, 10 AM–5 PM.  Admission is $15 adults, $13 seniors and $10 students, and free for members and children 17 and under. Free admission for families at ICA Play Dates (2 adults + children 12 and under) on last Saturday of the month. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at www.icaboston.org. Follow the ICA at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) presents inspiring performances and compelling artist talks as part of its upcoming season. 

July 25, 2017

Highlights include new and indie music by Weyes Blood, performances by award-winning choreographers Faye Driscoll, Pam Tanowitz, and Okwui Okpokwasili, a concert by the Arditti Quartet featuring all-female composers, and a free talk by legendary artist and Academy Award-winning filmmaker Steve McQueen (12 Years A Slave).

All events take place in the Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater at the ICA, 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston. Ticketed programs go on sale to ICA members on July 25 and to the general public on July 27. Tickets can be purchased at www.icaboston.org or by calling 617-478-3103.

MUSIC

THU, SEP 14 | 8 PM
Weyes Blood
$15 for ICA members + students / $20 for nonmembers
Active in underground music since 2006, singer-songwriter Natalie Mering has released four records as Weyes Blood. Mering, together with co-producer Chris Cohen and some special guests, contrasts live-band intimacy with the postmodern electric sheen of A.M. radio atmospherics. Experimental flourishes sparkle amid succinct, thoughtful arrangements. With arpeggiated piano, acoustic guitar, druggy horns, and outer-space electronics, this is the folk music of the near future. 

SUN, OCT 1 | 7:30 PM
Zola Jesus
$20 for ICA members + students / $22 for nonmembers
Nika Roza Danilova has been recording music as Zola Jesus for over a decade. Her most recent music was written in pure catharsis, and as a result, the songs are heavy, dark, and exploratory. Danilova has crafted a profound meditation on loss and reconciliation that speaks of tragedy with wisdom and clarity. Returning to the ICA, Danilova’s live performance will plumb the dark depths of her past, but reflect on the light of new beginnings. Opening set by John Wiese.

THU, OCT 12 | 8:00 PM
Mr. Harrison’s Gamelans featuring Johnny Gandelsman, Sarah Cahill, and Gamelan Galak Tika
Performing Suite for Violin and American Gamelan, Concerto for Piano with Javanese Gamelan, and By the Numbers
$15 for ICA members + students / $25 for nonmembers
The ICA and MIT present a centennial celebration of composer Lou Harrison. MIT’s Gamelan Galak Tika joins forces with violinist Johnny Gandelsman and pianist Sarah Cahill to present a program of Harrison’s groundbreaking works for gamelan and western instruments, performed on two gamelans built by the composer and William Colvig and curated by Jody Diamond. The concert will also feature the world premiere of composer and MIT Professor Evan Ziporyn’s “By the Numbers,” an homage to Harrison for violin and re-tuned piano.

SUN, OCT 22 | 3 PM
Arditti Quartet
$15 for ICA members + students / $20 for nonmembers
“The world’s pre-eminent contemporary music quartet” (The Guardian), the acclaimed Arditti Quartet returns to the ICA in collaboration with the Boston University Center for New Music. Founded in 1974 by Irvine Arditti, the quartet’s concerts and albums of 20th- and 21st-century music have been praised for their technical expertise and spirited interpretations. At the ICA, the Arditti Quartet will perform a concert of prominent 21st-century female composers.
Program:
Liza Lim, Hell 
Clara Iannota, Dead wasps in the jam jar
Rebecca Saunders, Fletch interval
Hilda Paredes, Bitacora Capilar 
Olga Neuwirth, In the realms of the unreal 

SUN, DEC 3 | 7:30 PM
Emily Haines and the Soft Skeleton
$28 for ICA members + students / $33 for nonmembers
Emily Haines, lead vocalist and songwriter of the band Metric and a member of Broken Social Scene, brings her solo project Soft Skeleton to the ICA for an intimate concert event. Haines is touring in support of her new album Choir of the Mind, her first solo release in a decade. Her distinctive vocals are the focal point of her new songs, which she uses to create spellbinding orchestrations for an effect that is subtle, ghostly, lush, and deeply powerful.

DANCE

FRI, OCT 20 | 8 PM
SAT, OCT 21 | 2 PM + 8 PM
Faye Driscoll
Thank You For Coming: Play
$15 for ICA members + students / $25 nonmembers
Free pre-performance talks 30 minutes prior to curtain.
Faye Driscoll and company return to the ICA with the second installment of her Thank You For Coming series. Play revisits Driscoll’s ongoing concerns about the experience and performance of self, of being among others and being alone. While the first installment, Attendance, foregrounded movement and the relationship between audience and performers, Play explores our reliance on stories to relate to one another and form our identities as individuals and citizens. Play highlights how language both defines and reduces our lived experiences. Five multitalented and energetic performers ventriloquize, shape-shift, sing, and speak through and for each other in this strange and enthralling collage of gesture, image, voice, and persona.

