Ibrahim Mahama, NON ORIENTABLE PARADISE LOST 1667, 2017. Mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and White Cube. © Ibrahim Mahama. Installation view, Ex-Africa, CCBB Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 2017. Image courtesy White Cube. Photo by Joana França. Image © White Cube
Ebony G. Patterson, …and the dew cracks the earth, in five acts of lamentation…between the cuts…beneath the leaves…below the soil… (detail), 2020. Digital print on archival watercolor paper with hand-cut and torn elements, construction paper, wallpaper, poster board, acrylic gel medium, feathered monarch butterflies, 9 1/4 × 46 3/4 feet (2.8 × 14.2 m) (overall). Courtesy of the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago. Installation view, Ebony G. Patterson …when the cuts erupt…the garden rings…and the warning is a wailing…, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, September 11, 2020 – February 21, 2021. Photo by Dusty Kessler. © Ebony G. Patterson
Madeline Hollander, Heads/Tails: Walker & Broadway 2, 2020. Automobile headlights, taillights, speaker cable, and terminal box, 18 feet × 43 feet 11 inches × 14 inches (5.5 × 13.4 × 0.4 m). Collection of Alex Hank. Image courtesy the artist and Bortolami Gallery, New York. Photo by Kristian Laudrup. © Madeline Hollander
Joe Wardwell, Hello America: 40 Hits From the 50 States, 2017. Acrylic paint and silk-screening on wall, dimensions variable. Installation view, Joe Wardwell, Hello America: 40 Hits From the 50 States, MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA, 2021. Image courtesy of the artist and MASS MoCA. Photo by David Dashiell. © Joe Wardwell
El Anatsui, Area B, 2007. Aluminum and copper wire, 140 × 236 inches (355.6 × 599.4 cm). Private collection, Toronto. Image courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. © El Anatsui
Karyn Olivier, Fortified, 2018-2020. Bricks, used clothing and steel, approximately 144 × 240 × 30 inches (365.8 × 609.6 × 76.2 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles. Installation view, At the Intersection of Two Faults, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, 2021. Photo by Pierre Le Hors. © Karyn Olivier
(Boston, MA—May 3, 2022) On May 26, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) will open at the ICA Watershed Revival: Materials and Monumental Forms, an exhibition of large-scale installations by six international artists who reclaim and reuse industrial and everyday materials: El Anatsui (b. 1944, Anyako, Ghana), Madeline Hollander (b. 1986, Los Angeles), Ibrahim Mahama (b. 1987, Tamale, Ghana), Karyn Olivier (b. 1968, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago), Ebony G. Patterson (b. 1981, Kingston, Jamaica), and Joe Wardwell (b. 1972, Chapel Hill, NC). Inspired by the mixed-use history of the Watershed space—first built in the 1930s as a copper pipe and sheet metal facility and serving since 2018 as a free site for contemporary art—the exhibition highlights how artists have derived inspiration from industry and labor through the poetic and political power of found images and goods. Organized by Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Curator, with Anni Pullagura, Curatorial Assistant, Revival: Materials and Monumental Forms will be on view through September 5, 2022.
The six installations are as varied as the artists’ practices: Anatsui collects bottle caps and other refuse to form glittering, tapestry-like sculptures; Hollander programs automobile head and taillights as a choreography of street traffic; and Patterson makes intricate collages of flowers, birds, butterflies, and figures using the alluring and layered metaphor of the garden. Olivier and Mahama collect used clothing and crates, respectively, to build towering sculptures that reflect on human persistence, labor, and ingenuity. Finally, Wardwell, a Boston-based artist, will create a new, site-specific installation in dialogue with the rich history of labor songs.
“The artworks in Revival capture the power of reuse, resilience, and reclamation, celebrating a revival of the everyday at monumental scale,” said Jill Medvedow, the ICA’s Ellen Matilda Poss Director. “These impressive, large-scale works take full advantage of the Watershed’s voluminous space, offering visitors the opportunity for exploration, discovery, and reflection.”
“The Watershed’s physical environment uniquely brings its past and present into dialogue, offering a bridge between the histories and practices of industry and of art,” said Erickson. “The idea for Revival came out of this dialogue. In their work, the artists in the exhibition reflect on systems of industry, nature, and society, making visible the often invisible forces that shape human experiences.”
Entry to the Watershed is free. Timed tickets are required for Water Shuttle transportation between the ICA and the Watershed, and can be purchased in advance online at icaboston.org. Water Shuttle tickets will be available online beginning May 4 for ICA members and May 11 for the general public.
Free Admission: Memorial Day, Juneteenth, and Labor Day
Mon, May 30, 10 AM–5 PM
Sun, Jun 19, 10 AM–5 PM
Mon, Sep 5, 10 AM–5 PM
The ICA is offering free museum admission for all on Memorial Day, Juneteenth, and Labor Day. Advanced timed tickets are required and will be available to reserve online at 10 AM the day before the event.
Play Date: Watershed Family Day
Sat, Jul 30, 11 AM–4 PM
Join us for a special ICA Play Date in the East Boston shipyard for a Watershed family day featuring music, community and art making. Please note that there will be no Play Date programming at the ICA’s Seaport location.
Shipyard Block Party
Sat, Aug 13, 12–5 PM
Spend the day in the East Boston Shipyard and Marina for an afternoon of art, music, games, local libations, and food. Please note that there will be no free Water Shuttle service for this event.
El Anatsui (b. 1944 in Anyako, Ghana) is a sculptor whose iconic installations transform everyday and recycled materials in dazzling, large-scale wall-based artworks. He is best known for his use of bottle caps that are hammered flat and then sewn together to create a metallic fabric, belying their coarse material in fluid and reflective configurations. Anatsui lives and works in Nsukka, Nigeria.
Madeline Hollander (b. 1986 in Los Angeles) is an artist, choreographer, and dancer who has performed with the Los Angeles Ballet and the Angela Corella’s Barcelona Ballet. Her art installation and performance practice explores the orchestration of movement by natural and built structures, from city traffic to the emergency systems in buildings to the migration of crickets. Hollander lives and works between New York and Los Angeles.
Ibrahim Mahama (b. 1987 in Tamale, Ghana) is an author and artist who repurposes already repurposed objects to trace and investigate ideas of industry, commodity, and migrant labor. He creates monumental installations from collected and reused objects such as jute sacks sewn together in large-scale tapestries, or shoemaker boxes, wooden containers that are commonplace for “shoeshine boys” in the global south. Mahama lives and works between Accra, Kumasi, and Tamale, Ghana.
Karyn Olivier (b. 1968 in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago) explores how collective and individual memories remain and collect within everyday materials. Her sculpture, installation, video, photography, and public art interweaves histories of objects and locations with present-day narratives, highlighting overlooked histories and reinterpreting the permanence of monuments in public spaces. Olivier lives and works in Philadelphia.
Ebony G. Patterson (b. 1981 in Kingston, Jamaica) is a mixed media artist whose elaborate and multi-layered installations and sculptures address diverse experiences of the Black diaspora. Her works frequently evoke luscious environments mixed with difficult and dark imagery, recalling ideas of growth and decay, entropy and creation, in the natural and unnatural worlds. Patterson lives and works between Kingston and Chicago.
Joe Wardwell (b. 1972 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina) is a painter and muralist whose work combines text and graphic languages with bright, evocative installations. His work frequently incorporates lyrics drawn from rock ballads, alternative musical genres, or spoken word poetry in an investigation of the cultural landscapes throughout the United States. Wardwell lives and works in Jamaica Plain, MA.
