Ana Mendieta, Untitled, from the series Silueta Works in Mexico, 1973–77/1991. Pigmented inkjet print. 13 1/4 x 20 inches (33.7 x 50.8 cm). Gift of Barbara Lee, The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women. Courtesy the Galerie Lelong. © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC.
(Boston, MA—December 14, 2022) On January 31, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens Taylor Davis Selects: Invisible Ground of Sympathy, the first time an artist has been invited to organize an exhibition based on the ICA’s permanent collection. Davis—whose work in sculpture, painting, and collage explores the relationship between object and viewer—carries forward her artistic ideas into the exhibition, which will include works by Lynda Benglis, Mona Hatoum, Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe and many others. Organized by Davis in collaboration with Jeffrey De Blois, ICA Associate Curator and Publications Manager, the exhibition will be on view through January 7, 2024.
“In nearly two decades, the ICA has established a strong and significant collection ranging from the historically important work of figures such as Eva Hesse and Ana Mendieta to the explorations of leading artists at work today including Zanele Muholi and Senga Nengudi,” said Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director. “Taylor will bring her sculptor’s perspective to our collection and I am excited to experience works from the collection in new and meaningful ways.”
A long-time and critically acclaimed member of the Boston arts community, Davis has taught at Massachusetts College of Art and Design since 1999 and is on the faculty of Bard College. She is represented in the ICA’s collection with two works (Untitled, 2015; and Be Attentive, 2020) and is a member of the ICA’s Artist Advisory Council as well as a recipient of the 2001 ICA Artist Prize (forerunner of James and Audrey Foster Prize).
Davis has conceived of Invisible Ground of Sympathy as an open field in which constellations of artworks are assembled to activate their different emotional and psychological resonances. The exhibition’s title and thematic grounding are drawn from Chang Chung-yuan’s 1963 book Creativity and Taoism, in which sympathy is described as an unseen, but intuitive knowledge of the interfusion of all things.
Invisible Ground of Sympathy features key works from the ICA collection, such as Françoise Grossen’s Inchworm (1971), Senga Nengudi’s R.S.V.P. Reverie–“B” Suite (1977), and Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Still #48 (1979), alongside recently acquired works on view for the first time, including Liz Larner’s ii (calefaction subduction) (2019), Ron Nagle’s Boston Scrambler (2015), and James Welling’s Inlet (1998). Davis has also brought together a selection of works from outside the collection and a group of objects by her frequent collaborators. Highlights include a newly commissioned poem from Fanny Howe, a suite of drawings by Conny Purtill, and seating made for the exhibition by Oliver Strand and Brandon Ndife.
“There is a storied history of artist-curated exhibitions, and artists offer a fresh lens and perspective on a museum’s permanent collection,” said De Blois. “Considering themes of precarity, wonder, violence, and beauty, Davis presents a personal take on how we make sense of the present, especially when there is no language to describe an experience in the moment. This exhibition, which is so deeply informed by Taylor’s artistic concerns, demonstrates how museum collections are not static, but are continually reimagined to tell different stories.”
Davis received a Diploma of Fine Arts from School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, a B.S. in Education from Tufts University, and an M.F.A. from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. She has taught at Massachusetts College of Art and Design since 1999 and has been co-chair of sculpture at Bard College since 2003. Davis’s work has been widely exhibited, including the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; the 2004 Whitney Biennial and recent presentations at the Austin Museum of Art, Texas; ICA/Boston; The Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY; the Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT; and deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA. Davis’s work is in the collections of Harvard Art Museums; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.
Since its founding in 1936, the ICA has shared the pleasures of reflection, inspiration, imagination, and provocation that contemporary art offers with its audiences. A museum at the intersection of contemporary art and civic life, the ICA has advanced a bold vision for amplifying the artist’s voice and expanding the museum’s role as educator, incubator, and convener. Its exhibitions, performances, and educational programs provide access to the breadth and diversity of 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 is located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA, 02210. The Watershed is located at 256 Marginal Street, East Boston, MA 02128. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at icaboston.org. Follow the ICA on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Simone Leigh, Jug, 2022. Stoneware. 62 1/2 × 40 3/4 × 45 3/4 inches (158 × 103.5 × 116.2 cm). Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. Acquired through the generosity of Susana and Clark Bernard, Adelle Chang and Eddie Yoon, the Miller-Coblentz Family, Grace Colby, Fotene Demoulas and Tom Coté, Mathieu O. Gaulin, Jessica Knez and Nicolas Dulac, Christine and John Maraganore, and the Acquisitions Circle. Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery. Photo by Timothy Schenck. © Simone Leigh
Simone Leigh, trophallaxis, 2008/2017. Terracotta, porcelain, epoxy, graphite, gold and platinum glazes, and antennas, dimensions variable. Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), museum purchase with funds provided by PAMM’s Collectors Council
Simone Leigh, Cupboard IX, 2019. Stoneware, raffia, and steel armature, 78 × 60 × 80 inches (198.1 × 152.4 × 203.2 cm). Acquired through the generosity of Bridgitt and Bruce Evans and Fotene Demoulas and Tom Coté. Courtesy the artist. © Simone Leigh
Simone Leigh: Façade, 2022. Thatch, steel, and wood, dimensions variable. Satellite, 2022. Bronze, 24 feet × 10 feet × 7 feet 7 inches (7.3 × 3 × 2.3 m) (overall). Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery. Photo by Timothy Schenck. © Simone Leigh
Exhibition is accompanied by the first monograph of Leigh’s work
(Boston, MA—November 8, 2022) The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens the first museum survey exhibition of Simone Leigh (b. 1967, Chicago), on view April 6–Sept. 4, 2023. Among the most respected artists of her generation, Leigh is representing the United States at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, in a project commissioned by the ICA. Works from the U.S. Pavilion will go on view in the United States for the first time as part of Leigh’s survey exhibition in Boston, which includes over 40 key examples of the artist’s ceramics, bronzes, videos, and installations, covering almost 20 years of highly disciplined production. Following its debut at the ICA, the exhibition Simone Leigh will tour to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. (Nov. 2023-March 2024), and a joint presentation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and California African American Museum (CAAM), on view June 2024–Jan. 2025 in Los Angeles. Simone Leigh is organized by Eva Respini, ICA Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs and Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Anni Pullagura, Curatorial Assistant.
“Simone Leigh’s complex and profoundly moving work honors the agency and ideas of Black women, giving visibility to overlooked narratives and histories,” said Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director of the ICA. “We are thrilled to bring Simone Leigh’s art from Venice back to the U.S. as part of this important survey exhibition, so that audiences across the country have the chance to experience the work of this groundbreaking and influential artist.”
“Although this is the first survey dedicated to Leigh’s art, the work has always been there, and its impact and power can no longer be denied. Leigh’s drive to center Black women can be understood as in spite of and ahead of cultural and political realities, rather than in reaction to them,” said Respini. “Leigh’s art teaches us that time cannot be forced. Her work operates on its own terms, and she has created her own systems for her art, populated with collaborators, writers, and artists of her choosing, continually making room for others.”
Over the past two decades, Leigh has created works of art that situate questions of Black femme, or female-identified, subjectivity at the center of contemporary art discourse. Her sculpture, video, installation, and social practice explore ideas of race, beauty, and community in visual and material culture. Leigh’s art addresses a wide swath of historical periods, geographies, and traditions, with specific references to vernacular and hand-made processes from across the African diaspora, as well as forms traditionally associated with African art and ritual, all while mining historical gaps, inaccuracies, and fallacies. Saidiya Hartman’s conception of “critical fabulation”—a strategy that invites historians, artists, and critics to creatively fill the gaps of history—provides a resonant framework for approaching Leigh’s work.
The ICA exhibition focuses on Leigh’s work in ceramic and bronze—beginning with early sculptural works and concluding with the new body of work created for the U.S. Pavilion in Venice—while also including key examples of works in video and installation to provide the full breadth of the artist’s practice. In Leigh’s ceramics, the artist draws on the vernacular traditions of the American South, Caribbean, and African continent, and challenges traditional hierarchies of art. Domestic vessels such as bowls and jugs, cowrie shells, and busts are recurring forms, and her readdress of these forms over time in various materials underscores the remarkable consistency of Leigh’s vision over two decades.
The exhibition opens with the impressively scaled trophallaxis (2008/2017), a suspended sculpture composed of clusters of black terracotta and porcelain forms that resemble fruit or breasts, from which a network of fully extended car antennas protrudes. The title adopts a scientific term describing the transfer of nourishment from insects’ bodies to the collective’s larvae, drawing associations of the femme body with fertility, nourishment, and labor—themes developed throughout the exhibition. A subsequent gallery features a selection of Leigh’s table-top ceramic busts with their distinctive eyeless faces.
