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Presentation features hanging sculptures from the artist’s Be Dammed series

(Boston, MA – November 14, 2019) The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) presents a solo exhibition of Los Angeles-based artist Carolina Caycedo (b. 1978 in London, UK). Through a variety of mediums including sculpture, performance, drawing, and video, Caycedo’s artwork investigates vital questions related to asymmetrical power relations, dispossession, extraction of resources, and environmental justice. The ICA will present the culmination of Caycedo’s Cosmotarrayas, a series of hanging sculptures assembled with handmade fishing nets and other objects collected during field research in different riverine communities affected by the privatization of waterways. On view January 20 through July 12, 2020, Carolina Caycedo: Cosmotarrayas is organized by Jeffrey De Blois, Assistant Curator and Publications Manager.

The Cosmotarrayas are part of an ongoing project started in 2012 titled Be Dammed that has examined the wide-reaching impacts of dams built along waterways by transnational corporations, particularly those in Latin American countries such as Brazil or Colombia (where Caycedo was raised and frequently returns). Powerful objects borne out of extensive fieldwork in communities on “the front lines of environmental justice,” as she says, each Cosmotarraya is intimately linked to specific people, rivers, traditions, and cultures. As such, the Cosmotarrayas demonstrate the meaningful connectivity and exchange at the heart of Caycedo’s practice, as many of the nets and other objects were entrusted to her by individuals no longer able to use them. At the same time, they also represent the dispossession of these individuals and their continued resistance to corporations and governments seeking to control the flow of water and thus their way of life.

“For Caycedo, the material qualities of the fishing net—porous, malleable, and woven by hand—offer a potent counterpoint to the immovable, destructive architecture of the dam. The Cosmotarrayas embody a form of resistance that simultaneously raises our consciousness about land, history, and culture,” said De Blois.

About the artist

Caycedo was born in London in 1978. She received a M.F.A. from Roski School of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and a B.F.A. from Los Andes University, Bogotá, Colombia. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally with recent exhibitions at venues such as Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tufts University Art Galleries, Medford, MA; Banff Center for Arts and Creativity, Alberta, Canada; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Nottingham Contemporary, UK; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Nuevo Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Guatemala; Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles; and Espacio Odeon, Bogotá, among others. Her work has been included in several major recurring group exhibitions, including the 2018 edition of Made in L.A. at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the 2016 Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil; the 2014 Berlin Biennale; the 2009 New Museum Triennial, New York; the 2006 Whitney Biennial, New York; and the 2003 Venice Biennale, Italy.

About the ICA

Since its founding in 1936, the ICA has shared the pleasures of reflection, inspiration, imagination, and provocation that contemporary art offers with its audiences. A museum at the intersection of contemporary art and civic life, the ICA has advanced a bold vision for amplifying the artist’s voice and augmenting art’s role as educator, incubator, and convener for social engagement. Its innovative exhibitions, performances, and educational programs provide access to contemporary art, artists, and the creative process, inviting audiences of all ages and backgrounds to participate in the excitement of new art and ideas. Spanning two locations across Boston Harbor, the ICA offers year-round programming at its iconic building in Boston’s Seaport and seasonal programming (May-September) at the Watershed in an East Boston shipyard.

 The ICA is located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA, 02210. The Watershed is located at 256 Marginal Street, East Boston, MA 02128. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at icaboston.org. Follow the ICA at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Acknowledgements

Carolina Caycedo: Cosmotarrayas is presented by Max Mara.

 

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First Boston presentation and largest
exhibition to date of Tschabalala Self’s work

(Boston, MA – November 13, 2019) On January 20, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens Tschabalala Self: Out of Body, the first Boston presentation and largest exhibition to date of New Haven-based artist Tschabalala Self (b. 1990 in Harlem, NY). Self is at the forefront of a generation of young artists who are advancing new modes of figurative painting that center African American selfhood and intersectional identities. Her large-scale figurative paintings integrate hand-printed and found textiles, drawing, printmaking, sewing, and collage techniques to tell stories of black metropolitan life, the body, and humanity. Tschabalala Self: Out of Body features a selection of Self’s recent painting and sculptures—including new works made for the exhibition. On view through July 12, 2020, this exhibition is organized by Ellen Tani, former Assistant Curator at the ICA, and currently coordinated by Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Curator.

Self’s work is rooted in her own experience growing up in Harlem in a female-dominated family, yet her work also traverses diverse artistic and craft traditions. Her expressive, figurative painting practice employs eclectic materials and techniques—like hand-printed and found textiles, stitching, paper, and painted fabric—in service of characters that possess an ordinary grace grounded in reality.

Tschabalala Self: Out of Body features artworks that represent singular figures, couplings, and everyday social exchanges inspired by black metropolitan life. Together, they articulate forms of embodiment and expressions of humanity through exaggerated forms and exuberant textures, pointing to the human figure’s limitless capacity to represent imagined states, memories, aspirations, and emotions. Magnificent and coded, mysterious and often humorous, Self’s characters are reflections of the artist or people she can imagine meeting in Harlem, her hometown.

About the artist

Tschabalala Self was born in Harlem, New York in 1990, and lives and works in New Haven and New York. She received her MFA in painting/printmaking from the Yale School of Art (2015), and her BA in Studio Arts from Bard College (2012). Recent solo exhibitions include the Frye Museum, Seattle (2019); the Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2018); and Parasol Unit for Contemporary Art, London (2017).

About the ICA

Since its founding in 1936, the ICA has shared the pleasures of reflection, inspiration, imagination, and provocation that contemporary art offers with its audiences. A museum at the intersection of contemporary art and civic life, the ICA has advanced a bold vision for amplifying the artist’s voice and augmenting art’s role as educator, incubator, and convener for social engagement. Its innovative exhibitions, performances, and educational programs provide access to contemporary art, artists, and the creative process, inviting audiences of all ages and backgrounds to participate in the excitement of new art and ideas. Spanning two locations across Boston Harbor, the ICA offers year-round programming at its iconic building in Boston’s Seaport and seasonal programming (May-September) at the Watershed in an East Boston shipyard.

 The ICA is located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA, 02210. The Watershed is located at 256 Marginal Street, East Boston, MA 02128. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at icaboston.org. Follow the ICA at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Acknowledgments

Tschabalala Self: Out of Body is presented by Max Mara. 

Max Mara logo

This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

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Additional support is generously provided by Fotene Demoulas and Tom Coté, Ted Pappendick and Erica Gervais Pappendick, The Coby Foundation, Ltd, and the Jennifer Epstein Fund for Women Artists.
 

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Schedule includes a community-based project by Boston-based artist Anthony Romero; a deep dive into art and poetry featuring writers from Mass Poetry; and Suitcase Stories Unpacked, an ICA Forum presented in partnership with the International Institute of New England

(Boston, MA—October 18, 2019) On October 23, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art, a significant and timely exhibition that explores how contemporary artists are responding to the migration, immigration, and displacement of peoples today, in works ranging from personal accounts to poetic meditations. A robust schedule of exhibition-related programming—including artist and curator talks, performance events, community gatherings, film screenings, and family programs—accompany the ICA’s presentation of When Home Won’t Let You Stay. See icaboston.org for more information.

Artist project

The ICA invited Boston-based artist, organizer, and educator Anthony Romero to create …first in thought, then in action, a project that expands ideas, questions, and provocations beyond the museum’s walls. Romero has developed the project over the past year, with a focus on East Boston, organizing a series of listening sessions and community gatherings to collect local histories of activism, migration, and displacement from East Boston perspectives. At the ICA, he premieres a new sculpture and sound piece as well as a corresponding series of public talks, conversations, and performances with local organizers and community members that touch on gentrification, housing, and displacement.

…first in thought, then in action: Stable Ground: Anti-Displacement Lab with NuLawLab of Northeastern University School of Law
Thu, Nov 14, 6–7:30 PM
Sat, Jan 11, 2–3:30 PM
Throughout Boston, property (re)development is transforming neighborhoods, contributing to displacement of long-term residents, and exacerbating housing insecurity. Additionally, a lack of transparency around planning and development processes means that few area residents are able to participate effectively in the public development review process run by the Boston Planning & Development Agency. This interactive and entertaining training aims to provide local residents with the knowledge, resources, and skills to ensure that their voices are heard in formal neighborhood and city planning. Come to a learning session and help build a civic education strategy for Boston at the same time.