On July 4, 2018, the ICA opened to the public its new ICA Watershed expanding artistic and educational programming on both sides of Boston Harbor—the Seaport and East Boston. Located in the Boston Harbor Shipyard and Marina, the ICA Watershed transformed a 15,000-square-foot, formerly condemned space into a vast and welcoming space to see and experience large-scale art. The Watershed builds upon the extraordinary momentum achieved by the museum since opening its visionary waterfront building, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, in 2006. Admission to the Watershed—central to the museum’s vision for art and civic life—is free for all. Previous exhibitions at the Watershed include an immersive installation by Diana Thater, the U.S. premiere of John Akomfrah’s Purple, and a monumental sculpture by Firelei Báez. The Watershed was closed to the public in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the site was used to distribute boxes of food and art kits to the East Boston community from April 2020 through December 2021.
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.
Free admission to the ICA Watershed is made possible by the generosity of Alan and Vivien Hassenfeld and the Hassenfeld Family Foundation.
The ICA Watershed is supported by Vertex.
In-kind support of Revival: Materials and Monumental Forms generously provided by Blue Atlantic Fabricators.
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
(April 21, 2022, Venice, Italy) For the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, the United States Pavilion presents 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.
Simone Leigh: Sovereignty features a new body of work made for the United States Pavilion. Characterized by an interest in performativity and affect, Leigh’s expansive practice parses the construction of Black femme subjectivity. Her large-scale 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. 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 new bronzes and ceramics both outside and inside the Pavilion, Leigh intervenes imaginatively to fill gaps in the historical record by proposing new hybridities.
The works in Sovereignty collectively extend the artist’s ongoing inquiry into the theme of self-determination. The exhibition’s title speaks to notions of self-governance and independence, for both the individual and the collective. To be sovereign is to not be subject to another’s authority, another’s desires, or another’s gaze, but rather to be the author of one’s own history. Many of the featured sculptures interrogate the extraction of images and objects from across the African diaspora and their circulation as souvenirs in service of colonial narratives. Though Leigh’s figural works present their subjects as autonomous and self-sufficient, they do not simply celebrate the capacity of Black women to overcome oppressive circumstances, but rather indict the conditions that so often require them to affirm their own humanity. Acknowledging the capacity of Leigh’s work to articulate an expansive view of Black female experience, American author and scholar Saidiya Hartman has described the artist’s address of the Black feminine as “an architecture of possibility.” 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. “In order to tell the truth,” Leigh proposes, “you need to invent what might be missing from the archive, to collapse time, to concern yourself with issues of scale, to formally move things around in a way that reveals something more true than fact.”
Leigh’s exhibition continues beyond the U.S. Pavilion with Loophole of Retreat: Venice, a convening of Black women scholars, performers, writers, and artists in October 2022, organized by Rashida Bumbray. The project reflects the collaborative ethos that is characteristic of Leigh’s practice, and pays homage to a long history of Black femme collectivity, communality, and care.
Lee Satterfield, Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, said, “We congratulate Simone Leigh on her historic achievement as the first Black woman to represent the United States at the International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. On this international stage, her work will be a beacon for American art. Simone Leigh’s depiction of the reality, diversity, and complexity of the American experience will educate and inspire people around the globe.”
Considering the U.S. Pavilion itself as a sculpture, Leigh has transformed its architecture with Façade, an installation of thatch roofing that resembles a 1930s West African palace. Leigh’s exterior intervention introduces contrasting forms and materials that carry their own histories and interact with the original neoclassical building. The gesture draws upon the legacy of the landmark 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition, mounted by the French to display the cultures and peoples of the lands then under European colonial control.
Standing at the center of the U.S. Pavilion’s outdoor forecourt is Satellite, a monumental, 24-foot-high sculpture. The work recalls a traditional D’mba, a headdress shaped like a female bust created by the Baga peoples of the Guinea coast that is used during ritual performances to communicate with ancestors. A cast satellite dish tops the sculpture, echoing the D’mba’s function as a communicative conduit.
Entering the Pavilion’s galleries, visitors first encounter a large reflecting pool featuring Last Garment, a bronze depicting a laundress at work. The work references a late 19th century photograph taken in Jamaica titled Mammy’s Last Garment. Postcards bearing such imagery played a key role in supporting stereotypes created by the burgeoning Anglophone Caribbean tourism industry and these souvenirs formed a part of a visual economy that constituted an idea of Jamaica as imagined by its colonizers.
Two large works occupy the next gallery. In Anonymous, Leigh draws upon an 1882 photograph, titled The Wilde Woman of Aiken, depicting a Black woman seated at a table with an Edgefield face jug, an important example of early Black American material culture. The racist photograph was intended as a satire of Oscar Wilde and as a rejection of the poet’s aesthetic theory that anything can be beautiful. Leigh’s face jug is transposed nearby and enlarged to over 5 feet tall. Appended across the surface of the work are forms resembling cowrie shells the size and shape of the watermelons the artist uses as molds to generate them.
Sentinel, standing at the center of the rotunda gallery, references an important genre of African diasporic artwork called power objects, believed to possess inherent divine energy and knowledge. Leigh’s sculpture combines an elongated female form with an object traditionally used in fertility rituals. The work’s title, which denotes the act of watching over, casts the figure as an observant presence within the exhibition.
The sculpture Sharifa and the film Conspiracy are joined in a call and response in the Pavilion’s penultimate gallery. The film captures aspects of the sculpture’s making, and together, they expand on narratives of care, labor, and creation. Sculpted from life after the writer Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Sharifa is the first portrait made by Leigh. Along with artist Lorraine O’Grady, Rhodes-Pitts is also featured in the film Conspiracy, made collaboratively with filmmaker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich.
Conceived as a chorus of figures, the group of works assembled in the final gallery are crafted in ceramic and raffia, two materials that have long been central to Leigh’s practice. Clay forms the basis of most of Leigh’s artworks—including her bronzes, which are all first sculpted in clay—and the artist pushes the medium’s possibilities through scale and method. Taken together, the works in this room demonstrate Leigh’s continued use of forms and processes that have traditionally been gendered and that send up essentialist ideas of the Black femme body. The ICA is organizing Leigh’s first survey exhibition—including works from the U.S. Pavilion—and a major monograph to be presented in Boston in March 2023. Following its debut at the ICA, the exhibition will tour nationally 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.
A statement by U.S. Pavilion Co-Commissioners Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director, and Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, of the ICA/Boston can be found here.
Over the past two decades, Simone Leigh (b. 1967, Chicago, IL) has created an expansive body of work in sculpture, video, and performance 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 museums throughout the United States. The exhibition will be accompanied by the first comprehensive monograph dedicated to Leigh’s work.
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.
The 2022 U.S. Pavilion offers robust educational initiatives to engage students in the U.S. and Italy. The ICA has partnered with Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, on a two-semester long seminar to immerse students in the art and ideas of Simone Leigh, and introduce them to the history of the U.S. Pavilion and Leigh’s exhibition in Venice. In Italy, the ICA is working with the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice to organize a professional development program for middle and high school educators in the Veneto region. This workshop, modeled after the ICA’s nationally recognized teen arts education program, provides educators the tools to explore the work of Simone Leigh and create curriculum designed to inspire, empower, and educate their students. Learn more about these projects here: simoneleighvenice2022.org/partners.
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.
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 guggenheim-venice.it.
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 exchanges.state.gov/us.
Please visit the U.S. Pavilion’s website for more information about the artist, the ICA, and the Biennale Arte 2022: simoneleighvenice2022.org.
Polskin Arts & Communications Counselors, USPavilion@finnpartners.com
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.
Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca, Swinguerra, 2019. Two-channel video (color, sound; 21:16 minutes), dimensions variable. General Acquisition Fund, Fotene Demoulas and Tom Coté Art Acquisition Fund, and Anonymous Art Acquisition Fund. Courtesy the artists and Fortes D’aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. © Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca
(Boston, MA—February 8, 2022) On March 31, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) will open Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca: Swinguerra, a recent acquisition and room-filling, immersive video installation. Swinguerra (2019) is a 21-minute, two-channel video work that focuses on competitive dancers, including transgender and nonbinary performers, in queer communities of color on the outskirts of Recife, Brazil. This will be the first solo presentation of the installation in a U.S. museum since it premiered at the Brazil Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. Organized by Anni Pullagura, Curatorial Assistant, Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca: Swinguerra will be on view through September 5, 2022, concurrent with A Place for Me: Figurative Painting Now, which celebrates a new generation of artists at the vanguard of contemporary painting.