In recent large-scale ceramic sculptures, Leigh merges the human body with traditional domestic containers, conjuring unacknowledged acts of female labor. The intersection of architecture with the body is also central to her sculpture, such as the work Cupboard IX (2019), seen in the steel cage-like structures that the artist leaves bare or covered with raffia, evoking the womb, skirts, and sub-Saharan dwellings, often built by women and used as gathering spaces.
Since 2018, the artist has cast her sculptural works in bronze, creating statuary for both gallery presentations and public art commissions. Her bronzes combine figuration with domestic or architectural elements, such as in the 2019 sculpture Jug, featuring the head and torso of a woman’s body atop a large-scale vessel or jug. Through their material choices, these bronzes embody a state of permanence and grandeur, and thus enter the dialogue around monuments in cultural memory. Leigh’s bronzes, with their overtly feminist and Black figurative references, also insist on the centrality—indeed, the necessity—of considering the agency of Black women as subjects in the cultural sphere. The exhibition will feature Leigh’s monumental 24-foot-tall bronze Satellite (2022), sited outside around the ICA campus for visitors to encounter in the landscape, as a beacon for the exhibition, broadcasting ideas around self-determination that is endemic to the work.
Leigh’s video works, often created in collaboration with other artists, draw from historical and fictional representations of Black women and femmes. In the video my dreams, my works must wait till after hell (2011), Leigh and artist Chitra Ganesh reimagine the reclining female nude, a common subject in European art, from their perspective as women of color. A 2011 collaboration between Leigh and artist Liz Magic Laser, titled Breakdown, features mezzo-soprano Alicia Hall Moran singing a script the two artists compiled from scenes of men and women experiencing nervous breakdowns in plays or television shows, offering a stunning meditation on psychology, race, and gender.
Occupying the final four galleries of the exhibition, the body of work Leigh created for the U.S. Pavilion continues her explorations around the effect and legacy of colonialism and notions of self-determination. Featuring interrelated sculptures in ceramic, bronze, and raffia—as well as a video, Conspiracy (2022), made in collaboration with Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich—these galleries will evoke the layout of the Venice exhibition, providing U.S. audiences the opportunity to experience this landmark installation. The exhibition concludes with Last Garment (2022), a bronze based on a 19th-century souvenir photograph of a Jamaican laundress, and explores ideas of labor, specifically the invisible labor of Black women. This sculpture is placed in a large reflecting pool situated within the sightline of Boston Harbor, as the breathtaking final gallery of the exhibition.
A major scholarly catalogue, including images of all the works in the exhibition as well as installation views from Leigh’s Venice presentation, accompanies the exhibition. Serving as the first comprehensive scholarly publication on Leigh’s work, the publication includes newly commissioned essays by over fifteen leading scholars, historians, and writers; writing by Simone Leigh; and an introduction by Eva Respini. The catalogue is designed by Nontsikelelo Mutiti, and co-published by the ICA and DelMonico Books. Contributors to the publication include:
Vanessa Agard-Jones
Rizvana Bradley
Dionne Brand
Denise Ferreira da Silva
Malik Gaines
Saidiya V. Hartman
Daniella Rose King
Jessica Lynne
Nomaduma Masilela
Katherine McKittrick
Uri McMillan
Sequoia Miller
Steven Nelson
Tavia Nyong’o
Lorraine O’Grady
Rianna Jade Parker
Yasmina Price
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts
Christina Sharpe
Hortense J. Spillers
Exhibition Credits
Simone Leigh is organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Anni Pullagura, Curatorial Assistant.
With warmest thanks, the ICA/Boston gratefully acknowledges the following philanthropic partners for their magnificent support.
Major support is provided by the Ford Foundation and the Mellon Foundation.
Lead corporate support is provided by eu2be.
Generous support is provided by Bloomberg Philanthropies, Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser, Girlfriend Fund, and Wagner Foundation
Leadership gifts are provided by Amy and David Abrams, Stephanie Formica Connaughton and John Connaughton, Bridgitt and Bruce Evans, James and Audrey Foster, Agnes Gund, Jodi and Hal Hess, Hostetler/Wrigley Foundation, Barbara and Amos Hostetter, Brigette Lau Collection, Henry Luce Foundation, Kristen and Kent Lucken, Tristin and Martin Mannion, Ted Pappendick and Erica Gervais Pappendick, Gina and Stuart Peterson, Helen and Charles Schwab, and Terra Foundation for American Art
Essential support is also provided by Suzanne Deal Booth, Kate and Chuck Brizius, Richard Chang, Karen and Brian Conway, Steven Corkin and Dan Maddalena, Federico Martin Castro Debernardi, Jennifer Epstein and Bill Keravuori, Esta Gordon Epstein and Robert Epstein, Negin and Oliver Ewald, Alison and John Ferring, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Glenn and Amanda Fuhrman, Vivien and Alan Hassenfeld and the Hassenfeld Family Foundation, Peggy J. Koenig and Family, The Holly Peterson Foundation, David and Leslie Puth with Mark and Marie Schwartz, Cindy and Howard Rachofsky, Leslie Riedel and Scott Friend, Kim Sinatra, Tobias and Kristin Welo, Lise and Jeffrey Wilks, Kelly Williams and Andrew Forsyth, Nicole Zatlyn and Jason Weiner, Jill and Nick Woodman, Marilyn Lyng and Dan O’Connell, Kate and Ajay Agarwal, Eunhak Bae and Robert Kwak, Jeremiah Schneider Joseph, Barbara H. Lloyd, Cynthia and John Reed, and Anonymous donors
Additional support for the publication is provided by the Fotene Demoulas Fund for Curatorial Research and Publications.
Barbara Kruger, Belief+Doubt, 2012, Installation view, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC. Photo by Cathy Carver. Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers.
(Boston, MA—September 20, 2022) On November 3, 2022, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) will debut a new, site-specific commission by Barbara Kruger (b. 1945 in Newark, NJ). For over 40 years, Kruger has been a consistent, critical observer of contemporary culture. Her distinct visual language uses bold textual statements and images taken from mass media to create significant artworks that investigate ideas of power, identity, consumerism, and gender. At the ICA, Kruger will transform the first-floor lobby’s Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall into a monumental, thought-provoking installation that comments on the key issues of our era while reimagining one of her most iconic images. The riveting new work, Untitled (Hope/Fear), 2022, will be on view through January 21, 2024, in a presentation organized by Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Senior Curator.
“Barbara Kruger creates some of the most powerful artworks of our time, using her distinct combination of text, scale, and design to chart a journey from familiarity to eye-popping awareness. At the ICA, all visitors will encounter her monumental installation in our glass-enclosed lobby, a free and open public space,” said Jill Medvedow, the ICA’s Ellen Matilda Poss Director.
“The ICA installation draws on Kruger’s decades-long practice of creating large-scale installations of her text-based art, transforming spaces with her signature aesthetic and pointed content. Continuing in this vein, her brand-new work for the ICA will speak, as her work has done for many years, to issues of war, women’s rights, and power, and ultimately to question authority,” said Erickson.
In the early 1980s, Kruger perfected a signature style of words and images extracted from mass media and recomposed into memorable, graphic artworks. In this new commission for the ICA, Untitled (Hope/Fear), 2022, Kruger uses the wall’s unique architecture to create a bold work featuring three distinct areas of text and image combinations. The largest text—”Another hope, Another fear”—in Futura bold (the artist’s typeface of choice) exemplifies Kruger’s incisive ability to evoke the emotional tenor of our time, a parade of daily hopes and fears fueled by an unceasing newsreel and media feeds. By repeating and replacing words, Kruger creates a cadence of text that cascades across the wall. Another area of the installation displays phrases in graphic black-and-white bands that repeat the word “war”—“War time, war crime, war game”—before turning into the phrase “War for a world without women.” The effect of these phrases pivoting around “war” is to reveal the interrelationships or power. In the concluding phrase “War for me to become you,” Kruger has crossed out the pronouns, confounding clear notions of who is speaking and resisting any univocal position.
The final element restages the text from one of Kruger’s best-known works, Untitled (Your body is a battleground), 1989, which she originally produced as a poster for the women’s march in Washington, D.C. to protest new laws limiting women’s access to healthcare. In this 2022 version, she changes both image and font, overlaying text on top of a black-and-white photograph of a face. Untitled (Hope/Fear), 2022, reflects Kruger’s signature style while revealing her breathless and ongoing innovation of text and image. This newest work confirms Kruger’s status as one of the sharpest respondents to contemporary culture.