…first in thought, then in action: Teens Perform
Sun, Dec 1, 2–3 PM
Join us for an afternoon of musical performances by East Boston Teens. The event is produced by ICA teens in collaboration with ZUMIX, an East Boston-based nonprofit organization dedicated to building community through music and creative technology.

…first in thought, then in action: East Boston Perspectives on Immigration
Thu, Dec 19, 6–7:30 PM
Often referred to as Boston’s “Ellis Island,” East Boston has long been home to immigrant communities who are crucial to the development of the social, economic, and cultural life of the neighborhood. The intersecting histories of migration and community-building will be the subject of a dialogue between Matt Cameron, Co-Director and Public Policy Advisor of Golden Stairs Immigration Center, which provides life-changing legal services to vulnerable non-citizens, and Patricia Montes, Executive Director of Centro Presente, which is dedicated to immigrant rights, community organizing, and basic services for the Latin American immigrant community of Massachusetts.   

…first in thought, then in action: East Boston in Focus with Lydia Edwards
Thu, Jan 16, 7–8:30 PM
Join us for an in-depth look at some of the challenges and opportunities faced by East Boston residents and their representatives, including the creation of living-wage jobs, concerns about transportation, and the need for expanded civic and recreational spaces, health care facilities, and schools. Boston City Councilor Lydia Edwards is joined by local community organizers for a discussion of the impacts of housing uncertainty and redevelopment in East Boston. Speakers include Gloribell Mota, Co-Director and Lead Coordinator for Neighbors United for a Better East Boston, an organization focused on advocating for inclusive democratic processes and just public policies to create a vibrant economy and environment for all East Boston, as well as organizers from City Life / Vida Urbano, a grassroots community organization committed to fighting for racial, social, and economic justice and gender equality by building working class power.     

…first in thought, then in action: Performance and Celebration with Anthony Romero and collaborators 
Sun, Jan 26, 2–4 PM
Artist and organizer Anthony Romero and project collaborators join Ruth Erickson, ICA Mannion Family Curator, for a culminating performance and discussion of …first in thought, then in action, a community engagement and performance project commissioned as part of the exhibition When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art. Together they will celebrate the resiliency of those facing and resisting various forms of displacement. Followed by a reception open to the public.

Film

A Wall Is a Wall: Short Film Program
Sun, Nov 10, 2 PM
Sun, Dec 1, 3 PM
Mon, Jan 20, 11 AM
A short film program presented in conjunction with When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art. The selection presents abstract meditations on, and sobering documentation of, border walls and the lived experiences of those who journey from one side to another. Featuring films by Josh Begley, Skye Fitzgerald, Ann Marie Fleming, Caroline Monnet, Michelle Angela Ortiz, Fabio Palmieri, and Eavvon O’Neal / Downtown Boys. Note: on Monday, January 20, the films will play on a loop from 11 AM to 4 PM. Runtime 92 minutes. FREE with museum admission.

Adult programs

The Artist’s Voice: Michelle Ortiz
Thu, Oct 24, 7 PM
Artist Michelle Angela Ortiz’s Familias Separadas project amplifies the voices of families affected by separation and detention through large-scale public art works. Over the years, Ortiz has utilized cinema screens, building walls, and even a street in front of an ICE agency office to share stories of individuals who are often dehumanized within existing narratives on immigration. Ortiz shares her experiences as both an artist and activist living in today’s contentious and divisive state where immigration is a focal point in political rhetoric. Eva Respini, the ICA’s Barbara Lee Chief Curator and co-organizer of When Home Won’t Let You Stay, moderates this discussion. This program is organized in conjunction with When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art where Ortiz’s work is included.

Understanding Immigration
Thu, Oct 24, 5:30–8:30 PM
Thu, Dec 5, 5:30–8:30 PM
Throughout Massachusetts, numerous non-profit organizations dedicate their efforts to assist people who have recently migrated to this region. Come learn directly from organizations and individuals who are on the ground working with immigrants, migrants and refugees and whose understanding of evolving government policies can increase your own understanding on US immigration issues.

Deep Dive: Art & Poetry
Sat, Oct 26, 10:30 AM–12:30 PM
Sun, Nov 10, 10:30 AM–12:30 PM
Sun, Dec 8, 10:30 AM–12:30 PM
Writers from Mass Poetry including Jamele Adams, Martha Collins, and Enzo Silon Surin provide basic tools and exercises to get you started composing your own poetry and seeing the art on view at the ICA through a new lens. This drop-in activity will focus on art in the exhibition When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art. Open to all ages and abilities, all materials provided. Note: the October 26 program is geared to family audiences.

ASL Tour: When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art
Sun, Oct 27, 2:30 PM
Discover our feature exhibition in this interactive tour led by an ICA tour guide and interpreted in American Sign Language. 

ICA Forum: Suitcase Stories Unpacked
Thu, Nov 7, 7 PM
The ICA partners with the International Institute of New England (IINE) to present their Suitcase Stories program, featuring both foreign- and U.S.-born local residents sharing inspiring stories of refugee and immigrant life in conjunction with the exhibition When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art. Enjoy a live performance by three storytellers followed by a talk back about Suitcase Stories and the importance of amplifying immigrant and refugee voices.

Gallery Talk: Luz Zambrano on Aliza Nisenbaum
Sun, Nov 10, 2 PM
Aliza Nisenbaum’s paintings in the exhibition When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art depict the daily life of a family of undocumented immigrants. Join local community organizer, Luz Zambrano, who helps provide resources for refugees as she shares her insights into these works exploring home and belonging. Zambrano is the Co-Director for the Center to Support Immigrant Organizing in Boston.

Gallery Talk: Oliver De La Paz on Reena Saini Kallat
Sun, Dec 8, 2 PM
Join poet Oliver De La Paz as he shares his insights on Reena Saini Kallat’s Woven Chronicle, on view in the exhibition When Home Won’t Let you Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art. Kallat’s work uses electric wire and a modified map to plot just some of the many paths in the history of human migration. Oliver De La Paz is the author of five collections of poetry and the English Department at College of the Holy Cross Creative Writing, Program Coordinator.

Curator Tour: Ruth Erickson on When Home Won’t Let You Stay
Thu, Dec 12, 6 PM
Join Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Curator, as she explores diverse artistic responses to the subject of migration in a tour titled “Belonging and Belongings,” presented in conjunction with When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art. The discussion will touch upon works by Rineke Dijkstra, Camilo Ontiveros, Richard Misrach, Carlos Motta, and Yinka Shonibare.

Curator Tour: Eva Respini on When Home Won’t Let You Stay
Thu, Jan 16, 6 PM
Join Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, as she explores diverse artistic responses to the subject of migration presented in conjunction with When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art. The discussion will touch upon theme of water as a site for migration and its relationship to our site on the harbor.

Family programs

ICA Play Date: Home Is Where…
Sat, Oct 26
Activities: 10:30 AM–4 PM
Kids rule the ICA the last Saturday of every month, when the museum fills up with fun, creative, and even zany activities for kids and adults to do together. Experience the new exhibition When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art and engage in creative activities inspired by the theme of home. We will be collaborating with Mass Poetry and poet Jamele Adams will perform and lead a family-focused workshop.

ICA Play Date: Tell Me a Story
Sat, Nov 30
Activities: 10:30 AM–4 PM
Kids rule the ICA the last Saturday of every month, when the museum fills up with fun, creative, and even zany activities for kids and adults to do together. Inspired by the stories told in When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art, we invite people of all ages to connect with themselves and each other through making and creating.

ICA Play Date: We Belong
Sat, Jan 25
Activities: 10:30 AM–4 PM
Kids rule the ICA the last Saturday of every month, when the museum fills up with fun, creative, and even zany activities for kids and adults to do together. Say goodbye to our exhibition When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art during its final weekend and join Boston-based social justice project Wee the People, as they explore stories of migration, home, loss, and belonging through storytelling and making. This workshop will feature an interactive story time, kids’ open mic, and culture-specific activities.

Teen programs

Fall Teen Night
Fri, Oct 25, 6–9 PM
Join the ICA Teen Arts Council—15 students from Boston-area high schools—for an unforgettable Teen Night! Organized by teens for teens, the evening features teen-led art tours, art-making activities, and youth performances. FREE for teens.

Support for When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art is generously provided by Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser, Steve Corkin and Dan Maddalena, Alan and Vivien Hassenfeld, Kristen and Kent Lucken, the Poss Family Foundation, and Mark and Marie Schwartz.

Anthony Romero’s …first in thought, then action is supported, in part, by Robert Nagle, a Live Arts Boston grant from the Boston Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. 