“We are excited to present Swinguerra for the first time since we acquired it for the ICA Collection,” said Jill Medvedow, the ICA’s Ellen Matilda Poss Director. “The dance and music performance is both exhilarating and a necessary perspective on contemporary Brazilian culture during a time of substantial social and political tension.”
Swinguerra features three contemporary dance styles—swingueira, brega funk, and passinho da maloca—as performed by three competitive dance groups. These mixed dance styles recall Brazil’s colonial and slave trade history, where music and dance functioned as discreet methods of organizing politically under oppressive regimes and in the wake of ongoing social and gender-based violence. The film, whose title fuses two words: swingueira, the dance style, and guerra, the Portuguese word for war or struggle, exceeds genres of documentary and fiction to forward a fluid, narrative experience of movement, choreography, and ideas of self-expression. Fast-paced, athletic, sexy, dreamlike, and aggressive, these dance styles make Swinguerra an exhilarating and unforgettable viewing experience, illustrating how dance and music offer rich sources of agency, resistance, and community.
Collaborating since 2011, Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca create works in video and installation that explore contemporary histories of underground dance and musical genres. Frequently made in collaboration with cinematographer Pedro Sotero, these moving-image works, which they refer to as “documentary musicals,” often center on the South Atlantic diaspora, from the Franco-Indo creole musical genre maloya to frevo dancers and brega singers. Constructing their films collaboratively with the performers, their approach merges the cinematic with the fictional, documentary, and ethnographic to address questions of surveillance, visibility, and creativity in an increasingly connected, postcolonial world.
“Swinguerra explores how these performers use dance and music to create spaces of representation and resistance within larger political systems. The artists’ practice is rooted in a philosophy of collaboration: they frequently work over several years on a project with both the subjects of their films and with colleagues. The collaborative nature of their work means they are very intentional about letting people speak and perform for themselves, foregrounding a celebration of self-possessed knowledge and agency,” said Pullagura.
Working collaboratively since 2011, Wagner & de Burca have shown in exhibitions, biennials and film festivals, including: the 33rd, 35th Panorama de Arte Brasileira, the 32nd São Paulo Biennial, the 20th Festival de Arte Contemporânea Sesc VideoBrasil (São Paulo, Brazil); the 36th EVA International (Limerick, Ireland); the 5th Skulptur Projekte (Münster, Germany); the 67th, 68th, 69th Berlin International Film Festival (Germany); and the 72nd Locarno International Film Festival (Switzerland). In 2020 they took part in Manifesta, the European Nomadic Biennial. In 2019, Wagner & de Burca represented Brazil at the 58th Venice Biennial and unveiled solo presentations at Jumex Museum (Mexico City, Mexico) and the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, Holland). Their work can be found in collections such as: ICA/Boston (Boston, USA), Kadist Art Foundation (France), Museu de Arte de São Paulo (Masp) and Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM) (São Paulo, Brazil), Pérez Art Museum, (Miami, USA), and Arts Council of Ireland, among others. The artists are represented by Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
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.
Credit
Swinguerra was acquired through the generosity of the General Acquisition Fund, Fotene and Tom Coté Art Acquisition Fund, and Anonymous Art Acquisition Fund.
Arcmanoro Niles, I Look Just Like My Mama With My Father’s Eyes (Can Time Heal The Guilty), 2021. Oil, acrylic, and glitter on canvas, 74 1/2 × 54 1/2 inches (189.2 × 138.4 cm). Promised gift of Fotene Demoulas and Tom Coté. Image courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London. Photo by Elisabeth Bernstein. © Arcmanoro Niles
David Antonio Cruz, canyoustaywithmetonight_causeyouarehere,youarehere,andweareherewithyou, 2021. Oil and latex on wood panels, 72 × 96 inches (182.9 × 243.8 cm) (overall). Courtesy the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago. © David Antonio Cru
Louis Fratino, My Meal, 2019. Oil on canvas, 43 × 47 inches (109.2 × 119.4 cm). Collection of Deborah and James Kern. Image courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. © Louis Fratino
Doron Langberg, Bather, 2021. Oil on canvas, 80 × 96 inches (203.2 × 243.8 cm). Gift of the Wilks Family. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London. Photo by Mel Taing. © Doron Langberg
Aubrey Levinthal, Egg Breakfast, 2020. Oil on panel, 24 × 18 inches (61 × 45.7 cm). Collection of Jill Porter and Stephen Larson. Image courtesy Monya Rowe Gallery, New York. © Aubrey Levinthal
Gisela McDaniel, Created for Such a Time as This, 2020. Oil on panel, plant and shell from subjects, resin, found object, and sound, 50 × 60 × 5 1/2 inches (127 × 152.4 × 14 cm). Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London. Photo by Clare Gatto. © Gisela McDaniel
Celeste Rapone, Pack Animals, 2021. Oil on canvas, 78 × 89 inches (198.1 × 226.1 cm). Courtesy the artist; Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago; Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen; and Josh Lilley, London. Image courtesy Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago. Photo by Nathan Keay. © Celeste Rapone
Ambera Wellmann, Strobe, 2021. Oil and mixed media on linen, 108 × 360 inches (274.3 × 914.4 cm). Courtesy the artist and Company Gallery, New York. © Ambera Wellmann
(Boston, MA—February 8, 2022) The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) presents A Place for Me: Figurative Painting Now, an exhibition that celebrates a new generation of artists at the vanguard of contemporary painting. David Antonio Cruz, Louis Fratino, Doron Langberg, Aubrey Levinthal, Gisela McDaniel, Arcmanoro Niles, Celeste Rapone, and Ambera Wellmann are leading figurative painting’s recent revival by depicting what they love—their friends, lovers, and family; studio spaces and homes; and the scenes that make up their everyday. Organized by Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Curator, with Anni Pullagura, Curatorial Assistant, A Place for Me: Figurative Painting Now will be on view March 31 through September 5, 2022, concurrent with Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca: Swinguerra.
Colorful, surprising, and full of life, A Place for Me is a testament to the vitality of contemporary figurative art, reflecting a multitude of styles and approaches to painting through a cross-section of contemporary painting today. Evoking intimacy, community, and the personal in the power to represent oneself in painting, these eight artists claim space for Black, Indigenous, brown, and queer life. Through their work, they consider the politics of seeing and being seen and how painting might register care, tenderness, empathy, and resilience. The exhibition features nearly 40 works arranged by artist.
“Portraiture has historically been a way that people in positions of power represent and memorialize their authority and positions within society,” said Jill Medvedow the ICA’s Ellen Matilda Poss Director. “A Place for Me presents an exuberant selection of paintings by an emerging generation of queer, female, and BIPOC artists and a multiplicity of perspectives on art and identity.”
“Over the last five to 10 years, there has been a remarkable reemergence of figurative painting with a new attention on who is depicted and who is being seen, and a desire through figurative painting to connect with contemporary experience,” said Erickson. “Shedding light on this, A Place for Me considers questions of identity and community and the diverse ways artists are addressing and exploring these themes through painting.”
David Antonio Cruz
David Antonio Cruz (b. 1974 in Philadelphia) is a Boston-based painter and mixed media performance artist who centers the experiences and agency of the Black, brown, and queer sitters who feature in his work. Drawn from life studies made of friends and acquaintances presented in richly varied compositions and palettes, Cruz’s paintings honor what he calls “the celebration of life, of being. Living in the moment and full of life.”
Louis Fratino
Louis Fratino (b. 1993 in Annapolis, MD) is a New York-based artist whose work fuses personal memories with art historical references to explore queerness in the gestures of everyday life. The subject matter of his paintings, sculptures, and prints ranges from nude figures to landscapes and still-lifes, through which he searches to represent visually the emotions and expressions of what he has called the “mysticism around painting, where you can manifest something through it, [whether] it’s something as simple as doing the dishes, or being in love with someone, or feeling close to your family.”