The ICA’s Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall is dedicated to site-specific, commissioned works by leading contemporary artists. Located within the museum’s glass-enclosed lobby, the Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall is the visitor’s first encounter with art upon entering the building.
The ICA Store has collaborated with Kruger to develop exclusive merchandise including a t-shirt, tank top, and tote bag featuring the “Your body is a battleground” motif from the Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall. Available only at the ICA. More details will be available soon on icastore.org.
Media and visitors are encouraged to use #BarbaraKruger in their social media posts.
Kruger lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and New York, NY. She studied at Syracuse University and Parsons School of Design, New York. Solo shows include Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2022), Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2022), The Art Institute of Chicago (2021), AMOREPACIFIC Museum of Art, Seoul (2019), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2016), High Line Art, New York (2016), Modern Art Oxford (2014), Kunsthaus Bregenz (2013), Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2011), Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2010), Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow (2005), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2000), Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1999), Serpentine Gallery, London (1994), Musée d’art contemporain, Montreal (1985) and Kunsthalle Basel (1984). Group shows include those at Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2021), Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2018), V-A-C Foundation, Palazzo delle Zattere, Venice (2017), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2014), Biennale of Sydney (2014), Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2013), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2010), Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010, 2009, 2007), Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2006), Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2004), Tate Liverpool (2002), Centre Pompidou, Paris (1988) and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1987). Her is also currently on view in The Milk of Dreams, the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2022), curated by Cecilia Alemani.
Since its founding in 1936, the ICA has shared the pleasures of reflection, inspiration, imagination, and provocation that contemporary art offers with its audiences. A museum at the intersection of contemporary art and civic life, the ICA has advanced a bold vision for amplifying the artist’s voice and expanding the museum’s role as educator, incubator, and convener. Its exhibitions, performances, and educational programs provide access to the breadth and diversity of 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 is located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA, 02210. The Watershed is located at 256 Marginal Street, East Boston, MA 02128. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at icaboston.org. Follow the ICA on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Photo by Ernesto Galan
Photo by Nathan Bajar
Photo by Ari Marcopoulos
Photo by Thais Aquino
Photo by Stephanie Berger
Photo by Eric Politzer
Photo by Maria Baranova
Okwui Okpokwasili, Poor People’s TV Room. Photo by Ian Douglas.
(Boston, MA—Aug 26, 2022) Member tickets are now available for the ICA’s new performance season. Highlights include Liz Gerring, Jason Moran + Alicia Hall Moran, Bill T. Jones, Okwui Okpokwasili, and much more!
Fri, Sep 30 | 8 PM
L’Rain
$17 ICA members + students / $22 general admission
Brooklyn-born-and-based musician, experimentalist, and multi-instrumentalist Taja Cheek, aka L’Rain, blends genres including gospel, jazz, and neo-soul with an array of keyboards, synths, and hauntingly delicate vocals.
Fri, Oct 21 + Sat, Oct 22 | 8 PM
Liz Gerring Dance Company with the JACK Quartet: Harbor
$20 ICA members + students / $30 general admission
Liz Gerring Dance Company debuts “Harbor,” a world-premiere performance combining movement, poetic illumination, and a newly commissioned string quartet by Pulitzer Prize–winning composer John Luther Adams performed by JACK Quartet.
Fri, Nov 18 + Sat, Nov 19 | 8 PM
Jason Moran and Alicia Hall Moran: Family Ball
$25 ICA members + students / $35 general admission
This world premiere performance by pianist and composer Jason Moran and mezzo-soprano and composer Alicia Hall Moran scrutinizes the intricacy of human partnership, presenting it in raw form through music and song.
Fri, Feb 10, 2023 | 8 PM
Suzanne Bocanegra: Honor
$15 ICA members + students / $25 general admission
This performance by conceptual artist Suzanne Bocanegra masquerades as an artist talk but reveals Bocanegra’s current fixation with one of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s greatest tapestries. Honor features celebrated film and theater actor Lili Taylor in the title role of “The Artist.”
Fri, Feb 24, 2023 | 8 PM
HYENA
$15 ICA members + students / $25 general admission
Composer Georg Friedrich Haas’s HYENA features a remarkable score accompanying the autobiographical story of Haas’s wife, the writer Mollena Lee Williams-Haas. Williams-Haas narrates, with music by Boston’s Sound Icon Ensemble led by Jeffrey Means.
Fri, Mar 10 + Sat, Mar 11, 2023 | 8 PM
Sun, Mar 12, 2023 | 2 PM
Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company: Curriculum II
$30 ICA members + students / $40 general admission
A timely new work by Tony-winning Bill T. Jones, choreographed with Janet Wong and the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, Curriculum II explores the historical and persistent connection between race and technology and the pursuit of what is human.
Fri, Apr 21 + Sat, Apr 22, 2023 | 8 PM
Sam Green: 32 Sounds
$15 ICA members + students / $25 general admission
This immersive documentary from filmmaker Sam Green explores the elemental phenomenon of sound, performed in its “live cinema” form, featuring live narration by Sam Green and live original music by JD Samson.
Fri, May 12 + Sat, May 13, 2023 | 8 PM
Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born
$20 ICA members + students / $30 general admission
Keep an eye out for more information on this world premiere from a team of “Bessie” Award winners: writer, performer and choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili, and director, designer and filmmaker Peter Born.
Since its founding in 1936, the ICA has shared the pleasures of reflection, inspiration, imagination, and provocation that contemporary art offers with its audiences. A museum at the intersection of contemporary art and civic life, the ICA has advanced a bold vision for amplifying the artist’s voice and augmenting art’s role as educator, incubator, and convener for social engagement. Its innovative exhibitions, performances, and educational 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. Spanning two locations across Boston Harbor, the ICA offers year-round programming at its iconic building in Boston’s Seaport and seasonal programming (May-September) at the Watershed in an East Boston shipyard.
The ICA is located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA, 02210. The Watershed is located at 256 Marginal Street, East Boston, MA 02128. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at icaboston.org. Follow the ICA at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Acknowledgments
The ICA is supported in part by grants from the Barr Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Mellon Foundation, the Mass Cultural Council, and the Reopen Creative Boston fund, administered by the Mayor’s Office of Arts & Culture.
Support for FAMILY BALL is generously provided by Kathleen McDonough & Edward Berman.
Honor, an Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra, was commissioned in part by UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance, which also hosted a creative development residency in November 2019.
This performance of HYENA is a coproduction of the Boston University Center for New Music and the ICA/Boston.
Support for the ICA’s presentation of Curriculum II is generously provided by Jean-François and Nathalie Ducrest and The David Henry Fund for Performance.
Curriculum II is commissioned and produced by New York Live Arts with commissioning support from Peak Performances at Montclair State University (MSU) and the American Dance Festival. Curriculum II premiered with Peak Performances at MSU in June 2022.
32 Sounds is commissioned by Stanford Live, Stanford University; The Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi; Ferst Center for the Arts at Georgia Institute of Technology; Green Music Center of Sonoma State University; Arizona Arts Live at University of Arizona; and developed through a creative residency at MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts.
This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Support for the upcoming Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born premiere is generously provided by Leslie Riedel and Scott Friend.
Image credit: Hollis Johnson
(Boston, MA—July 29, 2022)—The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) announces the promotion of Ruth Erickson to Mannion Family Senior Curator. In her new position, Erickson will take an expanded role developing the curatorial vision for the ICA’s exhibition and collection program as well as shaping conversations around community partnerships.
“I am thrilled to announce Ruth’s promotion to Mannion Family Senior Curator at the ICA,” said Eva Respini, the ICA’s Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs and Barbara Lee Chief Curator. “This new role recognizes Ruth’s extraordinary work and leadership on our curatorial team, including an impressive—and ongoing—run of exhibitions and continued oversight of the museum’s growing collection.”
Erickson’s upcoming exhibitions for the ICA include the major October exhibition To Begin Again: Artists and Childhood, the first thematic group exhibition in the U.S. to explore the influence of children and childhood on the practice of visual artists, and a new commission by Barbara Kruger for the museum’s Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall opening in November. Her group exhibition Revival: Materials and Monumental Forms is currently on view at the ICA Watershed, the museum’s project space in East Boston.
After serving as a Research Fellow for Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-57 and receiving her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Pennsylvania, Erickson joined the museum as Assistant Curator in 2014 and was promoted to Associate Curator in 2016 and Mannion Family Curator in 2017. In her time at the ICA, Erickson has organized 18 exhibitions, including the major thematic group exhibition When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art (2019), a significant artist survey and publication Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 21st-Century Naturalist, as well as solo artist presentations of Vivian Suter (2021), Wangechi Mutu (2018) Kevin Beasley (2018), Ethan Murrow (2015), and the trio Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian (2015). She additionally contributes to growing the ICA’s collection, coordinating the Collections and Exhibitions Committee, and overseeing the digitization of the collection. In 2021, Erickson was a fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership.