Play Dates are sponsored by Vivien and Alan Hassenfeld and the Hassenfeld Family Foundation.

Tours and workshops are supported, in part, by The Willow Tree Fund and the Raymond T. & Ann T. Mancini Family Foundation.

Lead support for Teen Programs provided by Wagner Foundation.

Teen Programs are made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Award Number MA-10-19-0390-19.

The ICA’s Teen Arts Council and Teen Nights are generously sponsored by Vertex and MFS Investment Management and are made possible, in part, through the Diversifying Art Museum Leadership Initiative, funded by the Walton Family Foundation and the Ford Foundation.

 

Additional support is provided by the Surdna Foundation; Rowland Foundation, Inc.; The Corkin Family; the William E. Schrafft and Bertha E. Schrafft Charitable Trust; The Willow Tree Fund; the Robert Lehman Foundation; the Deborah Munroe Noonan Memorial Fund, Bank of America, N.A., Trustee; the Plymouth Rock Foundation; the Jean Gaulin Foundation; and the Thomas Anthony Pappas Charitable Foundation, Inc. 

 

(Boston, MA—September 5, 2019) The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) announces its exhibition schedule from fall 2019 through summer 2020. Upcoming exhibitions include Yayoi Kusama’s LOVE IS CALLING, a new anchor in the ICA’s collection; When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art, a major exhibition that considers how contemporary artists are responding to the migration, immigration, and displacement of peoples today; the first comprehensive museum survey for American artist Sterling Ruby; and the first museum exhibition devoted to the work of the genre-bending artist and designer Virgil Abloh. For more information, please contact Margaux Leonard at mleonard@icaboston.org or 617-478-3176.

A photo shows a mirrored room filled with inflated glowing tentacles in different colors and colored with black dots of varying sizes.

Yayoi Kusama: LOVE IS CALLING
Sep 24, 2019–Feb 7, 2021
An icon of contemporary art, Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929, Matsumoto, Japan) has interwoven ideas of pop art, minimalism, and psychedelia throughout her work in paintings, performances, room-size presentations, outdoor sculptural installations, literary works, films, design, and architectural interventions over her long and influential career. LOVE IS CALLING, which premiered in Japan in 2013, is the most immersive and kaleidoscopic of the artist’s Infinity Mirror Rooms. Representing the culmination of her artistic achievements, it exemplifies the breadth of her visual vocabulary—from her signature polka dots and soft sculptures to brilliant colors, the spoken word, and most importantly, endless reflections and the illusion of space. It is composed of a darkened, mirrored room illuminated by inflatable, tentacle-like forms—covered in the artist’s characteristic polka dots—that extend from the floor and ceiling, gradually changing colors. 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. LOVE IS CALLING is the largest of Kusama’s existing Infinity Mirror Rooms, and the first one held in the permanent collection of a New England museum. Yayoi Kusama: LOVE IS CALLING is organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator.

Parallel to LOVE IS CALLING, the ICA will present a focused collection presentation titled Beyond Infinity: Contemporary Art after Kusama, to provide visitors with a deeper understanding of how Kusama has indelibly influenced art today. The 14th iteration of the ICA’s annual collection exhibition, Beyond Infinity will feature approximately 15 works from the 1950s to today, encompassing sculpture, painting, film, photography, and drawings.

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When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art
Oct 23, 2019–Jan 26, 2020
When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art considers how contemporary artists are responding to the migration, immigration, and displacement of peoples today. We are currently witnessing the highest levels of movement on record—the United Nations estimates that one out of every seven people in the world is an international or internal migrant who moves by choice or by force, with great success or great struggle. When Home Won’t Let You Stay borrows its title from a poem by Warsan Shire, a Somali-British poet who gives voice to the experiences of refugees. Through artworks made since 2000 by twenty artists from more than a dozen countries—such as Colombia, Cuba, France, India, Iraq, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, Palestine, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States—this exhibition highlights diverse artistic responses to migration ranging from personal accounts to poetic meditations, and features a range of mediums, including sculpture, installation, painting, and video. Artists in the exhibition include Kader Attia, Tania Bruguera, Isaac Julien, Hayv Kahraman, Reena Saini Kallat, Richard Mosse, Carlos Motta, Yinka Shonibare, Xaviera Simmons, and Do-Ho Suh, among others. A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition, with an essay by Eva Respini and Ruth Erickson and texts by prominent scholars Aruna D’Souza, Okwui Enwezor, Thomas Keenan, Peggy Levitt, and Uday Singh Mehta, among others. This exhibition is organized by Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Curator, and Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Ellen Tani, Assistant Curator.

A large mixed- media painting depicts the abstracted figure of a man in a tank top and sneakers standing on a sidewalk holding a beer can and the leg of another figure in red gingham pants that appears to have just walked out of the frame.

Tschabalala Self
Jan 20, 2020–Jul 5, 2020
Tschabalala Self (b. 1990 in Harlem, New York) creates large-scale figurative paintings that integrate hand-printed and found textiles, drawing, printmaking, sewing, and collage techniques to tell stories of urban life, the body, and humanity. The artist’s first Boston presentation—and her largest exhibition to date—will include a selection of paintings and sculptures that represent personal avatars, couplings, and everyday social exchanges inspired by urban life. Together, they articulate new expressions of embodiment and humanity through the exaggerated forms and exuberant textures of the human figure, pointing to its limitless capacity to represent imagined states, memories, aspirations, and emotions. Yet Self’s characters possess an ordinary grace grounded in reality: they are reflections of the artist or people she can imagine meeting in Harlem, her hometown. This exhibition is organized by Ellen Tani, Assistant Curator.

A form that looks like a mobile or a fishing net with orange and yellow fibers hangs suspended. At the bottom, small objects hang from strings in a corkscrew shape.

Carolina Caycedo
Jan 20, 2020–Jul 5, 2020
The interdisciplinary practice of Los Angeles–based artist Carolina Caycedo (b. 1978, London) is grounded in vital questions related to asymmetrical power relations, dispossession, extraction, and environmental justice. Since 2012, Caycedo’s ongoing project Be Dammed has examined the wide-reaching impacts of dams built along waterways, particularly those in Latin American countries such as Brazil or Colombia (where she was raised and frequently returns). At the ICA, Caycedo will present the culmination of her Cosmotarrayas, a series of hanging sculptures assembled with handmade fishing nets and other objects collected during field research in different riverine communities affected by the privatization of waterways. These objects demonstrate the meaningful connectivity and exchange at the heart of Caycedo’s practice, as many of the nets and other objects were entrusted to her by individuals no longer able to use them. At the same time, they also represent the dispossession of these individuals and their continued resistance to corporations and governments seeking to control the flow of water and thus their way of life. This exhibition is organized by Jeffrey De Blois, Assistant Curator and Publications Manager.

One three-dimensional oblong form sits stacked askew on top of another. The top for is translucent yellow with swirls of red that appear to be rising up. The bottom form appears to be a wooden box painted yellow, with the letters WS ROLLING hand-drawn on the side in red.

Sterling Ruby
Feb 26, 2020–May 26, 2020
ICA/Boston presents the first comprehensive museum survey for American artist Sterling Ruby. The exhibition features more than 50 works that demonstrate the relationship between material transformation in Ruby’s practice and the rapid evolution of American culture, institutions, and labor. Spanning more than two decades of the artist’s career, the exhibition features an array of works created in various mediums, from his renowned ceramics and paintings to lesser-known drawings and installations. Since his earliest works, Ruby has investigated the role of the artist as an outsider. Critiquing the structures of modernism and traditional institutions, Ruby addresses the repressed underpinnings of American culture and the coding of power and violence, employing a range of imagery from the American flag to prison architecture and graffiti. Craft is central to his inquiry, informed by his upbringing in Pennsylvania Dutch country and working in Los Angeles, as he explores hand-based processes from Amish quilt-making to California’s radical ceramics tradition. Organized loosely by chronology and medium, Sterling Ruby considers the artist’s explorations of these themes across the many materials and forms he has utilized throughout his practice, including many innovations. Sterling Ruby is co-presented with Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and will be accompanied by an illustrated scholarly catalogue edited by Alex Gartenfeld and Eva Respini, with a conversation between Ruby and Isabelle Graw. The catalogue will feature essays that consider Ruby’s work amidst the contemporary art production and visual culture of the last 30 years. Sterling Ruby is on view at ICA, Miami November 7, 2019–February 2, 2020. The exhibition is organized by Alex Gartenfeld, Artistic Director, ICA, Miami, and Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, ICA/Boston, with Jeffrey De Blois, Assistant Curator and Publications Manager, ICA/Boston.