Doron Langberg
Doron Langberg (b. 1985 in Yokneam Moshava, Israel) is a New York-based painter invested in the relationship between queer lived experiences and emotional states that are universal across social categories. Touch, physicality, and movement are significant areas of focus in his vivid paintings, which include portraits of family and friends in his social circle. “I see my work as an aspirational space where queer experiences can embody more than just what they depict,” explains Langberg. “So, my paintings are both a ‘real’ reflection of my everyday experiences, and an alternate reality where queerness is allowed to be expansive and generative.”
Aubrey Levinthal
Aubrey Levinthal (b. 1986 in Philadelphia) is a Philadelphia-based painter whose work attends to the quotidian register of experience, what she calls the “uncanny in our everyday lives.” Her abstract figurative portraits are charged with an almost melancholic atmosphere, rendered in muted yet vibrant colors and a close attention to detail, evoking less a portrait of her subjects – which range from herself to those in her familial and social circles – than of their emotional states. As Levinthal explains, “I hope my work is a real, tender accounting of my particular visual life. The paintings can be inventive and distorted, as I often work from memory and through process, but I want them to carry resonance of my experience, which happens to be as a painter, woman, and mother.”
Gisela McDaniel
Gisela McDaniel (b. 1995 in Bellevue, NE) is a Detroit-based diasporic, Indigenous CHamoru artist. Her work, which engages primarily with processes of healing for womxn and non-binary people of color who have survived personal and historical trauma, is composed as mixed-media assemblages based in oil painting and found objects (often donated by her sitters) and accompanied by audio recordings she makes with her sitters during the painting process. “As survivors, we deal with the aftermath of events that remain with us for years and even lifetimes,” reflects the artist. “By recording the stories of these [womxn], I ensure that history hears their voices and recognizes them as having saved themselves.”
Arcmanoro Niles
Arcmanoro Niles (b. 1989 in Washington, D.C.) is a New York-based artist whose brightly hued paintings offer views of daily life, drawn from his own personal life and featuring characters as “seekers” who reflect subliminal urges and desires. Often incorporating reflective paints and glitter to enliven the surface of his canvases and those depicted, Niles’s intensely rendered compositions feature himself, friends, and family. “A lot of it is pretty intuitive, especially when it comes to the color, the construction of the composition, and how I want it to feel,” shares the artist. “But I think that, at the end of the day, I am a painter who is interested in color and stories that talk about who we are. Little moments that give us a glimpse into what life feels like.”
Celeste Rapone
Celeste Rapone (b. 1985 in Glen Ridge, NJ) is a Chicago-based abstract figurative painter known for illustrations of mostly women subjects—usually the artist herself—in outlandish, impossible, and even humorous compositions. Her style exceeds the traditional expectations and perspectival grounds of her canvas, drawing attention to the dynamic movement, colors, and details layered into her images meant to evoke a range of feelings from anxiety and restriction to vulnerable freedom and potential. “There’s something about the idea of the women contained, occupying these impossible positions anatomically, but also in terms of expectations, ambition, defeat and self-awareness,” shares the artist. “But even if there are sub-narratives occurring in [my] paintings, inherently they are all about trying. That notion of effort or expectation that goes into trying, which tries to counter failure. But failure is always one aspect of a larger cycle, in life and in painting.”
Ambera Wellmann
Ambera Wellmann (b. 1982 in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, Canada), a New York-based artist, explores themes of absurdity, familiarity, and uncertain intimacy in her paintings. Portraying human and, on occasion, animal bodies, commingled into numberless, genderless figures, Wellman’s paintings forgo a dominant, heteronormative Western figurative canon in favor of a distinctly feminist and queered perspective. Interested in visualizing the fluidity of gender and identity expression, Wellmann notes, “There’s this urge sometimes when you’re painting to answer things. I try to avoid that, actually. A painting should end with a question; it helps lead you to the next one.”
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.
Credit
Support for A Place for Me: Figurative Painting Now is generously provided by Katie and Paul Buttenwieser, Ellen Poss, Stephen Baker and Gavin Kennedy, Patrick Planeta and Santiago Varela, and an anonymous donor.
Napoleon Jones-Henderson, TCB, 1970. Wool. 72 x 48 inches (182.9 x 121.9 cm). Courtesy the artist. © Napoleon Jones-Henderson
(Boston, MA—January 25, 2022) On February 17, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) will open a solo museum presentation of the work of Napoleon Jones-Henderson (b. 1943, Chicago), the most comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s work in Boston to date. For more than 50 years, Jones-Henderson has created works that strive to highlight, celebrate, and empower the communities where he lives. The artist has been based since 1974 in Roxbury, Massachusetts, where he is an influential community member, educator, and mentor.
Organized by Jeffrey De Blois, the ICA’s Assistant Curator and Publications Manager, in close collaboration with the artist, Napoleon Jones-Henderson: I Am As I Am – A Man will be on view through July 24, 2022 and feature more than 20 works from the artist’s career, including a new work created for the exhibition. This shrine-like devotional sculpture from the artist’s series “Requiem for Our Ancestors” is dedicated to writer James Baldwin. As in other shrines by Jones-Henderson, it is inspired by vernacular architecture in the American South—specifically the modest one-room shacks he photographs in his travels throughout the South—and grounded in spiritual traditions of ancestor reverence.
Jones-Henderson is a longstanding founding member of African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists (AfriCOBRA), an artist collective that came together in Chicago in 1968. His work translates AfriCOBRA’s aesthetic principles—to create images inspired by the lived experience and cultures of people of the African diaspora in an accessible graphic style—into woven tapestries, mosaic tile works, shrine-like sculptures, varied works on paper, and wearable art made in collaboration with fellow AfriCOBRA artist Barbara Jones-Hogu. His kaleidoscopic works, often focused on themes of Pan-Africanism and racial justice, aim to be self-affirming and reflective, with an eye toward both a fraught past and a liberated future.
“The ICA’s presentation of Jones-Henderson’s work is an overdue opportunity for audiences to encounter influential works from the artist’s extensive career. AfriCOBRA is a critically important artist collective that helped shape the Black Arts Movement, and Jones-Henderson is one of the group’s most significant proponents. He has exhibited his artworks widely across the country and we are honored to present them here in Boston,” said Jill Medvedow, the ICA’s Ellen Matilda Poss Director.
Napoleon Jones-Henderson brings together a suite of major works from across the artist’s career—centered around his magisterial woven textiles—displaying the breadth of his practice and the singularity of his vision. In his work, the artist alludes to African and African American culture, integrating forms from African ritual sculpture and vernacular architecture from the American South, as well as reverential references to jazz musician Duke Ellington’s ‘Sacred Concerts,’ musicians Stevie Wonder and The Blind Boys of Alabama, and writers June Jordan and James Baldwin, among others. The exhibition includes a range of influential and rarely seen tapestries and enamel on copper works alongside drawings, prints, and collages on a variety of themes both personal and cultural, and a gallery dedicated to Jones-Henderson’s Requiem shrine works, encompassing altar-like sculptures dedicated to memorializing impactful events and cultural luminaries.
“Living and working in Boston since 1974, Jones-Henderson has had a longstanding influence on the city’s cultural landscape and beyond. The exhibition at the ICA is a great opportunity for audiences to explore and learn more about the work of this important artist, who has put his practice in service of themes of Black self-determination,” said De Blois.
Thursday, March 3, 7 PM
Jones-Henderson will be in conversation with De Blois. More information will be available soon on icaboston.org.