FRI, DEC 8 + SAT, DEC 9 | 8 PM
SUN, DEC 10 | 2 PM
Pam Tanowitz and Simone Dinnerstein
New Work for Goldberg Variations
$25 for ICA members + students / $35 nonmembers
Free pre-performance talk 30 minutes prior to curtain.
New Work for Goldberg Variations is an evening-length piece for piano and seven dancers created by classical pianist Simone Dinnerstein and choreographer Pam Tanowitz. Inspired by and set to a live performance of Bach’s iconic and demanding Goldberg Variations, the work is performed by Dinnerstein with Tanowitz’s company, Pam Tanowitz Dance. The artists spent a week in the ICA’s theater this summer developing the work. Dinnerstein, who distinguished herself internationally with her impassioned interpretation of the Variations, brings her nuanced understanding of the demanding score to the project; Tanowitz’s choreography adds a slyly deconstructed classical dance vocabulary to translate Bach’s intricate score into movement.

FRI, MAR 9 + SAT, MAR 10 | 8 PM
Okwui Okpokwasili
Poor People’s TV Room
$15 for ICA members + students / $25 nonmembers
Bessie Award–winning artist Okwui Okpokwasili and director-designer Peter Born use an interdisciplinary approach to examine gender, culture, and identity in the lives of four women. Poor People’s TV Room recovers buried histories and forgotten stories of women’s resistance movements and collective action in Nigeria. This exploration was set in motion by two historical incidents: the Women’s War of 1929, a resistance movement against British colonial powers, and the Boko Haram kidnappings of more than 300 girls in 2014, which launched the Bring Back Our Girls movement.
Through choreography, song, text, and film, Okpokwasili and Born, along with a multigenerational cast of women, craft a performance of haunting intensity and visceral beauty. Poor People’s TV Room plays out like a fever dream, a potent reflection on history’s erasure of female resistance.
 
FRI, MAY 18 + SAT, MAY 19 | 6:30 PM and 8:30 PM
Ryan McNamara
MEƎM: A Story Ballet About the Internet
$15 for ICA members + students / $25 nonmembers
Through our smartphones and laptops, we now have access to infinite streams of information available in an instant. We can get lost in the internet for hours, clicking through hundreds, if not thousands, of videos, links, and images at a dizzying rate. Visual artist Ryan McNamara reimagines our impulse to click, copy, paste, and share in MEƎM 4 Boston: A Story Ballet About the Internet, an immersive, museum-wide, and unforgettable performance experience. Working with a cast of 13 dancers, McNamara samples and remixes music and movement—from classical ballet to contemporary dance—in an inventively staged physical realization of our virtual experience. 
 

THEATER

FRI, NOV 17 + SAT, NOV 18 | 8 PM
Lars Jan/Early Morning Opera
The Institute of Memory (TIMe)
$15 for ICA members + students / $25 nonmembers
Called “incendiary with hope…” (Los Angeles Magazine), The Institute of Memory (TIMe) is a multimedia performance about how the future of remembering is currently changing. Two men hunt each other as a kinetic light sculpture hovers and cuts through the air, signaling keystrokes from a hacked 1950s typewriter. Featuring archival wire-tap transcriptions, communist spy missives, and MRI brain scans, TIMe conjures a portrait of director Lars Jan’s enigmatic father — a Cold War operative whose story exhibits how the future of privacy looks dangerously like the darkest era of its past. The son of émigré parents from Afghanistan and Poland, Jan grew up in Cambridge, where his father, Henryk Ryniewicz, moved after World War II to take a position at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Today Lars is a director, writer, visual artist, and the founder of Early Morning Opera, a genre-bending performance and art lab whose works explore emerging technologies. 
 

TALKS + MORE
Free with museum admission, unless otherwise specified.

THU, SEP 14 | 6 PM
Curator’s Perspective: Eva Respini with Danielle Legros Georges on Dana Schutz
Barbara Lee Chief Curator Eva Respini discusses Dana  Schutz’s paintings with Danielle Legros-Georges, Lesley University professor and Boston Poet Laureate, in the galleries. Visitors will gain a greater understanding of Schutz’s artistic influences, get a curator’s perspective on hanging an exhibition of contemporary painting, and consider some of the challenges of organizing a show amidst artist controversy. Capacity is limited; admission is first-come, first served.
 
THU SEP 28 | 7 PM
ICA Forum: Representation and Responsibility in Creative Spaces
Within social, political, and cultural arenas, issues of representation—the act of depicting and/or speaking on behalf of someone—and responsibility have come into even sharper focus in recent months. These issues, surfacing in the commentary surrounding the leadership of the Women’s March, contentious government elections, speeches by literary figures, and calls for the removal of artworks in museums, proliferate news and social media feeds as communities try to make sense of it all in a new era of rapid consumption of information. Within the arts, important questions are being raised, primarily: who gets to represent whom in art? The ICA and Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research invite you to join artists, scholars, and educators in a series of conversations this fall and spring that address ideas of cultural appropriation and creative license in the 21st century. 
 