A photo shows a model in a translucent cropped top and shorts, sunglasses, and yellow boots against a black background.

Virgil Abloh: “Figures of Speech”
Jul 4, 2020–Oct 18, 2020
Virgil Abloh: “Figures of Speech” is the first museum exhibition devoted to the work of the genre-bending artist and designer Virgil Abloh (b. 1980, Rockford, IL). Abloh pioneers a practice that cuts across media and connects visual artists, musicians, graphic designers, fashion designers, and architects. Abloh cultivated an interest in design and music at an early age, finding inspiration in the urban culture of Chicago. While pursuing a master’s degree in architecture from the Illinois Institute of Technology, he connected with Kanye West and joined West’s creative team to work on album covers, concert designs, and merchandising. In 2013, Abloh founded his stand-alone fashion brand Off-White™ in Milan, Italy, and, in 2018, assumed the position of artistic director of Louis Vuitton’s menswear. Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and set in an immersive space designed by Rem Koolhaas’s renowned architecture firm OMA*AMO, the exhibition will offer an in-depth look at defining highlights of Abloh’s career, including signature clothing collections, video documentation of iconic fashion shows, distinctive furniture and graphic design work, and collaborative projects with contemporary artists. A program of cross-disciplinary offerings will mirror the artist’s range of interests across music, fashion, architecture, and design. Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech is organized by Michael Darling, James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator of the MCA Chicago, with curatorial assistance from Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol. The ICA’s presentation is coordinated by Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Curator.

About the ICA
Since its founding in 1936, the ICA has shared the pleasures of reflection, inspiration, imagination, and provocation that contemporary art offers with its audiences. A museum at the intersection of contemporary art and civic life, the ICA has advanced a bold vision for amplifying the artist’s voice and augmenting art’s role as educator, incubator, and convener for social engagement. Its innovative exhibitions, performances, and educational programs provide access to contemporary art, artists, and the creative process, inviting audiences of all ages and backgrounds to participate in the excitement of new art and ideas. Spanning two locations across Boston Harbor, the ICA offers year-round programming at its iconic building in Boston’s Seaport and seasonal programming (May–September) at the Watershed in an East Boston shipyard.The ICA is located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA, 02210. The Watershed is located at 256 Marginal Street, East Boston, MA 02128. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at icaboston.org. Follow the ICA at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Acknowledgments

LOVE IS CALLING was 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.

Support for When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art is generously provided by Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser, Steve Corkin and Dan Maddalena, Alan and Vivien Hassenfeld, Kristen and Kent Lucken, the Poss Family Foundation, and Mark and Marie Schwartz.

Tschabalala Self: Around the Way is supported, in part, by the Jennifer Epstein Fund for Women Artists. Additional support for  is generously provided by Fotene Demoulas and Tom Coté and Ted Pappendick and Erica Gervais Pappendick.

Additional support for Tschabalala Self: Around the Way is generously provided by Fotene Demoulas and Tom Coté and Ted Pappendick and Erica Gervais Pappendick.

Major support for Sterling Ruby is provided by Sprüth Magers, Gagosian, and Xavier Hufkens.

SPONSORS_Spruth Magers Gagosian Xavier Hufkens combined Sterling Ruby

Additional support for the Boston presentation is generously provided by Stephanie Formica Connaughton and John Connaughton, Jean-François and Nathalie Ducrest, Bridgitt and Bruce Evans, James and Audrey Foster, Ted Pappendick and Erica Gervais Pappendick, David and Leslie Puth, and Charlotte and Herbert S. Wagner III.

Images

Yayoi Kusama, LOVE IS CALLING, 2013. Wood, metal, glass mirrors, tile, acrylic panel, rubber, blowers, lighting element, speakers, and sound, 174 ½ x 340 ⅝ x 239 ⅜ inches (443.2 x 865.2 x 608 cm). © YAYOI KUSAMA | Reena Saini Kallat, Woven Chronicle, 2011–2016. Installation view, Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter, October 1, 2016 – January 22, 2017, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo by Jonathan Muzikar. © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY | Tschabalala Self, Lite, 2018. Acrylic, flashe, milk paint, fabric, and gum on canvas. 96 x 84 inches (243.8 x 213.36 cm). Courtesy of the artist; Pilar Corrias Gallery, London; and Thierry Goldberg Gallery, Miami. © Tschabalala Self | Carolina Caycedo, Ósun (detail), 2018. Hand-dyed artisanal fishing net, steel chain, steel pot lid, mirror, enamel, spray paint, hoop earrings, paracord, string, and brass handles. 120 x 24 x 24 inches (304.8 x 61 x 61 cm). Courtesy the artist and Instituto de Visión, Bogotá, Columbia © Carolina Caycedo | Sterling Ruby, ACTS/WS ROLLIN, 2011. Clear urethane block, dye, wood, spray paint, and formica. 60 ½ x 62 ½ x 34 inches (153.7 x 158.8 x 86.4 cm). Photo by Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy Sterling Ruby Studio, Los Angeles © Sterling Ruby Studio |Off-White™ c/o Virgil Abloh, Spring/Summer 2018, Look 11; Courtesy of Off-White™ c/o Virgil Abloh. Photo: Fabien Montique.

The artist’s first Boston exhibition will feature a gallery-sized installation created from suspended and layered unstretched canvases

(Boston, MA—July 19, 2019) On August 21, The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens the first Boston presentation of Argentine-Swiss artist Vivian Suter (b. 1949, Buenos Aires, Argentina), who has been living and working Guatemala since the 1980s. Comprised of dozens of individual mixed-media paintings, this exhibition will feature a single installation by Suter in which unstretched canvases flood the gallery, creating a canopy of color and shape evocative of the natural environment surrounding her home and studio in Panajachel, Guatemala. On view from August 21 through December 31, 2019, Vivian Suter is organized by Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Curator.

“Vivian Suter’s approach to installing her paintings is incredibly unique,” says Erickson. “She layers, suspends, and rotates her canvases, inviting visitors to meander through her work and its sumptuous gestures and colors.”

Suter works in close partnership with the natural environment surrounding her home of thirty years by Lake Atitlán in Guatemala. Her method often involves moving her canvases between the indoors and outdoors and exposing them to the climate in order to allow nature to comingle with her broad swaths of painted, vivid color. The mud and rain, insects that crawl across the soil, and avocados and mangos that drop from trees work in concert with Suter’s gestural compositions, which are inspired by the surrounding vegetation and landscape. To exhibit her work, she creates installations by layering and suspending unstretched canvases in space, referencing the organic modes of hanging and draping her canvases in the studio.

About the artist

Vivian Suter was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, studied in Basel, Switzerland, and currently lives and works in Panajachel, Guatemala. Solo exhibitions of the artist’s work have been held at numerous international institutions including Gladstone Gallery, New York (2019), The Power Plant, Toronto (2018), Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois (2018), Jewish Museum, New York (2017), Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2014), and Kunstmuseum Olten, Switzerland (2004), and also included in documenta 14 (2017).

Curator Tour: Ruth Erickson on Vivian Suter

Thu, Sep 5, 6 PM
Delve into Vivian Suter’s vivid canvases with Mannion Family Curator Ruth Erickson to learn more about the artist’s creative method. Based in Guatemala, Suter engages in intense dialogue with the natural environment surrounding her home and studio.

About the ICA

Since its founding in 1936, the ICA has shared the pleasures of reflection, inspiration, imagination, and provocation that contemporary art offers with its audiences. A museum at the intersection of contemporary art and civic life, the ICA has advanced a bold vision for amplifying the artist’s voice and augmenting art’s role as educator, incubator, and convener for social engagement. Its innovative exhibitions, performances, and educational programs provide access to contemporary art, artists, and the creative process, inviting audiences of all ages and backgrounds to participate in the excitement of new art and ideas. Spanning two locations across Boston Harbor, the ICA offers year-round programming at its iconic building in Boston’s Seaport and seasonal programming (May-September) at the Watershed in an East Boston shipyard.

The ICA is located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA, 02210. The Watershed is located at 256 Marginal Street, East Boston, MA 02128. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at icaboston.org. Follow the ICA at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.       

Acknowledgement
Support for Vivian Suter is generously provided by Fotene Demoulas and Tom Coté and Alan and Vivien Hassenfeld.