Born in 1943 in Chicago, Jones-Henderson attended the Sorbonne, Paris, holds a B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a M.F.A. from Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. As a member of AfriCOBRA, he was included in the collective’s first exhibition Ten in Search of a Nation at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1970, which was later presented at the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists in Roxbury and the University Art Gallery at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. More recently, his work was included in AfriCOBRA: Messages to the People at Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami in 2018, a portion of which traveled to Venice, Italy, as AfriCOBRA: Nation Time, an official Collateral Event of the 2019 Venice Biennale. Jones-Henderson has been awarded several public art commissions, including at the Bruce C. Bolling Municipal Building in Roxbury and Roxbury Community College. He is Executive Director of the Research Institute of African and African Diaspora Arts in Roxbury, Massachusetts, where he lives and works.
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.
Napoleon Jones-Henderson, TCB, 1970. Wool. 72 x 48 inches (182.9 x 121.9 cm). Courtesy the artist. © Napoleon Jones-Henderson
Arcmanoro Niles, Still Trying To Figure Out Forgiveness (So I Can Say This Is The Way That I Used To Be), 2020. Oil, acrylic, and glitter on canvas, 63 × 42 inches (160 × 106.7 cm). Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody. Image courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London. Photo by Stan Narten. © Arcmanoro Niles
Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca, Swinguerra, 2019. Two-channel video (color, sound; 21:16 minutes), dimensions variable. General Acquisition Fund, Fotene Demoulas and Tom Coté Art Acquisition Fund, and Anonymous Art Acquisition Fund. Courtesy the artists and Fortes D’aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. © Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca
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
Jordan Nassar, Al-Fasul Al-Arba’a (The Four Seasons), 2021. Hand-embroidered cotton on cotton, 17 1/2 × 40 1/2 inches (44.5 × 102.9 cm) (framed). Image courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York. © Jordan Nassar
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
(Boston, MA—November 16, 2021) The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) presents its advance schedule of exhibitions through 2023. Upcoming exhibitions include solo exhibitions of Napoleon Jones-Henderson, Jordan Nassar, Rose B. Simpson, and Guadalupe Maravilla, the exhilarating video installation Swinguerra by Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca, and a major thematic exhibition exploring the influence of childhood on the work of visual artists.
All exhibition dates are subject to change. For more information and to confirm schedule, please contact Margaux Leonard at mleonard@icaboston.org or 617-478-3176.
Napoleon Jones-Henderson
Feb 17, 2022–Jul 24, 2022
For more than fifty years, Napoleon Jones-Henderson (b. 1943 in Chicago) has created works that strive to highlight, celebrate, and empower the communities where he lives. Jones-Henderson is a longstanding founding member of the influential artist collective African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists (AfriCOBRA). His work translates AfriCOBRA’s aesthetic principles—to create images inspired by the lived experience and cultures of people of the African diaspora in an accessible graphic style with shining Kool-Aid colors—into woven tapestries, mosaic tile works, shrine-like sculptures, and varied works on paper. Often focused on themes of Pan-Africanism and racial justice, Jones-Henderson’s work aims to be self-affirming and reflective, with an eye toward both a fraught past and a liberated future. The artist integrates forms from African ritual sculpture and Southern vernacular architecture and incorporates reverential references to jazzman Duke Ellington’s “Sacred Concerts,” musician Stevie Wonder, and writer June Jordan, among others. Made in close collaboration with the artist, this concise survey draws together a suite of Jones-Henderson’s works in various media across his entire career, centered around his magisterial woven textiles. Jones-Henderson has been based since 1974 in Roxbury, Massachusetts, where he has been an influential community member, educator, and mentor. This is his most comprehensive solo museum exhibition in Boston. This exhibition is organized by Jeffrey De Blois, Assistant Curator and Publications Manager.
A Place for Me: Figurative Painting Now
Mar 31, 2022–Sep 5, 2022
A Place for Me celebrates a new generation of artists at the vanguard of contemporary painting. David Antonio Cruz (b. 1974 in Philadelphia), Louis Fratino (b. 1993 in Annapolis, MD), Doron Langberg (b. 1985 in Yokneam Moshava, Israel), Aubrey Levinthal (b. 1986 in Philadelphia), Gisela McDaniel (b. 1995 in Bellevue, NE), Arcmanoro Niles (b. 1989 in Washington, D.C.), Celeste Rapone (b. 1985 in Wayne, NJ), and Ambera Wellmann (b. 1982 in Lunenburg, Canada) are propelling figurative painting’s recent revival by depicting what they love—their friends, lovers, and family; studio spaces and homes; and the scenes that make up their everyday. Evoking intimacy, community, and the personal in the power to represent oneself in painting, these artists consider the politics of seeing and being seen and how the process of painting might register care, tenderness, fragility, empathy, and resilience. They have each developed unique approaches to representing others, approaching their sitters with the insights of their own subject positions and a wide range of painterly techniques. Colorful, surprising, and full of life, A Place for Me is a testament to the vitality of contemporary figurative art, reflecting a multitude of styles and approaches to painting through a cross-section of contemporary painting today. Organized by Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Curator, with Anni Pullagura, Curatorial Assistant.
Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca: Swinguerra
Mar 31, 2022–Sep 5, 2022
Collaborating since 2013, Bárbara Wagner (b. 1980 in Brasília, Brazil) and Benjamin de Burca (b. 1975 in Munich) create works in video, photography, and installation that explore contemporary histories of underground dance and musical genres. Frequently made in collaboration with cinematographer Pedro Sotero, their moving-image works (which the artists refer to as “documentary musicals”) often center on urban subcultures in the South Atlantic diaspora. A recent acquisition on view for the first time in Boston, Swinguerra (2019) focuses on queer communities of color in Recife, Brazil, with an emphasis on transgender and nonbinary performers. Their mixed dance styles recall Brazil’s colonial and slave trade history, where music and dance functioned as discreet methods of organizing politically under oppressive regimes. Fast-paced, athletic, sexy, dreamlike, and dynamic, Swinguerra is an exhilarating and unforgettable viewing experience, illustrating how dance and music offer rich sources of agency, resistance, and community. Organized by Anni Pullagura, Curatorial Assistant.
Rose B. Simpson
Aug 11, 2022–Jan 29, 2023
The art work of Rose B. Simpson (b. 1983 in Santa Clara Pueblo, NM) encompasses ceramic sculpture, metals, performance, installation, writing, and automobile design, offering poignant reflections on the human condition. Her figurative ceramic sculptures—for which she is best known—often incorporate metal, wood, leather, fabric, and found objects, and express complex 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 calls forth Indigenous knowledge and curative aspects of working with clay to heal generational trauma and foster an internalized notion of sustainability. An enrolled member of the Pueblo of Santa Clara, New Mexico, Simpson draws on processes of producing clay pottery in practice since the 6th century, connecting tradition and knowledge with her own place in the world today. From intimately scaled works, to monumental standing figures, this tightly conceived exhibition will feature a presentation of the artist’s signature ceramic sculptures alongside new works. Organized by Jeffrey De Blois, Assistant Curator and Publications Manager.
Jordan Nassar
Aug 11, 2022–Jan 29, 2023
Jordan Nassar’s solo exhibition—his first in Boston—presents a selection of his intricate embroidered and mixed media works. Nassar (b. 1985 in New York) draws on traditional Palestinian craft techniques to investigate ideas of home, land, and memory. His work, which he creates in collaboration with Palestinian embroiders and craftspersons, combines geometric patterns with abstracted landscapes, imbued, in the artist’s words, “with yearning, while hopeful and beautiful.” Through complex patterning and a unique attendance to form and color, the painterly aesthetic of Nassar’s embroidery allows the artist to explore relationships between craft and history in new contemporary dialogues. Organized by Anni Pullagura, Curatorial Assistant.