Since its founding in 1936, the ICA has shared the pleasures of reflection, inspiration, imagination, and provocation that contemporary art offers with its audiences. A museum at the intersection of contemporary art and civic life, the ICA has advanced a bold vision for amplifying the artist’s voice and expanding the museum’s role as educator, incubator, and convener. Its exhibitions, performances, and educational programs provide access to the breadth and diversity of 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 is located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA, 02210. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at icaboston.org. Follow the ICA on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Media contact: Margaux Leonard, press@icaboston.org
Deborah Roberts, Sisterly Love, 2021. Acrylic and collage on canvas. 65 × 125 inches (165.1 × 317.5 cm). Private collection, Detroit. Courtesy Vielmetter, Los Angeles. © Deborah Roberts
Cathy Wilkes, Untitled, 2012. Mixed media. Overall dimensions variable. Museum of Modern Art, New York; Gift of the Speyer Family Foundation and Mrs. Saidie A. May (by exchange). Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. © Cathy Wilkes
Oscar Murillo, Frequencies, 2013–ongoing (Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2016). Ballpoint pen, fountain pen, graphite, felt-tip pen, highlighter, permanent marker, paint, crayon, staples, natural pigments, debris and other mixed media on canvas. Courtesy the artist and Frequencies Foundation. © Oscar Murillo
Njideka Akunyili Crosby. “The Beautyful Ones” Series #7, 2018 Acrylic, colored pencil and transfers on paper, 59 7/8 × 42 1/2 inches (152.1 × 108 cm). Acquired through the generosity of Fotene and Tom Cote in honor of Eva Respini. Courtesy the artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner. © Njideka Akunyili Crosby
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled, 1981. Acrylic and spray paint on canvas. 80 × 80 inches (203 × 203 cm). Princeton University Art Museum, Lent by Herbert Schorr, Graduate School Class of 1963, and Lenore Schorr. Image courtesy Princeton University Art Museum. © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York
Sweeping survey of 20th and 21st century art features work by Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Francis Alÿs, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jordan Casteel, Paul Klee, Glenn Ligon, Oscar Murillo, Faith Ringgold, and more
(Boston, MA—July 26, 2022) On October 6, 2022, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens To Begin Again: Artists and Childhood, the first thematic group exhibition in the U.S. to explore the influence of children and childhood on the practice of visual artists. Years in the making, this groundbreaking exhibition examines how childhood is an important yet undervalued subject in the history of art. It begins with the observation that artists have long been inspired by children—by their imagination, creativity, and unique ways of seeing and being in the world—and explores how artists grapple with timely issues of creativity, risk, power, care, labor, and learning through their engagement with childhood. Featuring 40 artists—including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paul Klee, Glenn Ligon, and Faith Ringgold—To Begin Again is comprised of more than 75 artworks, including painting, sculpture, photography, installation, video, and over 20 works made by young people. Using unique exhibition design and didactics, the exhibition brings awareness to the range of ways that different people experience art in museums. To Begin Again is organized by Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Senior Curator, with Jeffrey De Blois, Associate Curator and Publications Manager, and will be on view October 6, 2022 through February 26, 2023.
“This is an exciting exhibition with a range of art that explores the influence of children on visual artists from Paul Klee and Jean-Michel Basquiat to Jordan Casteel and Sable Elyse Smith. Presenting a diverse array of artworks spanning time, geography, generations, and cultures, To Begin Again crafts an important narrative about modernism, innocence, and the institutional structures surrounding childhood,” said Jill Medvedow, the ICA’s Ellen Matilda Poss Director. “Through focused approaches to accessibility and design—including tiered reading levels, lower hanging heights, interactive drawing and reading spaces, and special programs—the exhibition highlights the museum as an intergenerational gathering place, where visitors of all ages and backgrounds can enjoy the critical pleasures of art, learning, and reflection together.”
“The artworks in To Begin Again demonstrate how artists have reflected on and contributed to notions of childhood: they may depict children or involve them as collaborators, represent or mimic their ways of drawing or telling stories, highlight their unique cultures, or negotiate ideas of innocence and spontaneity associated with young people,” said Erickson.
Though artists have been inspired by children for millennia, the works in To Begin Again offer distinctive viewpoints and experiences, revealing how time and place, economics and race, and representation and aesthetics fundamentally shape how we experience and understand childhood. Themes explored in the exhibition include representing childhood, drawing and the creative capacities of children, books and storytelling, dynamics of power, caretaking, and forms of learning. To Begin Again includes historical and contemporary artwork made by young people from across the globe, in different configurations. The exhibition underscores that while there is no single, uniform idea of childhood, it is nevertheless the ground upon which so much of society is built, negotiated, and imagined.
To Begin Again features several recently commissioned works and unique iterations of existing projects. Brian Belott’s newly reimagined installation Dr. Kid President Jr. (2022) includes selections from the massive collection of children’s art assembled by the early childhood educator and psychologist Rhoda Kellogg and his own “failed” copies of the children’s art, staging a dialogue that invites closer reflection on the aesthetic and communicative qualities of children’s drawings and mark-making. Carmen Winant’s new large-scale installation What it is like to be (2022) assembles more than 300 instructional books intended for young people on a wide variety of subjects, from geography to ceramics. Her project traces the capacity of books and their images to travel, to teach outside of language, and to have unintended lives. Oscar Murillo’s Frequencies project (2013–ongoing) totals more than 40,000 canvases, each made by installing a blank canvas on a classroom desk and leaving it in place for a few months. Described by Murillo and his collaborators as inserting a free space for self-expression into the school, the installations have taken place in more than 30 countries throughout the world, generating a vast collection that registers the presence and creativity of students. In To Begin Again, this iteration of Frequencies includes a collaboration with members of the ICA’s Teen Arts Council, who selected canvases from the archive which will be presented on a video monitor within Murillo’s installation.
The exhibition is divided into six thematic sections: “Among Children,” “Draw Like a Child,” “The Page Is a World,” “Born into Being,” “Gestures of Care,” and “After School.”
Sculptors today have employed the child figure to generate representations of childhood in rich and varied ways, registering experiences of joy, play, creativity, vulnerability, and resilience that reinvent centuries-old forms and motifs. Conjuring the presence of children and their interior lives, the sculptures included in this section stage encounters between the viewer and the child figure. They negotiate the power of scale and perception, and they become containers for hopes, beliefs, fears, and ideas about humanity. This section includes artworks by John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres, Karon Davis, Duane Hanson, Tau Lewis, Berenice Olmedo, and Charles Ray.
Artists have long sought to imitate, incorporate, or investigate “child-like” drawings in their own work. Children’s evolving ability to communicate is a fundamental aspect of their development, and within this uneven process, contemporary artists have discovered immense potential for invention and collaboration. Capturing an enduring interest in the expressive and creative capacities of children, this section features artworks by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Brian Belott, Allan Rohan Crite, Mary Kelly, Paul Klee, Helen Levitt, Glenn Ligon, Rivane Neuenschwander, and Sable Elyse Smith. Visitors are invited to make their own drawings at an interactive drawing table included in this section.
Just as books shape the lives of children, the vast world of children’s literature has also affected artists. Since the twentieth century, illustrated books intended for young people have offered platforms to innovatively explore relationships between word and image, and provided source material for artists to articulate their own novel visions and worlds. The page has offered artists and children a tremendously rich space for reflecting the world and imagining it anew. This section features works by Henry Darger, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Ekua Holmes, Faith Ringgold, Rachel Rose, and Becky Suss, as well as an interactive reading room—developed in conversation with librarians from Boston Public Schools, Boston Public Library, and a children’s book author—that will invite visitors of all ages to explore the world of children’s literature as a site of significant artistic production.
Dynamics of power—and attendant issues of disenfranchisement and agency—shape the experiences of children from the moment of their birth. Those dynamics are sometimes apparent, but at other times and in other places, they are invisible yet inform conceptions of childhood. This section includes artworks by Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Robert Gober, Mona Hatoum, Sharon Hayes, Deborah Roberts, Heji Shin, and Sable Elyse Smith. These artists give form to the complex processes of becoming, attending to the structures that empower and marginalize young people.