Featuring Rashin Fahandej, Josephine Halvorson, Lavaughan Jenkins, and Helga Roht Poznanski, whose artwork and biographies reflect the diverse practices of artists living and working in Boston

(Boston, MA—July 18, 2019) The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) presents the 2019 James and Audrey Foster Prize exhibition with major works on view from Boston-area artists Rashin Fahandej, Josephine Halvorson, Lavaughan Jenkins, and Helga Roht Poznanski. This intergenerational group of artists works across media, including painting, sculpture, and video, to explore questions of place, portraiture, and belonging. On view from August 21 to December 31, 2019, the exhibition is organized by Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Curator.

“We are ever grateful to Jim and Audrey Foster for their inspired support of the ICA. The James and Audrey Foster Prize exhibition highlights the strength, dynamism, and depth of Boston’s arts community. We are eager to share with the public a broad range of talent in this important biennial showcase,” said Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director. 

“The 2019 Foster Prize artists exemplify the dynamic breadth of work being created in Boston’s artistic community,” said James Foster, ICA Trustee, and Audrey Foster, ICA Advisory Board Member. 

The James and Audrey Foster Prize is key to the ICA’s efforts to nurture and recognize exceptional Boston-area artists. First established in 1999, the Foster Prize (formerly the ICA Artist Prize) expanded its format when the museum opened its new facility in 2006. James and Audrey Foster, passionate collectors and supporters of contemporary art, endowed the prize, ensuring the ICA’s ability to sustain and grow the program for years to come.

Each iteration of the James and Audrey Foster Prize Exhibition highlights a new area of focus within Boston’s rich ecology of contemporary art practices. To select the 2019 Foster Prize artists, Erickson conducted studio visits with 50 artists living and working in the Boston-area over the past year. Relying upon ongoing recommendations from curators, artists, and other colleagues, she previewed more than 150 artists’ work online, and set up studio visits with 50 of these artists. Intent to view a broad cross-section of artists, Erickson assured she met with practitioners working in all media and with varied backgrounds and training.

“This exhibition presents a sliver of the countless talented artists who have trained at and teach in Boston’s numerous art schools,” said Erickson. “I am humbled by the generosity of these artists and grateful to Jim and Audrey Foster for the opportunity to share their work with ICA audiences.”

The exhibition begins with a selection of tightly-composed, abstract watercolors by Helga Roht Poznanski that reflect her training in fashion and fine art, as well as her own life experience fleeing her native Estonia and immigrating to Vienna, and then to Canada and the United States. Poznanski begins these works first as collages, tearing colored and patterned paper from fashion magazines. These collages serve as studies for her final watercolors, which she paints using a dry watercolor technique to achieve bold colors and crisp lines. Her paintings possess a complex pictorial space, with nested and overlapping forms, windows and portals, moons and suns, evoking fractured views of a cityscape.

The next gallery presents forty three-dimensional, figurative “paintings” by Lavaughan Jenkins on individual shelves lining the walls. Building the human figure through the layering of oil paint over an armature of wire, molding paste, and Styrofoam, Jenkins describes his tabletop sculptures as “paintings,” and he is centrally invested in the effects of form, color, and light. The sculptures include figures vaguely resembling the artist—with black skin and a full girth—to regal figures in full skirts that Jenkins refers to as “duchesses.” Some figures are sitting or kneeling, others are standing; many lack arms or other features that fully define the human form; and often they appear to interact in small groupings. Such modifications lend the sculptures an incredible range of emotions, especially as each one seems to express particular emotional or psychological states in relationship to power. The kneeling and armless figures that read as men especially evoke a sense of humility, shame, or even emasculation. Jenkins derives his color palettes from his study of high fashion, especially the collections of designers like Valentino. His unique hand combines a roughness of form and paint application with the delicacy of oil built up.   

An immersive and interactive installation of Rashin Fahandej’s multipart and ongoing project A Father’s Lullaby fills the next gallery. Initiated in response to the absence of fathers in communities of color as a direct result of mass incarceration, this project harnesses song, storytelling, and video to convey the love and loss as a result of incarcerated fathers. A multi-channel video and sound piece presents the images and sounds of community members and formerly incarcerated men who hum lullabies they remember from their childhood or sang to their own children. Interactive touch panels activate the playing of individual stories, and mirrors throughout the space reflect the projected images and the bodies of visitors, merging these two and considering the shared space of their interaction and empathy.

The final gallery is the exhibition is dedicated to the work of Josephine Halvorson, whose painting practice focuses on place and the careful acts of observation and transcription. Working in gouache on paper mounted to canvas, Halvorson selects a particular place, sets up her tools and materials, and takes in her surroundings, easel, and looks at the ground, translating what she sees into painted marks. The resulting paintings capture the heterogeneity and brilliance of the mundane, revealing each square inch to hold countless marks, colors, and shapes. This exhibition presents recent gouache paintings made at two different locations: five paintings made at an abandoned mine in Death Valley, California, and two large panoramic works made in Western Massachusetts. In these works, Halvorson has further experimented with making a visceral connection to site through not only representation and observation but also material. Collecting stones, soil, and debris from the sites where she paints, she grinds these materials and mixes them with pigment to create subtly distinct “frames” for her gouache paintings.

The Artist’s Voice

Thu, Sep 26, 7 PM

Rashin Fahandej, Josephine Halvorson, Lavaughan Jenkins, and Helga Roht Poznanski will discuss their processes, and works, and participation in the Foster Prize exhibition in a public talk moderated by Mannion Family Curator Ruth Erickson.

About the artists

Rashin Fahandej (b. 1978, Shiraz, Iran) is an Iranian-American artist and independent filmmaker. Her work centers on marginalized voices, and the role of media, technology, and public collaboration in generating social change. A proponent of “Art as Ecosystem,” she defines her project as a “Poetic Cyber Movement for Social Justice,” where art mobilizes a plethora of voices by creating connections between public places and virtual space. She is the founder of A Father’s Lullaby, a multi-platform, co-creative project that highlights the role of men in raising children and their absence due to racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Marginalia, a series of poetic documentaries about Baha’i immigrants of Iranian descent, narrates a historical persecution in their homeland. Fahandej holds a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (2006) and an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute (2010). She has served as an artistic director of the Rebuilding the Gwozdziec Synagogue at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and 2017 Boston Artist-In-Residence with Mayor’s office of art and culture. Fahandej currently is a research fellow at MIT Open Documentary Lab, a Public Art Resident at Boston Center for the Arts, and a visiting faculty at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Fahandej maintains a studio at Boston Center for the Arts and lives in Framingham, MA.

Josephine Halvorson (b. 1981, Brewster, MA) makes art from observation in relation to a particular object and place. Transcribing her perceptions in real time, Halvorson connects with the world around her through the medium of paint. Her work describes the appearance of the thing at-hand, while also expressing that which is invisible yet nonetheless felt: locale, time, history, and emotion. Halvorson’s artistic practice foregrounds attention and experience, taking the form of painting and also sculpture, printmaking and drawing. Halvorson holds a BFA from The Cooper Union (2003) and an MFA from Columbia University (2007). She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Austria (2003-4), a Harriet Hale Woolley Fellowship at the Fondation des États-Unis in Paris (2007-8), a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant (2009), and was the first American pensionnaire at the French Academy in Rome (2014-15). Her work has been exhibited internationally and is represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, and Peter Freeman, Inc., Paris. Solo exhibitions include the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, NC and Storm King Art Center in New Windsor, NY. Halvorson is Professor of Art and Chair of Graduate Studies in Painting at Boston University, and she lives in Boston and western Massachusetts.

Lavaughan Jenkins (b. 1976, Boston) is a painter, printmaker, and sculptor who uses the materiality of paint to build up two- and three-dimensional works that merge figuration with abstraction. He continuously reworks his surfaces, adding and scraping paint until his figures—from rotund men to courtly female characters—emerge and at times spill over the edges. Jenkins has recently exhibited his work at Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, Boston, and the Fitchburg Art Museum. In 2016-17 he became the Emerging Artist at Kingston Gallery in Boston. He holds a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (2005) and has exhibited his work at such venues as Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, Gallery Kayafas, Lens Gallery, and the Arts Research Collaborative Gallery, all in Boston, MA, as well as at the Oasis Gallery in Beijing. Jenkins is a recipient of the 2015 Blanche E. Colman Award and the Rob Moore Grant in Painting. Jenkins was raised in Pensacola, Florida, and currently lives and works in Roxbury, MA.