To Begin Again: Artists and Childhood
Oct 6, 2022–Feb 26, 2023
To Begin Again: Artists and Childhood surveys how artists have reflected on and contributed to notions of childhood from the early twentieth-century to the present. Bringing together an international and intergenerational group of approximately thirty artists working from the early 20th-century to today, the exhibition takes as a starting point how artists have long been inspired by children—by their imagination, creativity, and unique ways of seeing and being in the world. Artists have made artwork that depicts and involves children as collaborators, that represents or mimics their ways of drawing or telling stories, that highlights their unique cultures, and that addresses ideas of innocence and spontaneity closely associated with children. 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 early human development. 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. Artists included are Njideka Akunyili Crosby (b. 1983 in Enugu, Nigeria), Jordan Casteel (b. 1989 in Denver), Henry Darger (b. 1892 in Chicago; d. 1973 in Chicago), Karon Davis (b. 1977 in Reno, NV), Mary Kelly (b. 1941 in Fort Dodge, IA), Paul Klee (b. 1879 in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland; d. 1940 in Muralto, Switzerland), Tau Lewis (b. 1993 in Toronto), Oscar Murillo (b. 1986 in Valle del Cauca, Colombia), Rivane Neuenschwander (b. 1967 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil), Faith Ringgold (b. 1930 in Harlem), Sable Elyse Smith (b. 1986 in Los Angeles), Mierle Laderman Ukeles (b. 1939 in Denver), and Cathy Wilkes (b. 1966 in Belfast, United Kingdom), among others. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated scholarly catalogue, featuring the voices and perspectives of a variety of artists, scholars, and writers. Organized by Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Curator, with Jeffrey De Blois, Assistant Curator and Publications Manager.
Barbara Kruger
Nov 5, 2022—Jan 21, 2024
For more than 40 years, Barbara Kruger (b. 1945 in Newark, NJ) has been a consistent, critical observer of contemporary culture. In the early 1980s, Kruger perfected a signature style of words and images extracted from mass media and recomposed into memorable, graphic artworks. Her iconic works, such as Untitled (I shop therefore I am), 1987, and Untitled (Your body is a battleground), 1989, combine cropped, black-and-white photographic images with provocative short texts printed on solid-colored bars. Often these works address viewers directly with personal pronouns—like “you” and “me”—while confounding clear notions of who is speaking. Kruger’s prodigious work has come to represent debates on women’s rights, identity, consumerism, and capitalism raging since the 80s. Rigorously composed, her works have occupied a range of media and spaces, including walls, billboards, video projections, and an array of consumer products. Since the 1990s, Kruger has also created large-scale installations of her text-based art, transforming lobbies, elevators, and buildings with her signature aesthetic and pointed content. Continuing in this vein, Kruger will create a brand-new work for the ICA that speaks, as her work has done for more than four decades, to contemporary social and political dynamics. Organized by Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Curator.
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.
A Place for Me: Contemporary Figurative Painting
Support is generously provided by Katie and Paul Buttenwieser and Ellen Poss, and an Anonymous donor.
Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca: Swinguerra
Swinguerra was acquired through the generosity of the General Acquisition Fund, Fotene and Tom Coté Art Acquisition Fund, and Anonymous Art Acquisition Fund.
Simone Leigh, 2021. Courtesy the artist. Photo by Shaniqwa Jarvis. Artworks © Simone Leigh
(Boston MA—November 4, 2021) The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) in cooperation with the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, is pleased to announce the launch of a new website dedicated to internationally renowned artist Simone Leigh and her exhibition at the forthcoming Venice Biennale. Leigh will represent the U.S. at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, on view from April 23 to November 27, 2022. The 2022 U.S. Pavilion is co-commissioned by Jill Medvedow, the Ellen Matilda Poss Director, and Eva Respini, the Barbara Lee Chief Curator at the ICA, and curated by Respini.
For the U.S. Pavilion, Leigh has created a new series of figurative sculptures in bronze and ceramic that furthers her commitment to highlighting the labor and resilience of Black women across global histories. Drawing upon artistic traditions from within Africa and the African diaspora, Leigh uses a strategy that she terms “the creolization of form,” merging disparate cultural languages linked through histories of colonization. With these works, Leigh weaves together references to 19th century West African art, the material culture of early Black Americans, and the colonial history of international expositions.
The new website features a short video of the artist at work by acclaimed visual creator Shaniqwa Jarvis. The video offers a brief glimpse behind-the-scenes as Leigh creates new artworks for the Biennale.
The website also offers an overview of the robust educational initiatives that accompany the 2022 U.S. Pavilion. The ICA has partnered with Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, on a two-semester long seminar to engage students with Leigh’s practice and the history of the U.S. Pavilion in Venice. In Italy, the ICA is working with the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice to organize a professional development program for middle and high school educators in the Veneto region. This workshop, modeled after the ICA’s nationally recognized teen arts education program, provides educators the tools to explore the work of Simone Leigh and create curriculum designed to inspire, empower, and educate their students.
Please visit the U.S. Pavilion’s newly launched website for more information about the artist, the ICA, and the Biennale Arte: www.simoneleighvenice2022.org
To stay updated on the 2022 U.S. Pavilion on social media, follow @icaboston on Instagram, @ICA.Boston on Facebook, and @ICAinBoston on Twitter and look for the hashtags: #SimoneLeighVenice #SimoneLeigh #BiennaleArte2022.
Over the past two decades, Simone Leigh (b. 1967, Chicago, IL) has created an expansive body of work in sculpture, video, and performance 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 museums throughout the United States. The exhibition will be accompanied by the first comprehensive monograph dedicated to Leigh’s work.
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.
Established in 1895, La Biennale di Venezia is acknowledged today as one of the most prestigiuos 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.
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’s 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/
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
The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston
Colette Randall, crandall@icaboston.org, 617-478-3181
Margaux Leonard, mleonard@icaboston.org, 617-478-3176
Polskin Arts & Communications Counselors
Alison Buchbinder, alison.buchbinder@finnpartners.com, 646-688-7826
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 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; Kristen and Kent Lucken; Tristin and Martin Mannion; Ted Pappendick and Erica Gervais Pappendick; Gina and Stuart Peterson; and VIA Art Fund.
Essential support is also provided by Suzanne Deal Booth; Kate and Chuck Brizius; Karen and Brian Conway; Steven Corkin and Dan Maddalena; 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; Cindy and Howard Rachofsky; Mark and Marie Schwartz; Kim Sinatra; Tobias and Kristin Welo; Lise and Jeffrey Wilks; Kelly Williams and Andrew Forsyth; Nicole Zatlyn and Jason Weiner; Marilyn Lyng and Dan O’Connell; Leslie Riedel and Scott Friend; Eunhak Bae and Robert Kwak; Barbara H. Lloyd; and anonymous donors.
Deana Lawson, Hair Advertisement, 2005. Pigment print. Courtesy the artist; Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; and David Kordansky, Los Angeles. © Deana Lawson
Nationally touring exhibition will open at the ICA in November 2021 and travel to MoMA PS1 and the High Museum of Art in 2022
(Boston, MA—October 8, 2021) The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) and MoMA PS1 have co-organized the first museum survey dedicated to the work of Deana Lawson (b. 1979, Rochester, NY), a singular voice in photography today. Drawing on a wide spectrum of photographic languages, including the family album, studio portraiture, staged tableaux, and appropriated images, Lawson’s posed photographs channel broader ideas about personal and social histories, sexuality, and spiritual beliefs. Featuring a selection of over fifty photographs from 2004 to the present, this exhibition features the full range of Lawson’s career to date and establishes for the first time a narrative arc of her expansive vision. This nationally touring exhibition will be on view November 4, 2021–February 27, 2022 at the ICA; April 14–September 5, 2022 at MoMA PS1; and October 7, 2022–February 19, 2023 at the High Museum of Art. Deana Lawson is co-organized by ICA/Boston and MoMA PS1. Organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, ICA/Boston, and Peter Eleey, Curator-at-Large, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing and Shanghai, with Anni Pullagura, Curatorial Assistant, ICA/Boston.
“With a painterly appreciation of composition, color, and scale, Deana Lawson creates works of intimacy, atmosphere and mystery. Her domestic scenes evoke the familiarity of family photographs, yet each work is a highly-staged arrangement exploring facets of Black life. Lawson tackles complex issues about race and photography that are timely, thorny, and essential. We look forward to sharing her work, and the important publication that accompanies the exhibition, with audiences,” said Jill Medvedow, the ICA’s Ellen Matilda Poss Director.