THU, OCT 5 | 7 PM
The Artist’s Voice: Mark Dion
“He is a genealogist of sorts, tracing the bloodlines of Western intellectual history to ask, among other things, how European colonial expansion, environmental plundering and the creation of the museum all relate to the ecological disasters we face today.” —The New York Times
 
Artist Mark Dion, whose exhibition Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 21st-Century Naturalist in on view October 4, 2017 through January 1, 2018, takes on art, science, our evolving understanding of the natural world, and his own practice in conversation with Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Curator at the ICA.
 
SAT, NOV 4 | 2 PM                                                                           
The Artist’s Voice: Steve McQueen
“He holds his lens steady to achieve a truer sense of bodies in real time, and to give the viewer no choice but to let their mind unravel the implications behind the images.”  —The Atlantic
Filmmaker and artist Steve McQueen, recipient of both the Academy Award and Turner Prize, will be in conversation with Hamza Walker, Director of LAXART and former curator at the Renaissance Society. McQueen’s Ashes, currently on view at the ICA, is a freestanding video installation that shows a young carefree fisherman and his unexpected fate. McQueen’s upcoming film Widows will be released next fall.
 

OPENING THIS FALL:

Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 21st-Century Naturalist
OCT 4, 2017 – JAN 1, 2018
The artist’s first U.S. survey examines 30 years of his pioneering inquiries into how we collect, interpret, and display nature. Since the early 1990s, Mark Dion (b. 1961, New Bedford, MA) has forged a unique, interdisciplinary practice by exploring and appropriating scientific methodologies. Often with an edge of irony, humor, and improvisation, Dion deconstructs both scientific and museum-based rituals of collecting and exhibiting objects by critically adopting them into his artistic practice. He has traveled the world to gather plant and animal specimens, conducted archeological digs, and rummaged through forgotten collections, arranging his finds into brimming curiosity cabinets and charismatic sculptures. His projects and exhibitions offer novel approaches to questioning institutional power, which he sees as connected to the control and representation of the natural world. 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First Republic Bank is proud to sponsor the ICA’s 2017–18 Performance Season.

First Republic Bank logo

The Music of Lou Harrison is co-presented with MIT as part of the MIT Sounding concert series.

The Arditti Quartet is co-presented with the Boston University Center for New Music.

Dance UP is presented by 

WorldMusic CrashArts logo

Thank You for Coming: Play is co-commissioned by Summer Stages Dance @ the ICA.  Driscoll and Company were in residence in the Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater for two weeks in the summer of 2015. The presentation of Thank You For Coming: Play 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, with additional support from the National Endowment for the Arts. 

NEFA logo

Anne Myer and Dancers is presented by

WorldMusic CrashArts logo

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. New Work for Goldberg Variations is part of Summer Stages Dance @ the ICA/Boston and 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.

NEFA logo

The presentation of Poor People’s TV Room 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, with additional support from the National Endowment for the Arts. 

NEFA logo

The Institute of Memory (TIMe) is funded in part by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Theater Project, with lead funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. 

NEFA logo

 

Dana Schutz Opens July 26 at the ICA

(BOSTON, MA – July 24, 2017) — On July 26, The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens Dana Schutz. Schutz is among the foremost painters of her generation and is part of a group of artists leading a revival of painting today. Her distinct combination of figuration and abstraction, expressive color palette, and her use of imagined and hypothetical scenarios are unique among her contemporaries. The artist’s work captures the frenzy, tension, vulnerability, and struggle of life today, as her subjects actively manage, even fight, both the limitations of the canvas and their depicted environments.

The impressive scale of many of Schutz’s paintings reference the monumentality of history painting, the genre considered most important in the history of Western art. Her paintings challenge history painting’s typical subjects–heroic portrayals of historical and allegorical events–and instead monumentalize everyday scenes (laying in bed, getting dressed, carpooling, riding in an elevator).  Schutz confronts the traditional hierarchies of painting and expands the possibilities for the medium today.

Dana Schutz, a concise survey of the artist’s recent work, comprises 17 paintings, several at monumental scale and including two new ones, and four charcoal drawings. Schutz’s enormous new painting, Big Wave (2016), acquired by the ICA in December, is on view for the first time in the United States. Open through November 26, Dana Schutz is organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Jessica Hong, Curatorial Associate.

“Drawing on the legacies of both figurative and abstract painting, with nods to touchstone figures such as George Grosz and Max Beckmann, Schutz’s unique voice in painting exemplifies the expansive possibilities of the medium today,” said Respini.