Helga Roht Poznanski (b. 1927, Tartu, Estonia) is a watercolorist, painter, and fashion designer, whose diverse artistic output expresses a strong sense of color, composition, and spatial architectonics. Born in Estonia, Poznanski fled her homeland in 1944 for fear of Soviet repression, moving with her mother from Vienna to Innsbruck, Austria, and ultimately emigrating to Montreal, Canada in 1948. She graduated from the Montreal Fashion Arts Academy, working for 18 years as a designer at fashion houses in Montreal and New York, studied painting at the New York Art Students’ League from 1964-66, and then continued her study of visual arts at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts from 1974-78. During the interceding decades, she has painted hyperrealistic architectural scenes and botanical specimens, but her longest running series has been abstract and colorful collage-like compositions in watercolor, characterized by a well-structured pictorial space and rhythmic geometrical surfaces that Poznanski has equated to views from windows. Part of a generation of exiled Estonian artists, Poznanski has exhibited her artwork at galleries in Canada and New England and received her most significant exhibitions at museums in Estonia. She lives and works in Jamaica Plain, MA.

About the ICA

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

Acknowledgement

The exhibition and prize are generously endowed by James and Audrey Foster.

(Boston, MA—July 16, 2019) The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) presents a robust schedule of dynamic performances as part of the upcoming season. Highlights include a restaging of acclaimed choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s very first performance; THE DAY, a new music/dance collaboration among legends Maya Beiser, Wendy Whelan, Lucinda Childs, and David Lang; and a raw and visceral live performance album by nora chipaumire, “a kind of rock star of dance” (The New Yorker).

All events take place in the Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater at the ICA, 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston. Tickets can be purchased at www.icaboston.org or by calling 617-478-3103.

See icaboston.org for extended descriptions, artist bios, trailers, and production and accessibility info.

Dance

Thu Sep 19–Sat, Sep 21, 8 PM
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker/Rosas
Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich
$25 ICA members + students / $35 general admission

Premiered in 1982, choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s very first performance comprises three duets and one solo, choreographed to four compositions by the American minimalist composer Steve Reich. De Keersmaeker uses the structure of Reich’s music to develop an independent movement idiom that doesn’t merely illustrate the music but adds a new dimension to it. Both the music and the dance start from the principle of “phase shifting” through tiny variations: movements that start out perfectly synchronous gradually slip and move out of sync, resulting in an ingenious play of continuously changing forms and patterns. Having always danced Fase herself, De Keersmaeker will pass the work to two new dancers at the ICA, for the first time in the work’s history.

Fri, Oct 18 + Sat, Oct 19, 8 PM
nora chipaumire
#PUNK 100% POP *N!GGA
$15 ICA members + students / $25 general admission  
Friday: #PUNK and 100% POP
Saturday: 100% POP and *N!GGA

Born in Mutare, Zimbabwe and based in New York City, choreographer nora chipaumire challenges and embraces stereotypes of Africa and the black performing body, art and aesthetics. Inspired by her formative years in Zimbabwe, #PUNK 100% POP *N!GGA is a raw and visceral live performance album that confronts and celebrates three sonic ideologies: punk, pop, and rumba, through the radical visions of musicians Patti Smith, Grace Jones, and Rit Nzele. chipaumire and her company of dancers and musicians raucously question how status and power are experienced and presented through the body. Featuring a stage set designed by visual artists Ari Marcopoulos and Kara Walker, the work is a continuation of chipaumire’s career-long investigation of portraiture and self-portraiture, biography, subjecthood, liberation, and independence as a black female and African. Note: The audience remains standing for much of the performance.

Thu, Nov 21–Sat, Nov 23, 8 PM
Sun, Nov 24, 2 PM
Faye Driscoll
Thank You For Coming: Space
$20 ICA members + students / $30 general admission  

One of the most fascinating and astonishing choreographers working today, Faye Driscoll returns to the ICA with the final installment of her Thank You For Coming trilogy. Alone with the audience, Driscoll performs a moving elegy about loss, the substance of mourning, and the labor of grief. In Space, Driscoll and her collaborators construct a temporary world held up by pulleys, ropes, and the weight of others. At its center is the body—built for action, self-contained, and driven by a longing to be in the world. “A visual embodiment of grief and loss combined with a fierce proclamation of the ecstasy of living” (Montclair Local).

Fri, Jan 17 + Sat, Jan 18, 8 PM
Kate Wallich + The YC x Perfume Genius
The Sun Still Burns Here
$20 ICA members + students / $30 general admission  

The Sun Still Burns Here is an evening-length dance and music work created by Seattle-based choreographer Kate Wallich and her company The YC and musician/composer Mike Hadreas of the band Perfume Genius. Combining Hadreas’s musical textures and landscapes, Wallich’s choreographic narratives, and Amiya Brown’s production design, The Sun Still Burns Here unravels themes of deterioration, catharsis, and transcendence from the body. Wallich and Hadreas unite a team of musicians, dancers, and designers to create a stunning and emotionally complex performance that radically integrates indie rock with contemporary dance.

Fri, Feb 21 + Sat, Feb 22, 8 PM
Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group
POWER
$15 ICA members + students / $25 general admission  

For over 30 years, Reggie Wilson and his Fist and Heel Performance Group have explored the spiritual and mundane traditions of Africa and its Diaspora through contemporary dance. Expanding on his previous research of African American spiritual worship and movement, Wilson’s newest work, POWER, considers how the Black Shaker community might have lived and worshipped. POWER takes Inspiration from notable Shaker women leaders like Mother Ann Lee, founder of the Shaker community, and Mother Rebecca Cox Jackson, founder of the first African-American urban Shaker family group in Philadelphia. Featuring a thrilling cast of performers, POWER examines and enlivens Shaker values, contributions, practices, and history through a postmodern American lens.

Fri, Apr 24 + Sat, Apr 25, 8 PM
Sun, Apr 26, 2 PM
Maya Beiser + Wendy Whelan + Lucinda Childs + David Lang
THE DAY
$30 ICA members + students / $40 general admission  

THE DAY is a new music/dance work by cellist Maya Beiser, dancer Wendy Whelan, choreographer Lucinda Childs, with music by David Lang. A collaboration among legends, THE DAY is an evening-long sensory exploration of two journeys—life and the eternal, post-mortal voyage of the soul. This bold, highly collaborative work explores universal themes through the shared language of music and dance. Renowned avant-garde cellist Maya Beiser, who conceived the piece, has been described by the Boston Globe as “a force of nature” and by Rolling Stone as a “cello rock star.” Wendy Whelan, widely considered one of the world’s leading dancers, spent 30 years as a principal dancer with New York City Ballet and originated numerous roles in new works by the world’s most esteemed choreographers. The two will be onstage all evening, embodying the iconic choreography of Lucinda Childs (a Commandeur in France’s Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and 2018 inductee in Hall of Fame at the National Museum of Dance) to the original music of Pulitzer Prize-winner David Lang.

Music

Thu, Mar 26, 8 PM
Roger C. Miller and Ludovico Ensemble
Electric Guitars, String Quartet, Dreams and Records
$10 ICA members + students / $15 general admission  

Rock musician Roger Miller, a founding member of the band Mission of Burma and a longtime member of the Alloy Orchestra, showcases a different musical perspective, blending elements of classical and rock music, in a unique concert event. Performing original compositions influenced by everyday phenomena, as well as surrealism, Miller conjures a one-person orchestra with his electric guitar using loops, devices and electronics. The second part of the evening features Miller’s music for String Quartet performed by Boston’s own Ludovico Ensemble that culminates in “Music for String Quartet and Two Turn-tables,” with Miller joining in on the turn-tables.

Fall Exhibitions

2019 James and Audrey Foster Prize
Aug 21–Dec 31, 2019

The 2019 installment of the ICA’s biannual James and Audrey Foster Prize exhibition highlighting the work of Boston-area artists will feature four individuals: Rashin Fahandej (b. 1978, Shiraz, Iran), Josephine Halvorson (b. 1981, Brewster, MA), Lavaughan Jenkins (b. 1976, Boston, MA), and Helga Roht Poznanski (b. 1926, Tartu, Estonia). This intergenerational group of artists works across media, including painting, sculpture, film, and video, to explore questions of place, portraiture, and belonging. Their unique and exceptional work demonstrates the breadth and ecology of contemporary art practices in Boston. First established in 1999, the James and Audrey Foster Prize (formerly the ICA Artist Prize) is central to the ICA’s efforts to nurture and recognize local artists, showcase exceptional artwork, and support a thriving local arts scene. This exhibition is organized by Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Curator.