“Singular in their vision, profoundly complex in their ideas, Deana Lawson’s pictures possess an intimacy and immediacy that can be both uplifting and startling. Enriched by a range of backstories—photographic histories, feminist histories, Black histories—Lawson’s work is also informed by her life experiences, pop culture, her interest in both spirituality and photographic technology. In occupying a space of multiplicity and ambiguity, this relentlessly adventurous artist has produced some of the most resonant images of our time,” said Eva Respini, the ICA’s Barbara Lee Chief Curator.
Lawson’s pictures are portals to imaginative realms, highly staged, large-format color photographs that depict individuals, couples, and groups in both domestic and public settings, constructing narratives of family, love, intimacy, and desire. Her body of work models a mythical community from across the African and African American diasporas, building an extended family of strangers in living rooms, kitchens and back yards from Brooklyn to New Orleans, Haiti to Ethiopia, and Brazil to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Rather than creating documentary or biographical pictures, Lawson makes images that tell stories to reclaim an expansive Black experience.
“Much of Lawson’s work comes to life in the space between the truth presumed in a photograph and the art of making one, which in her hands becomes a vast and magical universe,” said exhibition co-curator Peter Eleey. “Though revelatory, Lawson’s pictures also draw attention to what the camera cannot capture—and in turn, to the many aspects of Black life that exceed forms of representation that establish and control the ways in which Black subjects are permitted to appear.”
The camera has a long history as a tool of objectification and subjugation, and Lawson uses photography to unsettle assumptions about the facts the medium purports to deliver. She carefully composes each scene, but does not always disclose details about how she has created them, or even where the photographs were taken; in some cases, she works with found images that depict people she does not know. Her tableaux tend to be composed of people she encounters on her travels rather than family, friends, or acquaintances; despite what certain pictures may suggest, some of the artist’s subjects may not have met before the shoot. Lawson finds photography’s contradictions and fraught history to be perfectly suited to the challenges of representing what she describes as “the majesty of Black life, a nuanced Black life, one that is by far more complex, deep, beautiful, celebratory, tragic, weird, strange.”
Deana Lawson (b. 1979, Rochester, NY) lives and works between New York and Los Angeles. Lawson received her B.F.A. from Pennsylvania State University (2001) and M.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design (2004). Lawson is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2013), Aaron Siskind Fellowship Grant (2008–09), and a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant (2006), among others. In 2020, she was selected for the Hugo Boss Prize, the first photographer to receive the award in recognition of achievement in contemporary art. She is currently the inaugural Dorothy Krauklis ’78 Professor of Visual Arts with the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University.
This survey exhibition will be accompanied by the first scholarly publication on the artist, surveying fifteen years of her photography. Featuring the voices and perspectives of a variety of scholars, historians, and writers, the catalogue includes essays by exhibition curators Eva Respini and Peter Eleey, Kimberly Juanita Brown, Tina M. Campt, Alexander Nemerov, Greg Tate, and a conversation between the artist and Deborah Willis.
In the process of organizing the exhibition, the ICA convened an advisory group of community leaders, artists, scholars, and peers who contributed to the presentation of this exhibition in Boston and helped to shape exhibition programming, didactics, and outreach. The committee was made up of the following individuals: Eden Bekele, Digital Associate at PICTURESTART; Kimberly Juanita Brown, Associate Professor, Department of English, Dartmouth College; Patricia Davis, Associate Professor, College of Arts, Media, and Design, Northeastern University; Nia Evans, Director, Boston Ujima Project; L’Merchie Frazier, Director of Education, Museum of African American History, Boston; Kai Grant, Principal, Afrikai, LLC, and Chief Curator, Black Market Nubian; Nikki Greene, Assistant Professor of Art, Wellesley College; Dell Hamilton, artist; James Pierre, artist and educator; Lisa Simmons, Director, Roxbury International Film Festival; President/Founder, the Color of Film Collaborative, Inc.; and Community Initiative Program Manager, Mass Cultural Council; and Akili Tommasino, Associate Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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 at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Deana Lawson is co-organized by ICA/Boston and MoMA PS1. This exhibition is organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, ICA/Boston, and Peter Eleey, Curator-at-Large, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing and Shanghai, with Anni Pullagura, Curatorial Assistant, ICA/Boston.
Major support for Deana Lawson is provided by the Henry Luce Foundation and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Additional support for the ICA/Boston presentation is generously provided by Bridgitt and Bruce Evans, Aedie McEvoy, Kambiz and Nazgol Shahbazi, Kim Sinatra, Charlotte and Herbert S. Wagner III, the Fotene Demoulas Fund for Curatorial Research and Publications, the Jennifer Epstein Fund for Women Artists, and The Kristen and Kent Lucken Fund for Photography.
Yayoi Kusama, LOVE IS CALLING, 2013. Wood, metal, mirrored glass, vinyl, ceramic tile, acrylic panel, blowers, lighting elements, speakers, and sound, 174 1/2 x 340 5/8 x 239 3/8 inches (443 x 865 x 608 cm). Acquired through the generosity of Barbara Lee/The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women; Fotene Demoulas and Tom Coté; Hilary and Geoffrey Grove; Vivien and Alan Hassenfeld; Jodi and Hal Hess; Barbara H. Lloyd; and an anonymous donor. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York; Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/Singapore/Shanghai; Victoria Miro, London/Venice. Photo by Ernesto Galan. © YAYOI KUSAMA
(Boston, MA—September 21, 2021) The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) will reopen Yayoi Kusama’s LOVE IS CALLING to the public on October 16, 2021. One of the most beloved and popular works in the ICA’s collection, LOVE IS CALLING is among the most immersive of the artist’s existing Infinity Mirror Rooms. It will be featured as a cornerstone of the exhibition The Worlds We Make: Selections from the ICA Collection, on view through December 31, 2022. Advance timed tickets are required and can be reserved at icaboston.org/tickets. Tickets are limited and are on sale now for ICA members. Tickets will go on sale to the general public on September 28.
“We are so happy to be able to offer audiences the ability to experience this beloved artwork from our collection and once again share Kusama’s universal message of love and human connection,” said Jill Medvedow, the ICA’s Ellen Matilda Poss Director.
A mirrored landscape, sculptural environment, and unique experience, LOVE IS CALLING immerses visitors within Kusama’s groundbreaking visualization of infinity, a concept the artist understands as the potential for dissolving one’s place in the universe to become connected to others—remaking the world we know through the invitation to dream another.
LOVE IS CALLING illustrates a central idea within the exhibition The Worlds We Make: Selections from the ICA Collection. Including works by artists such as Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Jeffrey Gibson, Lorraine O’Grady, Matthew Ritchie, and Yinka Shonibare CBE (RA), the exhibition celebrates the world-making potential of artistic imagination. The Worlds We Make is organized by Anni Pullagura, Curatorial Assistant.
Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929, Matsumoto, Japan) is one of the most recognized and celebrated artists today. In addition to her widely popular Infinity Mirror Rooms, Kusama creates vibrant paintings, works on paper, and sculpture with abstract imagery. LOVE IS CALLING features vividly colored, tentacle-like, inflatable sculptures covered with the artist’s signature polka dots and encased in a dark mirrored room to create an illusion of infinite space. As visitors walk throughout the installation, a sound recording of Kusama reciting a love poem in Japanese plays continuously. Written by the artist, the poem’s title translates to Residing in a Castle of Shed Tears in English. Exploring enduring themes including life and death, the poem poignantly expresses Kusama’s hope to spread a universal message of love through her art. The largest of Kusama’s existing Infinity Mirror Rooms, LOVE IS CALLING is the first one held in the permanent collection of a New England museum.
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.
Eben Haines, Facades, 2021. Installation view, The 2021 James and Audrey Foster Prize, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, 2021–22. Photo by Mel Taing.