Numerous artists reflect on the practical and intangible needs of children and the many individuals who meet those needs, often with an extended hand or a warm embrace. This section considers the figure of the mother in dialogue with fathers, siblings, peers, and domestic workers, highlighting questions of labor and visibility. Featuring artworks by Ann Agee, Jordan Casteel, Lenka Clayton, Ramiro Gomez (now Jay Lynn Gomez), Justine Kurland, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Cathy Wilkes, this section invites us to reconsider caretaking as an act shared in communion rather than the labor of an individual.
Models of learning sometimes appear at the margins of institutions and sanctioned structures, and often involve the imagination of artists and children collaborating. The distinct projects in this section of the exhibition illuminate unexpected paths of learning and the unique competencies of children and artists in navigating them. They also reveal the breadth of expression, play, and knowledge generated by and for children, reminding us that there are as many childhoods as there are children. This section includes artworks by Francis Alÿs, Oscar Murillo, Tim Rollins and K.O.S., and Carmen Winant.
Ann Agee (b. 1959, Philadelphia)
John Ahearn (b. 1952, Binghamton, New York) and Rigoberto Torres (b. 1960, Aguadilla, Puerto Rico)
Njideka Akunyili Crosby (b. 1983, Enugu, Nigeria)
Francis Alÿs (b. 1959, Antwerp, Belgium)
Jean-Michel Basquiat (b. 1960, Brooklyn, New York; d. 1988, New York)
Brian Belott (b. 1973, East Orange, New Jersey)
Jordan Casteel (b. 1989, Denver)
Lenka Clayton (b. 1977, Cornwall, United Kingdom)
Allan Rohan Crite (b. 1910, North Plainfield, New Jersey; d. 2007, Boston)
Henry Darger (b. 1892, Chicago; d. 1973, Chicago)
Karon Davis (b. 1977, Reno, Nevada)
Robert Gober (b. 1954, Wallingford, Connecticut)
Jay Lynn Gomez (b. 1986, San Bernardino, California)
Trenton Doyle Hancock (b. 1974, Oklahoma City)
Duane Hanson (b. 1925, Alexandria, Minnesota; d. 1996, Boca Raton, Florida)
Mona Hatoum (b. 1952, Beirut)
Sharon Hayes (b. 1970, Baltimore)
Ekua Holmes (b. 1955, Roxbury, Massachusetts)
Mary Kelly (b. 1941, Fort Dodge, Iowa)
Paul Klee (b. 1879, Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland; d. 1940, Muralto, Switzerland)
Justine Kurland (b. 1969, Warsaw, New York)
Helen Levitt (b. 1913, Brooklyn, New York; d. 2009, New York)
Tau Lewis (b. 1993, Toronto)
Glenn Ligon (b. 1960, New York)
Oscar Murillo (b. 1986, Valle del Cauca, Colombia)
Rivane Neuenschwander (b. 1967, Belo Horizonte, Brazil)
Berenice Olmedo (b. 1987, Oaxaca, Mexico)
Charles Ray (b. 1953, Chicago)
Faith Ringgold (b. 1930, Harlem)
Deborah Roberts (b. 1962, Austin, Texas)
Tim Rollins and K.O.S. (b. 1955, Pittsfield, Maine; d. 2017, New York)
Rachel Rose (b. 1986, New York)
Heji Shin (b. 1983, Seoul)
Sable Elyse Smith (b. 1986, Los Angeles)
Becky Suss (b. 1980, Philadelphia)
Mierle Laderman Ukeles (b. 1939, Denver)
Cathy Wilkes (b.1966, Belfast, Northern Ireland)
Carmen Winant (b. 1983, San Francisco)
A fully-illustrated, scholarly catalogue edited by Jeffrey De Blois and Ruth Erickson accompanies the exhibition featuring the voices and perspectives of a variety of artists, scholars, and writers, including: Joshua Bennett, writer and Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College; Anna Craycroft, multidisciplinary artist; Jeffrey De Blois, the ICA’s Associate Curator and Publications Manager and supporting curator; Ruth Erickson, the ICA’s Mannion Family Senior Curator and curator; Anne Higonnet, Professor of Art History at Barnard College of Columbia University; Naima J. Keith, curator and Vice President of Education and Public Programs at Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Valeria Luiselli, writer; Oscar Murillo, artist; Sable Elyse Smith, artist and Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University; Mierle Laderman Ukeles, artist; Carmen Winant, artist and Roy Lichtenstein Chair of Studio Art at Ohio State University. The catalogue is co-published by the ICA and DelMonico Books • D.A.P.
Roberts will be in conversation with Erickson. More information will be available soon on icaboston.org.
The Bank of America Art Lab will feature an installation by Elisa Hamilton, a Boston-based multimedia artist. The Art Lab will be open every Saturday and Sunday from 12-4 PM. Activities are drop-in and first-come, first-serve with limited capacity. More information will be available soon on icaboston.org.
Join us for a day of family fun and drop-in for an art-making activity with Bank of America Art Lab artist Elisa Hamilton. Explore exhibitions in the galleries, engage in activities designed for families with kids to work on together. Pull up a seat for the return of Books & Looks, live storybook readings throughout the galleries! All activities are drop-in and first-come, first-serve with limited capacity. Request free admission tickets online in advance. More information will be available soon on icaboston.org. Please note: During Play Dates, museum admission is free for families when accompanied by kids ages 12 and under, with up to 2 adults per family. Timed entry tickets are required, and advance reservations are strongly recommended. Day-of tickets are not guaranteed.
In October 2021, with support from the Radcliffe Institute of Advance Study at Harvard University, Erickson and Dr. Anne Higonnet, Professor of Art History, Barnard College of Columbia University, organized an exploratory seminar titled Access Points: Children, Artists, and Museums. This seminar brought together a focused group of scholars, educators, curators, and artists from a range of disciplines to explore how museums offer young audiences access points to the objects and ideas they present. Focused on To Begin Again, the group brainstormed exhibition design, interpretation, engagement, and programs, and many of these individuals have continued as advisors to the project. This group includes: Robin Bernstein, Dillon Professor of American History, Harvard University; Allison Curseen, Assistant Professor of English, Boston College; Clara Dublanc, Director, Itinerant Works; Marah Gubar, Associate Professor of Literature, MIT; Laura Koenig, Team Leader for Children’s Services at the Central Library of the Boston Public Library; Francie Latour, writer, editor, and founder of Wee the People; Robin Meisner, Director of Child Development at Boston Children’s Museum; Camille Owens, Junior Fellow, Harvard Society of Fellows; Vivian Poey, Professor of Photography, Lesley University; Liz Phipps-Soeiro, Director of Boston Public School Libraries; Siddhartha V. Shah, Director of Education and Civic Engagement, Curator of South Asian Art, Peabody Essex Museum; Vita Murrow, author; and Ellen Winner, Professor of Psychology, Boston College.
Media previews are available by appointment beginning Wednesday, October 5; please contact Margaux Leonard at press@icaboston.org to schedule.
On Saturday, October 15, the ICA will host a family-friendly press event including an exhibition tour by the curators, and a special art-making activity led by Boston-based artist Elisa Hamilton highlighting her installation in the Bank of America Art Lab. Please RSVP to press@icaboston.org.
Since its founding in 1936, the ICA has shared the pleasures of reflection, inspiration, imagination, and provocation that contemporary art offers with its audiences. A museum at the intersection of contemporary art and civic life, the ICA has advanced a bold vision for amplifying the artist’s voice and expanding the museum’s role as educator, incubator, and convener. Its exhibitions, performances, and educational programs provide access to the breadth and diversity of 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 is located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA, 02210. The Watershed is located at 256 Marginal Street, East Boston, MA 02128. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at icaboston.org. Follow the ICA on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Acknowledgments
Organized by Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Senior Curator, with Jeffrey De Blois, Associate Curator and Publications Manager.
Support for To Begin Again: Artists and Childhood is provided by First Republic Bank.
Additional support generously provided by Kate and Chuck Brizius, Paul and Katie Buttenwieser, Marina Kalb and David Feinberg, Andree LeBoeuf Foundation, Kristen and Kent Lucken, Tristin and Martin Mannion, Erica and Ted Pappendick, and Cynthia and John Reed.
In-kind support of To Begin Again: Artists and Childhood generously provided by Porter Square Books.