Vivian Suter
Aug–Dec 31, 2019

Vivian Suter (b. 1949, Buenos Aires, Argentina) works in close partnership with the natural environment surrounding her home and studio in Panajachel, Guatemala. The artist’s first Boston exhibition will feature a single installation filling the galleries with a canopy of color and shapes evocative of the lush setting. Her method often involves moving her canvases between the indoors and outdoors and exposing them to the climate in order to allow nature to comingle with her broad swaths of painted, vivid color. The mud and rain, light through the trees, and animals in the forest work in concert with Suter’s gestural compositions, which are inspired by the surrounding vegetation and landscape. Her installation of layered and suspended canvases invites visitors to discover her unique dialogue with the imagined and natural worlds. This exhibition is organized by Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Curator.

Yayoi Kusama: LOVE IS CALLING
Sep 24, 2019–Feb 7, 2021

An icon of contemporary art, Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929, Matsumoto, Japan) has interwoven ideas of pop art, minimalism, and psychedelia throughout her work in paintings, performances, room-size presentations, outdoor sculptural installations, literary works, films, design, and architectural interventions over her long and influential career. LOVE IS CALLING, which premiered in Japan in 2013, is the most immersive and kaleidoscopic of the artist’s Infinity Mirror Rooms. Representing the culmination of her artistic achievements, it exemplifies the breadth of her visual vocabulary—from her signature polka dots and soft sculptures to brilliant colors, the spoken word, and most importantly, endless reflections and the illusion of space. It is composed of a darkened, mirrored room illuminated by inflatable, tentacle-like forms—covered in the artist’s characteristic polka dots—that extend from the floor and ceiling, gradually changing colors. 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. LOVE IS CALLING is the largest of Kusama’s existing Infinity Mirror Rooms, and the first one held in the permanent collection of a New England museum. Yayoi Kusama: LOVE IS CALLING is organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator.

Parallel to LOVE IS CALLING, the ICA will present a focused collection presentation titled Beyond Infinity: Contemporary Art After Kusama, to provide visitors with a deeper understanding of how Kusama has indelibly influenced art today. The 14th iteration of the ICA’s annual collection exhibition, Beyond Infinity will feature approximately 15 works from the 1950s to today, encompassing sculpture, painting, film, photography, and drawings.

When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art
Oct 23, 2019–Jan 26, 2020

When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art considers how contemporary artists are responding to the migration, immigration, and displacement of peoples today. We are currently witnessing the highest levels of movement on record—the United Nations estimates that one out of every seven people in the world is an international or internal migrant who moves by choice or by force, with great success or great struggle. When Home Won’t Let You Stay borrows its title from a poem by Warsan Shire, a Somali-British poet who gives voice to the experiences of refugees. Through artworks made since 2000 by twenty artists from more than a dozen countries — such as Colombia, Cuba, France, India, Iraq, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, Palestine, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States — this exhibition highlights diverse artistic responses to migration ranging from personal accounts to poetic meditations, and features a range of mediums, including sculpture, installation, painting, and video. Artists in the exhibition include Kader Attia, Tania Bruguera, Isaac Julien, Hayv Kahraman, Reena Saini Kallat, Richard Mosse, Carlos Motta, Yinka Shonibare, Xaviera Simmons, and Do-Ho Suh, among others. A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition, with an essay by Eva Respini and Ruth Erickson and texts by prominent scholars Aruna D’Souza, Okwui Enwezor, Thomas Keenan, Peggy Levitt, and Uday Singh Mehta, among others. This exhibition is organized by Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Curator, and Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Ellen Tani, Assistant Curator.

About the ICA

Since its founding in 1936, the ICA has shared the pleasures of reflection, inspiration, imagination, and provocation that contemporary art offers with its audiences. A museum at the intersection of contemporary art and civic life, the ICA has advanced a bold vision for amplifying the artist’s voice and augmenting art’s role as educator, incubator, and convener for social engagement. Its innovative exhibitions, performances, and educational programs provide access to contemporary art, artists, and the creative process, inviting audiences of all ages and backgrounds to participate in the excitement of new art and ideas. Spanning two locations across Boston Harbor, the ICA offers year-round programming at its iconic building in Boston’s Seaport and seasonal programming (May-September) at the Watershed in an East Boston shipyard.

The ICA is located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA, 02210. The Watershed is located at 256 Marginal Street, East Boston, MA 02128. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at icaboston.org. Follow the ICA at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

 

 

Acknowledgments

First Republic Bank is proud to sponsor the 2019–20 Performance Season ICA Live.

Additional support is generously provided by Edward Berman and Kathleen McDonough and Robert Davoli and Eileen McDonagh.

nora chipaumire: #PUNK 100% POP *N!GGA is funded in part by the Expeditions program of the New England Foundation for the Arts, made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, with additional support from the six New England state arts agencies.

The presentation of Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group: POWER was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group: POWER is supported, in part, by the David Henry Fund for Performance.

The presentation of Maya Beiser, Wendy Whelan, Lucinda Childs + David Lang, THE DAY was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

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

The 2019 James and Audrey Foster Prize exhibition and prize are generously endowed by James and Audrey Foster.

Support for Vivian Suter is generously provided by Fotene Demoulas and Tom Coté and Alan and Vivien Hassenfeld.

LOVE IS CALLING was 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.

Support for When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art is generously provided by Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser, Steve Corkin and Dan Maddalena, Alan and Vivien Hassenfeld, Kristen and Kent Lucken, the Poss Family Foundation, and Mark and Marie Schwartz.

 

Timely exhibition shines spotlight on how contemporary artists are responding to the migration, immigration, and displacement of peoples today, in works ranging from personal accounts to poetic meditations.

(Boston, MA—June 14, 2019) On October 23, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art, a significant exhibition that explores how contemporary artists are responding to the migration, immigration, and displacement of peoples today. The exhibition highlights diverse artistic responses to migration ranging from personal accounts to poetic meditations in a range of mediums, including sculpture, installation, painting, and video. Featuring 20 leading artists from around the globe, the exhibition is comprised of over 40 works made since 2000, including Richard Mosse’s multi-screen video installation Incoming, Yinka Shonibare CBE’s recently commissioned The American Library, and a new site-specific, community-based project by Boston-based artist Anthony Romero. On view Oct. 23, 2019 through Jan. 26, 2020, When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art is organized by Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Curator, and Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Ellen Tani, Assistant Curator. It travels to the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

“Today, migration and immigration are among the most painful, complex, and contested issues of our time. The United Nations Refugee Agency estimates that 68.5 million people are forcibly displaced worldwide: refugees, asylum-seekers, and those who are internally displaced. When Home Won’t Let You Stay considers how contemporary artists grapple with upended ideas of home, histories, borders, and belonging. I am honored and grateful to each of the artists in the exhibition, whose combined knowledge, experience, and perspective explore these themes through the lens of their art,” said Jill Medvedow, the ICA’s Ellen Matilda Poss Director.

“When Home Won’t Let You Stay borrows its title from a poem by Warsan Shire, a Somali-British poet who gives voice to the experiences of refugees. The exhibition shares with Shire’s poem the imperative to give a public platform to the variety of experiences around migration, including the jarring realities and experiences of refugees and immigrants. The artists included in this exhibition, some of whom are immigrants, refugees, or migrants, challenge established ideas of what it means to migrate and reveal how the forces of migration touch us all,” said curators Erickson and Respini.

At the center of When Home Won’t Let You Stay is the power of artistic thinking to reflect on the complexity of global migration today and to process the heated discourses around it. The featured artists hail from over a dozen countries—such as Colombia, Cuba, France, India, Iraq, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, Palestine, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States—and reveal migration as a universal force that reimagines ideas of home, place, and transit in the 21st century. In our politically divisive and uncertain times, this exhibition positions migration as an utterly common aspect of contemporary life that shapes public rhetoric, opinion, and policy, and touches individual lives in very real ways.

Exhibition Highlights

When Home Won’t Let You Stay responds to how issues of migration and movement can be interpreted through the ICA’s unique position on both sides of the Boston Harbor—in the Seaport and in East Boston, where the ICA opened the Watershed in the summer of 2018. Highlighting such potent sites as the sea, border, home, and nation, the exhibition moves from the global to the local scale.