Dell Marie Hamilton, The End of Susan, The End of Everything, 2021. Installation view, The 2021 James and Audrey Foster Prize, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, 2021–22. Photo by Mel Taing.
Marlon Forrester, If Black Saints Could Fly 23, 2021. Installation view, The 2021 James and Audrey Foster Prize, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, 2021–22. Photo by Mel Taing.
(Boston, MA—August 12, 2021) The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) presents the 2021 James and Audrey Foster Prize exhibition with major works on view from Boston-area artists Marlon Forrester (b. 1976, Georgetown, Guyana), Eben Haines (b. 1990, Boston), and Dell Marie Hamilton (b. 1971, New York). This group of artists works in a diversity of media, including collage, painting, performance, photography, sculpture, and installation, with unique artistic practices that share the impulse to explore questions of identity and history in the present to create connections with others and articulate their place in the world. On view September 1, 2021 through January 30, 2022, this exhibition is organized by Jeffrey De Blois, Assistant Curator and Publications Manager.
“We are grateful to Jim and Audrey Foster for their generous support which allows the museum the time and resources for the research and presentation of this important biennial exhibition,” said Jill Medvedow, the Ellen Matilda Poss Director of the ICA. “The works of Marlon Forrester, Eben Haines, and Dell Marie Hamilton help illuminate ways forward—and the need for community—in our complex time.”
“The 2021 Foster Prize artists illustrate the creativity, vitality, and expertise of Boston’s artistic community,” the Fosters added. “We congratulate Marlon, Eben, and Dell on this well-deserved achievement and look forward to seeing their work shared with all visitors to the ICA.”
This year’s iteration of the Foster Prize is the result of research made through sustained and ongoing conversations with artists and art workers about their perspectives on the cultural fabric of the city and the different institutions and histories that continue to inform artists working locally. The individual projects composing the 2021 James and Audrey Foster Prize exhibition draw on these perspectives to explore themes of memory, appropriation, inequity, and exchange, as well as intergenerational artistic legacies unique to Boston.
First established in 1999, the James and Audrey Foster Prize is key to the ICA’s efforts to support artists working in and around Boston, showcase exceptional artwork, and support the city’s thriving arts scene.
The exhibition begins with Marlon Forrester’s If Black Saints Could Fly 23: si volare posset nigra XXIII sanctorum, a new cycle of monumental paintings that begins with associations between ideas of flight, resistance, and freedom in the legend of Flying Africans, popular folktales about enslaved Africans harnessing the power of flight to return home. Forrester’s approach is framed conceptually by his notion of “psychic homeland,” his multilayered sense of identity, belonging, and disequilibrium as a Guyanese American of the Caribbean diaspora. Each painting in the cycle features a frontally posed figure rendered with graphic flatness over an intricate allover pattern (which is made from the geometric shapes found on basketball courts). These figures take their iconic poses and trappings of saints and biblical figures largely from sculptures that decorate the ornate portals on the Cathedral of Our Lady of Chartres in France. Beyond replacing conventionally white figures with those historically denied such veneration, he subverts these very traditions by incorporating a multiplicity of overlapping cultural influences. The complexity of experience inscribed in each painting aims to counter historical exclusions and marginalization by centering the Black male body as a site of celebration, commemoration, and transformation.
The next gallery presents Eben Haines’s Facades, a sculptural stage set built to display works that take up different notions of shelter as necessity or commodity. The set evokes forms of New England architecture, such as the gable roof, with distressed walls that call to mind the rooms of lived-in homes fallen into disrepair. In one section, natural or supernatural phenomena recur across paintings of New England landscapes, at times presented on or in domestic furniture. In another section, representations of Roman portrait busts—such as the Forbes Augustus or the Nelson Head in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston—stand in for the corrupting force of unchecked power. Candles, either burning in paintings or recently extinguished on wall fixtures, appear to signal that time is running out, or that we are on borrowed time. Born out of ideas refined through Shelter In Place Gallery, a scale model gallery that has featured local artists throughout the pandemic, Facades is an imaginary interior space where illusion is a means for challenging structures of power and exclusion.
The final gallery presents Dell Marie Hamilton’s The End of Susan, The End of Everything, a multimedia installation encompassing Hamilton’s work with hundreds of possessions of the late art historian, Susan Denker, a longtime faculty member at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. When Denker passed away unexpectedly in 2016, Hamilton inherited her friend and mentor’s many belongings. A room-filling work in three sections, The End of Susan, The End of Everything is modeled on the living room, study, and bedroom of Denker’s former Cambridge apartment. The installation—which aims to “map the unmappable,” according to the artist—enacts a creative exchange between the two individuals pointed at making a layered portrait of Denker rooted in their relationship, Hamilton’s own history and lived experience, and, frequently, her body. By engaging with the complex and innumerable material traces of Denker’s life and using her own body as a medium, Hamilton attempts to answer the question: How do we make meaning out of what is left behind after someone dies?
Marlon Forrester (b. 1976, Georgetown, Guyana) is an artist and educator whose artworks take the representations and uses of the Black male body as a central concern. Forrester’s work explores ideas of ritual and transformation, often through themes and motifs drawn from basketball culture. Following an influential return visit to Guyana, Forrester’s work increasingly examines the instability of identity and complex ideas of homeland for individuals of the Caribbean diaspora. Forrester holds a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and an MFA from Yale University. Forrester holds a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and a MFA from Yale University. He is a resident artist at the African-American Master Artist Residence Program (AAMARP) at Northeastern University. His work has been exhibited at such venues as University Hall Gallery, UMass Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate, Boston; the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art, Harvard University; 808 Gallery, Boston University; Ajira, a Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, NJ; Montserrat College of Art Gallery, Beverly, MA; and the Museum of the National Center for Afro American Artists, Roxbury.
Eben Haines (b. 1990, Boston) investigates the life of objects and their contexts through works that challenge the authority of history by emphasizing its constructed nature. Haines employs various techniques and materials to suggest the passage of time, volatility, and degradation. Many works explore the conventions of portraiture, picturing lone, unidentifiable sitters against cinematic backdrops or in otherworldly scenes. Recent works consider themes of housing and access to art during the pandemic, especially his project Shelter In Place Gallery, an artist-run, 1:12 scale model gallery. Haines holds a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. His work has been shown at such venues as 13forest Gallery, Arlington, MA; AREA Gallery, Boston; Aviary Gallery, Jamaica Plain; Boston Center for the Arts; and Grin Gallery, Providence. In 2018, Haines received a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship in Drawing. Shelter In Place Gallery received a Transformative Public Art grant from the City of Boston Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture and the original model was recently acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Dell Marie Hamilton (b. 1971, New York) is a multidisciplinary artist, independent curator, and archivist who uses the body—often her own—to investigate themes of memory, gender, and history. With roots in Central America and the Caribbean, Hamilton’s work frequently draws upon the personal experiences of her family as well as the folkloric traditions and histories of that region. Hamilton holds a BA in journalism from Northeastern University and a MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She has frequently presented her work at venues around New England, including Stone Gallery, Boston University; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; and Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, where she became the first visual artist to present a performance artwork in their galleries. Her most recent curatorial project, Nine Moments for Now, which was presented at the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art at Harvard, was ranked by Hyperallergic as one of 2018’s top 20 exhibitions in the U.S. In 2019, she presented work in the 13th Havana Biennial in Matanzas, Cuba. Along with her collaborator, Magda Fernandez, Hamilton is part of the U.S. Latinx Art Forum’s 2021 inaugural cohort of recipients of the Charla Fund, a Ford Foundation-sponsored initiative that provides grants to Latinx artists. A frequent performer in the work of María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Hamilton appears in Campos-Pons’s collaborative performance When We Gather, which includes poetry and choreography from artists LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs and Okwui Okpokwasili. She is currently at work on a variety of research and curatorial projects at Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.
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.
The 2021 James and Audrey Foster Prize exhibition and prize are generously endowed by James and Audrey Foster.