Over the last decade, Schutz has honed her approach to painting, creating tightly structured scenarios and compressed interiors. Her works capture subjects who seem to be actively managing, even fighting, the limitations of their depicted environments—boundaries set by the canvases’ actual borders.

Schutz’s paintings often show hypothetical or impossible physical feats and explore the uncanny through wit and the expressive use of color. Her physically imposing canvases—one nearly 18 feet—are worlds onto themselves. Building the Boat While Sailing (2012) displays a mass of people, working, sailing, and lounging, all at once. Shaking out the Bed (2015) portrays a couple in bed seen from a birds-eye vantage point, a common gesture transformed by the artist into a tornado of energy that includes pizza slices, body parts, cups, and dirty laundry. In Big Wave (2016) two figures in the foreground play in the sand, seemingly oblivious to the ferocious incoming tidal wave that is swallowing up fish, a tangle of bodies, and assorted objects.

Dana Schutz also includes several paintings illustrating single figures involved in everyday scenarios such as showering or getting dressed. Works that have a more melancholy tenor include Piano in the Rain (2012) and Slow Motion Shower (2015), where each protagonist is encased within the work’s tight borders. Schutz’s vibrant color palette is widely expressive, encompassing violence, wit, melancholy, and absurdity. Teeming with energy, commotion, and struggle, her paintings capture a high level of tension and compression that is part of today’s zeitgeist.

Artist Bio

Dana Schutz was born in Livonia, a suburb of Detroit, in 1976. The artist earned a B.F.A. at the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2000 and an M.F.A. at Columbia University, New York, in 2002. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Rose Museum, Brandeis University (2006); Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto (2010); Neuberger Museum of Art (2011); Miami Art Museum (2012); Denver Museum of Contemporary Art and Denver Art Museum (2012); Hannover Kesterngesellschaft and Hepworth Wakefield (2013); Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2015/2016), her first solo exhibition at a Canadian institution; and a forthcoming exhibition at The Cleveland Museum of Art (2017). She was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, where one of her paintings ignited a vigorous debate around the role of art, artists, and institutions in the representation of race, a conversation that resonates with larger issues in our current political and cultural landscape.

Exhibition-related programming

THU, SEP 14 | 6 PM
Curator’s Perspective: Eva Respini with Danielle Legros Georges on Dana Schutz
Barbara Lee Chief Curator Eva Respini discusses Dana  Schutz’s paintings with Danielle Legros-Georges, Lesley University professor and Boston Poet Laureate, in the galleries. Visitors will gain a greater understanding of Schutz’s artistic influences, get a curator’s perspective on hanging an exhibition of contemporary painting, and consider some of the challenges of organizing a show amidst artist controversy. Capacity is limited; admission is first-come, first served.

THU, SEP 28 | 7 PM
ICA Forum: Representation and Responsibility in Creative Space
Within social, political, and cultural arenas, issues of representation—the act of depicting and/or speaking on behalf of someone—and responsibility have come into even sharper focus in recent months. These issues, surfacing in the commentary surrounding the leadership of the Women’s March, contentious government elections, speeches by literary figures, and calls for the removal of artworks in museums, proliferate news and social media feeds as communities try to make sense of it all in a new era of rapid consumption of information. Within the arts, important questions are being raised, primarily: who gets to represent whom in art? The ICA and Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research invite you to join artists, scholars, and educators in a series of conversations this fall and spring that address ideas of cultural appropriation and creative license in the 21st century. 

SUN, OCT 8 | 2 PM
Gallery Talk: Josephine Halvorson on Dana Schutz
Join artist Josephine Halvorson as she shares her insights on Dana Schutz’s monumental painting Big Wave. Halvorson, whose own artistic practice emphasizes attention to detail and experience, will shed light on Schutz’s painting, which reflects the moods and anxieties of everyday contemporary life. Halvorson is Professor of Art and Chair of Graduate Studies in Painting at Boston University. She was previously Senior Critic in the MFA Painting and Printmaking program at Yale University.

About the ICA

An influential forum for multi-disciplinary arts, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston has been at the leading edge of art in Boston for 80 years. Like its iconic building on Boston’s waterfront, the ICA offers new ways of engaging with the world around us. Its exhibitions and programs provide access to contemporary art, artists, and the creative process, inviting audiences of all ages and backgrounds to participate in the excitement of new art and ideas. The ICA, located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, is open Tuesday and Wednesday, 10 AM–5 PM; Thursday and Friday, 10 AM–9 PM; and Saturday and Sunday, 10 AM–5 PM.  Admission is $15 adults, $13 seniors and $10 students, and free for members and children 17 and under. Free admission for families at ICA Play Dates (2 adults + children 12 and under) on last Saturday of the month. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at www.icaboston.org. Follow the ICA at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.