Rose B. Simpson, Root A, 2019. Ceramic, glaze, linen, jute string, steel, and leather. 71 1/2 x 20 1/2 x 16 inches (181.6 x 52.1 x 40.6 cm). Rennie Collection, Vancouver. Courtesy the artist and Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco. © Rose B. Simpson
(Boston, MA—July 13, 2022) The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) presents Rose B. Simpson: Legacies, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in Boston. The artistic practice of Rose B. Simpson (b. 1983 in Santa Clara Pueblo, NM) encompasses ceramic sculpture, metal work, performance, installation, writing, and automobile design, offering poignant reflections on the human condition. Legacies is a tightly conceived exhibition featuring 11 of the artist’s ceramic figurative sculptures, including new works on view for the first time. Her ceramic sculptures, which range from intimately scaled works to monumental standing figures, express complex emotional and psychological states, spirituality, women’s strength, and post-apocalyptic visions of the world. Part of a multigenerational, matrilineal lineage of artists working with clay, Simpson connects traditional processes of producing clay pottery with innovative techniques and knowledge of her own place in the world today. Organized by Jeffrey De Blois, Associate Curator and Publications Manager, the exhibition is on view August 11, 2022 through January 29, 2023.
“Simpson is one of the most compelling voices in contemporary sculpture who consistently asks urgent questions about where we find ourselves in the world today through inventive techniques and materials. We look forward to sharing her powerful work with Boston audiences,” said De Blois.
For Legacies, Simpson’s signature themes and approaches to working with clay are brought together in an open floor plan presentation of individual figures, pairs, and groupings. These ceramic sculptures often incorporate metal, wood, leather, fabric, jewelry, and reclaimed materials, and are frequently marked with a “+” or an “x,” symbols for direction and protection, respectively. While the works included date back to 2014, the focus is on more recent work, including three new ceramic sculptures created for the exhibition. Heights I (original) (2022) is a small, armless standing figure with a series of cup-like vessels growing upwards from its head, suggesting the impulse to reach for new levels of consciousness. Legacy (2022), the work which gives the exhibition its title, is a two-part mother-daughter sculpture made using a technique Simpson refers to as “slap-slab,” involving repeatedly throwing clay against the floor on a diagonal until it is very thin. Built up of overlapping layers of thin clay, these busts are imbued with a sense of watchful vulnerability conveying the shifting complexities of motherhood as your child grows older. In Brace (2022), two armless leaning figures are locked in an evocative embrace, mutually dependent and tenderly joined together with knotted twine adorned with clay beads.
Many of Simpson’s works, like Legacy, consider intergenerational inheritances, or stand as safeguards against legacies of violence. Genesis Squared (2019), located at the gravitational center of the exhibition, features a mother figure who stands holding her child close to her body with feet planted firmly atop an ornately cut metal pedestal. Another cut-metal plate, depicting an intimate scene of mother and child embracing, balances on top of her head like a crown, as an homage to missing and murdered Indigenous women and to address the impact of the ongoing human rights crisis on the children forced to grow up without their mothers. Root A (2019) is a sentinel-like standing figure with crossed arms poised to safeguard women, native lands, and other vulnerable groups against external threats. Made of red, buff, and white clay, Root A is armed with various tools of survival. The figure’s intricately carved face is fixed atop a menacing blade encircling the shoulders. Suggesting an indomitable figure in a post-apocalyptic landscape, Root A “stand(s) tall,” according to the artist, “for justice, healing, and rehabilitation.”
Through such evocative, tactile forms and materials, each with their own commanding presence, Simpson’s work is intended, as she has said, “to translate our humanity back to ourselves.”
Simpson will be in conversation with De Blois. More information will be available soon on icaboston.org.
Rose B. Simpson (b. 1983, Santa Clara Pueblo, NM) has a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Art, a MFA from Rhode Island School of Design, and a MA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts. She has had recent solo exhibitions at the Wheelwright Museum (Santa Fe, NM), the Nevada Art Museum (Reno, NV), SCAD Museum of Art (Savannah, GA), and University of New Mexico Art Museum (Albuquerque, NM). In the past year, her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including at MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA), The Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland, OH), the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley, CA), and The Bronx Museum of Arts (New York). Her work is in many museum collections, including the Denver Art Museum, ICA/Boston, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Portland Art Museum (OR), Princeton University Art Museum, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Simpson lives and works on the Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico. Counterculture, a new large-scale public artwork by Simpson will be on view at Field Farm in Williamstown from June 18 — November 30, 2022 as part of The Trustees’ Art & The Landscape public art series.
Since its founding in 1936, the ICA has shared the pleasures of reflection, inspiration, imagination, and provocation that contemporary art offers with its audiences. A museum at the intersection of contemporary art and civic life, the ICA has advanced a bold vision for amplifying the artist’s voice and expanding the museum’s role as educator, incubator, and convener. Its exhibitions, performances, and educational programs provide access to the breadth and diversity of 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 is located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA, 02210. The Watershed is located at 256 Marginal Street, East Boston, MA 02128. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at icaboston.org. Follow the ICA on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Rose B. Simpson: Legacies is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Additional support is generously provided by Karen and Brian Conway, Steve Corkin and Dan Maddalena, Bridgitt and Bruce Evans, Kim Sinatra, Charlotte and Herbert S. Wagner III, and the Jennifer Epstein Fund for Women Artists.
Jordan Nassar, Beyond the Boundaries, 2022. Hand-embroidered cotton on cotton, 84 × 81 × 1 inches (213.4 × 205.7 × 2.5 cm). The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art at Rollins College, Gift of Barbara ‘68 and Theodore ‘68 Alfond. 2022.2.7. © Jordan Nassar. Image courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle.
(Boston, MA—July 13, 2022) On August 11, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens Jordan Nassar: Fantasy and Truth, a solo exhibition of the New York-based artist whose multifaceted practice draws on traditional Palestinian craft to investigate ideas of home, land, and memory. As a self-taught artist, Nassar (b. 1985 in New York) is mostly known for his use of Palestinian tatreez, a matrilineal tradition of cross-stitching. In collaboration with a Palestinian embroidery collective based in the West Bank, the artist composes his embroideries from numerous individually made panels that together weave breathtaking, layered panoramas suggestive of an expansive sky or a boundless horizon. Fantasy and Truth presents the artist’s largest embroidered panels to date, alongside recent work in wood and glass mixed media. Organized by Anni Pullagura, Curatorial Assistant, the exhibition is on view August 11, 2022 through January 29, 2023.
“Nassar’s work, with its complex patterning and painterly attention to form and color, elevates our understanding of craft traditions as long-standing and deeply meaningful forms of art. We look forward to sharing his work with audiences in Boston for the first time,” said Pullagura.
Tatreez is a tradition deeply rooted in the history and culture of Palestine. Since 1948, it has become closely tied to ideas of nostalgia, nationality, and heritage. Colors, patterns, and designs could distinguish a wearer both by where they were from as well as their social or familial status, or signal different stages of life. Nassar grew up with many of these motifs in his household, and began incorporating tatreez into his practice after meeting with women-led embroidery collectives in Ramallah, Hebron, and Bethlehem, with whom he now collaborates on some of his artworks.
Presented across the gallery space, the embroidered works offer visions of homelands at monumental scale. Nassar’s largest works to date—Song of the Flowers (2022) and Lament of the Field (2022)—are each composed of fifty-seven individual panels in richly varied warm and cool colors, introducing familiar motifs and patterns in an arrangement that together suggests a sun rising over a blue mountain or a moon shining across a red valley. Recalling the fragmentation of memory, time, history, and place, the panels individual language and collective dialogue offer a poetic remark on ideas of fantasy and truth. The exhibition title, as well as the titles of the two large-scale embroideries, draw from the poetry collection A Tear and A Smile (1914) by Lebanese writer Gibran Khalil Gibran (1883–1931), whose melancholic poetics address the ebb and flow of memory and history. Similarly, for Nassar, embroidery holds a tension between conflict and harmony in the relationship between stitch and thread, color and pattern.
“I like to discuss these landscapes as versions of Palestine as they exist in the minds of the diaspora, who have never been there and can never go there,” shares Nassar. “They are the Palestine I heard stories about growing up, half-made of imagination. They are dreamlands and utopias that are colorful and fantastical—beautiful and romantic, but bittersweet.”
In recent years, Nassar has expanded his practice to include glass and wood-based crafts. The ICA exhibition features glassworks in which the artist has arranged hand-flamed glass beads in a steel armature, similar to decorative latticework. In the wood pieces on display, Nassar has layered the natural grains of the wood with brass and mother of pearl to create richly inlaid surfaces; these designs recur in the artist-made benches also created for this exhibition.
The ICA Store has partnered with Nassar and his clothing brand Adish to develop an exclusive capsule collection available only at the ICA featuring a limited edition embroidered hooded sweatshirt, tote bag, poster, and more. Visit icastore.org for more information.
Jordan Nassar (b.1985, New York, NY) earned his B.A. at Middlebury College in 2007. His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions globally at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Asia Society, New York, NY; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ; Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY; Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY; KMAC Museum, Louisville, KY; Center for Contemporary Art (CCA) Tel Aviv; Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA; James Cohan, New York and The Third Line, Dubai, UAE. His work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Rollins Museum of Art, Florida; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; The Museum of Contemporary Art, California; and Rhode Island School of Design Museum, in Rhode Island, among others.
Since its founding in 1936, the ICA has shared the pleasures of reflection, inspiration, imagination, and provocation that contemporary art offers with its audiences. A museum at the intersection of contemporary art and civic life, the ICA has advanced a bold vision for amplifying the artist’s voice and expanding the museum’s role as educator, incubator, and convener. Its exhibitions, performances, and educational programs provide access to the breadth and diversity of 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 is located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA, 02210. The Watershed is located at 256 Marginal Street, East Boston, MA 02128. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at icaboston.org. Follow the ICA on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Support for Jordan Nassar: Fantasy and Truth is generously provided by Oliver and Negin Ewald.
Eva Respini. Photo by Liza Voll.
(Boston, MA—June 29, 2022)—The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston announces the promotion of Eva Respini to Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs and Barbara Lee Chief Curator. Respini will lead the vision and strategy for the ICA’s exhibitions and collection, in alignment with the ICA’s mission to provide a wider and more global view of today’s most innovative artists and contemporary art practices. Respini joined the ICA as the Barbara Lee Chief Curator in 2015, after more than a decade as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art. Most recently, she was the curator and co-commissioner of the U.S. Pavilion’s historic Simone Leigh presentation for the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2022. Respini is currently organizing the first mid-career survey exhibition of Leigh’s work, which will open at the ICA in March 2023 before touring across the country.
“I am thrilled to announce Eva’s promotion to this expanded leadership position at the ICA,” said Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director of the ICA. “With creativity, thoughtfulness, and dedication, Eva has developed exhibitions that have advanced our knowledge of contemporary art and artists, and been met with popular and critical acclaim. Hundreds of thousands of people—in Boston, New York, and Venice—are currently experiencing exhibitions developed by Eva and her team, expanding the impact of the ICA on a local, national, and global stage.”
Respini led the significant expansion of ICA’s exhibition program in 2018 with the opening of the ICA Watershed, the museum’s project space in East Boston where audiences encounter and experience large-scale and immersive artworks. In keeping with ICA’s history to champion the most innovative art and ideas of our time, her work has brought attention to under-recognized artists or little-explored themes and practices in the art world. Specializing in global contemporary art and image-making practices, Respini has organized the critically acclaimed exhibitions Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today (2018); When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art (2019); and ambitious solo presentations such as Deana Lawson (2021); Firelei Báez (2021); John Akomfrah: Purple (2019); Huma Bhabha: They Live (2019); William Forsythe: Choreographic Objects (2018); Liz Deschenes (2016); and Nalini Malani (2016). Her other notable exhibitions include a major retrospective of Cindy Sherman (2012), and the surveys Walid Raad (2015) and Robert Heinecken (2014). Respini’s curatorial leadership and commitment to curatorial craft at every level of exhibition-making is evident in all her curatorial projects. Respini has been a visiting lecturer, critic, and speaker at a number of universities and currently teaches a seminar on curatorial practice at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Other universities where she has taught and lectured include School of Visual Arts, Columbia University; Yale University’s School of Art; and the School of Visual Arts, New York. She has published numerous books and catalogues and her writing appears in museum publications and periodicals.
About the ICA/Boston
Since its founding in 1936, the ICA has shared the pleasures of reflection, inspiration, imagination, and provocation that contemporary art offers with its audiences. A museum at the intersection of contemporary art and civic life, the ICA has advanced a bold vision for amplifying the artist’s voice and expanding the museum’s role as educator, incubator, and convener. Its exhibitions, performances, and educational programs provide access to the breadth and diversity of 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 is located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA, 02210. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at icaboston.org. Follow the ICA on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Media contact: Colette Randall, crandall@icaboston.org
Simone Leigh: Façade, 2022. Thatch, steel, and wood, dimensions variable. Satellite, 2022. Bronze, 24 feet × 10 feet × 7 feet 7 inches (7.3 × 3 × 2.3 m) (overall). Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery. Photo by Timothy Schenck. © Simone Leigh
(Boston, MA—June 22, 2022)—The U.S. Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia expands its presentation of artist Simone Leigh’s work this fall with Loophole of Retreat: Venice, a convening of Black women intellectuals—performers, writers, filmmakers artists, and activists—that will take place Oct. 7-9 at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini. The project is an extension of the critically acclaimed exhibition Simone Leigh: Sovereignty, commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) in partnership with the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, and reflects the collaborative ethos that is characteristic of artist Simone Leigh’s practice.
The three-day symposium is organized by Rashida Bumbray, director of Culture and Art at the Open Society Foundations, with curatorial advisors Saidiya Hartman, University Professor, Columbia University, and Tina M. Campt, Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities and Modern Culture and Media, Brown University. For more information, visit simoneleighvenice2022.org.
Loophole of Retreat: Venice builds on an eponymous one-day convening held in 2019 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. The conceptual frame is drawn from the 1861 autobiography of Harriet Jacobs, a formerly enslaved woman who, for seven years after her escape, lived in a crawlspace she described as a “loophole of retreat.” Jacobs claimed this site as simultaneously an enclosure and a space for enacting practices of freedom—practices of thinking, planning, writing, and imagining new forms of freedom.
“Leigh is committed to the lineage of Black women artists and intellectuals that make her practice possible. As such, in connection with her exhibition at the U.S. Pavilion in Venice, she continues her work of making Black women’s intellectual labor more visible. Loophole of Retreat will elevate a global conversation on Black feminist thought in order to nurture the intergenerational and interdisciplinary connections between Black women thinkers and makers,” said Bumbray.
Loophole of Retreat: Venice will feature a global roster of participants that includes visual artist Deborah Anzinger (Jamaica); cultural anthropologist, dancer, and choreographer Aimee Meredith Cox (U.S.); filmmaker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich (U.S.); filmmaker Gessica Geneus (Haiti); visual artist Bouchra Khalili (Morocco); poet Raquel Lima (Portugal); choreographer Paloma McGregor (St. Croix /U.S.), multidisciplinary collective Black Quantum Futurism (U.S.); choreographer Kettly Noël (Haiti/Mali), medical anthropologist Stella Nyanzi (Uganda); artist Lorraine O’Grady (U.S.); writer Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts (U.S.); and choreographer Nelisiwe Xaba (South Africa); among others. See full list below.
The symposium will feature performances, film screenings, and conversations organized around key directives, including:
Maroonage: Maroons refer to the people who escaped slavery and created independent communities on the outskirts of enslaved communities. The maroonage directive is informed by the artist Deborah Anzinger’s explorations of fugitivity and resistance in Jamaica’s Cockpit Country, which is a site of historical refuge and resistance for Maroons.
Manual: This directive is inspired by the Manual for General Housework from Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval.
Magical Realism: Magically real forms are the music, literature, and movement languages developed by Black people in the New World as a result of the catastrophes of colonialism and the middle passage.
Medicine: This directive is inspired by how we cope with the natural and supernatural world around us. It draws on our approaches to diverse ailments; physical, spiritual, natural, and supernatural. For this gathering, we consider the work of root and leaf doctors, traditional healers and conjurors of the rural Black American South and the global South.
Sovereignty: The title of the U.S. Pavilion exhibition, Sovereignty, speaks to notions of self-determination, self-governance and independence for both the intellectual and the collaborative.
Participants:
Aimee Meredith Cox
Annette Lane Harrison Richter
Aracelis Girmay
Autumn Knight
Ayana Evans
Black Quantum Futurism
Bouchra Khalili
Canisia Lubrin
Cecily Bumbray
Christina Sharpe
Daniella Rose King
Deborah Anzinger
Denise Ferreira da Silva
Diane Sousa da Silva Lima
Dionne Brand
dream hampton
Firelei Baez
Françoise Vergès
Gail Lewis
Gessica Geneus
Gloria Wekker
Grada Kilomba
Holly Bass
Ja’Tovia Gary
Janaína Oliveira
Javiela Evangelista
Jessica Lynne
Kettly Noël
Las Nietas de Nonó
Legacy Russell
Leslie Hewitt
Lisa Marie Simmons
Lorraine O’Grady
Maaza Mengiste
Mabel O. Wilson
Maboula Soumahoro
Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich
Mistura Allison
Negarra A. Kudumu
Nelisiwe Xaba
Nomaduma Masilela
Nontsikelelo Mutiti
Nora Chipaumire
Okwui Okpokwasili
Olumide Popoola
Oluremi Onabanjo
Paloma McGregor
Phoebe Boswell
Raquel Lima
Rizvana Bradley
Robin Coste Lewis
Saidiya Hartman
Sandra Jackson Dumont
Senam Okudzeto
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts
Stella Nyanzi
Tarana Burke
Tina Campt
Tsedaye Makonnen
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson
Zara Julius
ABOUT THE ORGANIZERS
Simone Leigh (b. 1967, Chicago, IL) has created an expansive body of work in sculpture, video, and performance, over the past two decades, that centers Black femme interiority. Inflected by Black feminist theory, Leigh’s practice intervenes imaginatively to fill gaps in the historical record by proposing new hybridities. Leigh’s sculptural works join forms derived from vernacular architecture and the female body, rendering them via materials and processes associated with the artistic traditions of Africa and the African diaspora. The collaborative ethos that characterizes Leigh’s videos and public programs pays homage to a long history of Black female collectivity, communality, and care. In 2019, Leigh was the first artist commissioned for the High Line Plinth, New York. Recent exhibitions include The Hugo Boss Prize 2018: Simone Leigh, Loophole of Retreat at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2019); the 2019 Whitney Biennial; Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon (2017) at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Psychic Friends Network (2016) at Tate Exchange, Tate Modern, London; Hammer Projects: Simone Leigh (2016–17) at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; inHarlem: Simone Leigh (2016–17), a public installation presented by The Studio Museum in Harlem at Marcus Garvey Park, New York; The Waiting Room (2016) at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; and Free People’s Medical Clinic (2014), a project commissioned by Creative Time. Leigh’s work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; Cleveland Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the ICA/Boston, among others.
The works that comprise Leigh’s exhibition for the U.S. Pavilion will be featured in her first museum survey exhibition at the ICA in 2023, which will subsequently tour to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. (Fall/Winter 2023/24), and a joint presentation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and California African American Museum (CAAM) in Spring/Summer 2024 in Los Angeles, CA. The exhibition will be accompanied by the first comprehensive monograph dedicated to Leigh’s work.
Rashida Bumbray is director of Culture and Art, the Open Society Foundations’ program dedicated to advancing diverse artistic practices and strengthening locally led cultural spaces around the world. Since joining the Open Society Foundations in 2015, Bumbray has launched and overseen many new grantmaking initiatives in global contexts including the Global Initiative for the Restitution of African Cultural Heritage, the Soros Arts Fellowship and the OSF Arts Forum on Art, Public Space and Closing Societies. With colleagues from Haiti’s FOKAL, she helped to inaugurate a new Caribbean cultural foundation, and in collaboration with Open Society-US, she established the Alternative Monuments Initiative. Bumbray began her curatorial career in 2001 at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, where she coordinated major exhibitions including Frequency (2005) and Freestyle (2001). As associate curator at The Kitchen, New York, Bumbray organized critically acclaimed exhibitions and commissions including Simone Leigh’s solo exhibition You Don’t Know Where Her Mouth Has Been (2012), among many others. She was guest curator of Creative Time’s public art exhibition Funk, God, Jazz and Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn in 2014, which included Leigh’s Free Peoples’ Medical Clinic. Bumbray is also an accomplished choreographer whose practice draws from traditional African American vernacular and folk forms. Her performances have been presented by Tate Modern, London; the New Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harlem Stage, and SummerStage, all in New York; and Project Row Houses, Houston.
ABOUT SIMONE LEIGH: SOVEREIGNTY
Simone Leigh: Sovereignty features a new body of work made for the United States Pavilion at the Biennale Arte 2022, commissioned by the ICA in partnership with the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Sovereignty commingles disparate histories and narratives, including those related to ritual performances of the Baga peoples in Guinea, early Black American material culture from the Edgefield District in South Carolina, and the landmark 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition. With a series of bronzes and ceramics both outside and inside the Pavilion, Leigh intervenes imaginatively to fill gaps in the historical record by proposing new hybridities. Learn more at simoneleighvenice2022.org.
ABOUT THE ICA/BOSTON
Since its founding in 1936, the ICA has shared the pleasures of reflection, inspiration, imagination, and provocation that contemporary art offers with its audiences. A museum at the intersection of contemporary art and civic life, the ICA has advanced a bold vision for amplifying the artist’s voice and expanding the museum’s role as educator, incubator, and convener. Its exhibitions, performances, and educational programs provide access to the breadth and diversity of 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 is located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA, 02210. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at icaboston.org. Follow the ICA on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
ABOUT LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA
Established in 1895, La Biennale di Venezia is acknowledged today as one of the most prestigious cultural institutions. La Biennale stands at the forefront of research and promotion of new contemporary art trends and organizes events in its specific sectors of Arts (1895), Architecture (1980), Cinema (1932), Dance (1999), Music (1930), and Theatre (1934), alongside research and training activities. The International Art Exhibition is considered the most prestigious contemporary art exhibition in the world, introducing hundreds of thousands of visitors to exciting new art every two years. The 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (April 23–November 27, 2022) is directed by Cecilia Alemani.
ABOUT THE U.S. PAVILION
The United States Pavilion, a building in the neoclassical style in the Giardini della Biennale, Venice, opened on May 4, 1930. Since 1986, the U.S. Pavilion has been owned by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and managed by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, which works closely with the U.S. Department of State and exhibition curators to install and maintain all official U.S. exhibitions presented in the Pavilion. Every two years, museum curators from across the country detail their visions for the U.S. Pavilion in proposals that are reviewed by the National Endowment for the Arts’ Federal Advisory Committee on International Exhibitions (FACIE), a group comprising curators, museum directors, and artists, who then submit their recommendations to the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Past exhibitions can be viewed on the Peggy Guggenheim Collection’s website at https://www.guggenheim-venice.it/.
ABOUT THE BUREAU OF EDUCATIONAL AND CULTURAL AFFAIRS, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
The U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) builds relations between the people of the United States and the people of other countries through academic, cultural, sports, professional, and private exchanges, as well as public-private partnerships and mentoring programs. These exchange programs improve foreign relations and strengthen the national security of the United States, support U.S. international leadership, and provide a broad range of domestic benefits by helping break down barriers that often divide us, like religion, politics, language, and ethnicity, and geography. ECA programs build connections that engage and empower people and motivate them to become leaders and thinkers, to develop new skills, and to find connections that will create positive change in their communities. For more information, please visit https://exchanges.state.gov/us.
Simone Leigh is presented by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston in partnership with the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State.
With warmest thanks, the ICA/Boston gratefully acknowledges the following philanthropic partners for their magnificent support.
Major support is provided by the Ford Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Lead corporate support is provided by eu2be.
Generous support is provided by Bloomberg Philanthropies, Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser, The Girlfriend Fund, and Wagner Foundation.
Leadership gifts are provided by Amy and David Abrams; Stephanie Formica Connaughton and John Connaughton; Bridgitt and Bruce Evans; James and Audrey Foster; Agnes Gund; Jodi and Hal Hess; Hostetler/Wrigley Foundation; Barbara and Amos Hostetter; Brigette Lau Collection; Kristen and Kent Lucken; Tristin and Martin Mannion; Ted Pappendick and Erica Gervais Pappendick; Gina and Stuart Peterson; Helen and Charles Schwab; the Terra Foundation for American Art; and VIA Art Fund.
Essential support is also provided by Suzanne Deal Booth; Kate and Chuck Brizius; Richard Chang; Karen and Brian Conway; Steven Corkin and Dan Maddalena; Federico Martin Castro Debernardi; Jennifer Epstein and Bill Keravuori; Esta Gordon Epstein and Robert Epstein; Negin and Oliver Ewald; Alison and John Ferring; Helen Frankenthaler Foundation; Glenn and Amanda Fuhrman; Vivien and Alan Hassenfeld and the Hassenfeld Family Foundation; Peggy J. Koenig and Family; The Holly Peterson Foundation; David and Leslie Puth with Mark and Marie Schwartz; Cindy and Howard Rachofsky; Leslie Riedel and Scott Friend; Kim Sinatra; Tobias and Kristin Welo; Lise and Jeffrey Wilks; Kelly Williams and Andrew Forsyth; Jill and Nick Woodman; Nicole Zatlyn and Jason Weiner; Marilyn Lyng and Dan O’Connell; Komal Shah and Gaurav Garg Foundation; Kate and Ajay Agarwal; Eunhak Bae and Robert Kwak; Jeremiah Schneider Joseph; Barbara H. Lloyd; Cynthia and John Reed; and anonymous donors.