The sea and bodies of water figure powerfully in many narratives, experiences, and images of migration, and it is one of the most resonant and recurring sites in the exhibition and museum. The sea serves as a leitmotif in Isaac Julien’s symphonic three-channel video Western Union: small boats (2007), filmed on the Italian island of Lampedusa, a location for precarious migrant crossings between Africa and Europe. The blue clothing in Kader Attia’s La Mer Morte (The Dead Sea) (2015) evokes the sea and the migrant and refugee lives lost at sea. The Atlantic Ocean looms large in Xaviera Simmons’s work, which enfolds references to Christopher Columbus’s encounters with American landscape, the transatlantic slave trade, and the Great Migration.

Numerous projects address the navigation of routes, borders, and camps. Reena Saini Kallat maps various routes of the movement of people and goods across oceans with twisted and barbed wires in the site-specific installation Woven Chronicle (2011-16). Richard Mosse’s video work Incoming (2014-17) documents masses of people moving along some of the global migration routes from the Middle East and North Africa into Europe and inhabiting some of the largest refugee camps in Europe. The U.S.-Mexico border is the focus of Guillermo Galindo and Richard Misrach’s multiyear collaboration Border Cantos (2004-16). They bring together images and artifacts gathered at the border, capturing its quality as a no-man’s land, inhospitable territory, and accordingly the distress, and also the determination and resourcefulness, that fuel people’s journeys through these borderlands.

Global migration casts the notion of “home” into sharp relief; the impossibility of returning home, for many, invites the role of memory, movement, and imagination in redefining both the idea of home and the shape of nationhood. Do Ho Suh’s exacting fabric replicas of the dwellings where he has lived in Seoul, Berlin, New York, and other cities, highlight journey, memory, and mobility as constituent parts of home. The exhibition at the ICA concludes with Yinka Shonibare CBE’s The American Library (2018), a room filled floor-to-ceiling with over 6,000 books bound in Dutch wax cloth and imprinted in gold with the names of individuals who are first or second generation immigrants, or descendants of those who moved during the Great Migration, and have made a contribution to American culture. The work’s interactive web platform invites visitors to learn more about the individuals named, and to contribute their family’s own migration stories, establishing the library as an ever expanding, always unfinished archive.

Extending the ICA’s ongoing outreach to and collaboration with schools and surrounding communities, the ICA invited Boston-based artist and educator Anthony Romero to develop a project that he has titled … first in thought, then in action. From the spring of 2019 through the run of the exhibition (Oct. 23, 2019 through Jan. 26, 2020), Romero will organize a series of listening sessions, community gatherings, and performance events at the ICA, the Watershed, and locations in East Boston, offering participants and audiences the opportunity to think through the many impacts of immigration law and policy. Dates and more details about the events will be announced soon. … first in thought, then in action expands ideas, images, questions, and provocations beyond the museum, harnessing the exhibition as a means to invest more deeply in local communities.

Artist List

Kader Attia (Born 1970 in Dugny, France; lives and works in Berlin, Germany and Paris, France)

Yto Barrada (Born 1971 in Paris, France; lives and works in Tangier, Morocco and New York, NY)

Tania Bruguera (Born 1968 in Havana, Cuba; lives and works in Queens, NY)

Rineke Dijkstra (Born 1959 in Sittard, the Netherlands; lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands)

Guillermo Galindo (Born 1960 in Mexico City, Mexico; lives and works in Oakland, CA)

Mona Hatoum (Born 1952 in Beirut, Lebanon; lives and works in London, UK)

Isaac Julien (Born 1960 in London, UK; lives and works in London, UK)

Hayv Kahraman (Born 1981 in Baghad, Iraq; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA)

Reena Saini Kallat (Born 1973 in New Delhi, India; lives and works in Mumbai, India)

Richard Misrach (Born 1949 in Los Angeles, CA; lives and works in Berkeley, CA)

Richard Mosse (Born 1980 in Kilkenny, Ireland; lives and works in New York, NY)

Carlos Motta (Born 1978 in Bogotá, Colombia; lives and works in New York, NY)

Aliza Nisenbaum (Born 1977 in Mexico City, Mexico; lives and works in New York, NY)

Camilo Ontiveros (Born 1978 in Rosario, Sinaloa, Mexico; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA)

Michelle Angela Ortiz (Born 1978 in Philadelphia, PA; lives and works in Philadelphia, PA)

Adrian Piper (Born 1948 in New York, NY; lives and works in Berlin, Germany)

Anthony Romero (Born 1983 in Austin, TX; lives and works in Boston, MA)

Yinka Shonibare CBE (Born 1962 in London, UK; lives and works in London, UK)

Xaviera Simmons (Born 1974 in New York, NY; lives and works in New York, NY)

Do Ho Suh (Born 1962 in Seoul, South Korea; lives and works in London, UK; New York, NY; and Seoul, South Korea)

Catalogue

A richly illustrated scholarly publication edited by Ruth Erickson and Eva Respini accompanies the exhibition, featuring an introduction by Erickson and Respini and texts by scholars and curators Aruna D’Souza, Okwui Enwezor, Thomas Keenan, Peggy Levitt, and Uday Singh Mehta, as well as conversations with artists Tania Bruguera, Guillermo Galindo, Reena Saini Kallat, Hayv Kahraman and Anthony Romero.  

Advisory group

In the process of organizing the exhibition, the ICA convened an advisory group of local scholars, activists, artists, and individuals focused on issues of migration. Over the course of several meetings beginning in the spring of 2018, the curators turned to this group to help to shape the exhibition and consider its language, programming, didactics, and outreach. The committee was made up of the following individuals: Pedro H. Alonzo, Independent Curator; Celina Barrios-Millner, Director of Equity and Inclusion, Mayor’s Office for Economic Development, City of Boston; Matt Cameron, Co-director, the Golden Stairs Immigration Center, and Managing Partner, Cameron Micheroni & Silvia; Monica Garza, Charlotte Wagner Director of Education, ICA/Boston; Cheryl Hamilton, Director of Special Projects, International Institute of New England; Carol León, Outreach and Community Engagement Coordinator, Mayor’s Office for Immigrant Advancement, City of Boston; Noora Lori, Assistant Professor of International Relations, Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University; Timothy Patrick McCarthy, Lecturer on History and Literature, Education, and Public Policy, and Core Faculty, Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Harvard University; Anthony Romero, Professor of the Practice, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University; Adam Strom, Director, Re-imagining Migration; and Mehtap Yağcı, Executive Assistant to the Director at ICA/Boston.

Exhibition-related programs

The presentation of When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art will be enriched by gallery talks and artist talks. More details to be announced soon on icaboston.org.

About the ICA

Since its founding in 1936, the ICA has shared the pleasures of reflection, inspiration, imagination, and provocation that contemporary art offers with its audiences. A museum at the intersection of contemporary art and civic life, the ICA has advanced a bold vision for amplifying the artist’s voice and augmenting art’s role as educator, incubator, and convener for social engagement. Its innovative exhibitions, performances, and educational programs provide access to contemporary art, artists, and the creative process, inviting audiences of all ages and backgrounds to participate in the excitement of new art and ideas. Spanning two locations across Boston Harbor, the ICA offers year-round programming at its iconic building in Boston’s Seaport and seasonal programming (May-September) at the Watershed in an East Boston shipyard.

The ICA is located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA, 02210. The Watershed is located at 256 Marginal Street, East Boston, MA 02128. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at icaboston.org. Follow the ICA at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.       

Support for When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art is generously provided by Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser, Steve Corkin and Dan Maddalena, Alan and Vivien Hassenfeld, Kristen and Kent Lucken, the Poss Family Foundation, and Mark and Marie Schwartz.

Anthony Romero’s …first in thought, then action is supported, in part, by Robert Nagle, a Live Arts Boston grant from the Boston Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. 

 

(Boston, MA—April 30, 2019) The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens the second season of the Watershed, with the U.S. premiere of Purple, an immersive six-channel video installation by acclaimed artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah (b. 1957, Accra, Ghana). East Boston residents and ICA members are invited to preview days at the Watershed on Thursday, May 23–Saturday, May 25. The Watershed opens to the general public on Sunday, May 26 (see detailed schedule below).

Accompanying the presentation of Purple will be maps of Boston Harbor in 2030, 2050, and 2070 that demonstrate rising sea levels using research and data from the City of Boston’s Environment Department and Greenovate Boston.

An installation of photographs by teens from the ICA’s digital photography programs will be on view in the Watershed’s Harbor Room highlighting their perspectives on East Boston.

The 2019 season features a wide range of programming, including Aquí y allá: juntos a la mesa, a series of programs and activities on food, home, and community co-hosted by artist Evelyn Rydz and Eastie Farm’s Kannan Thiruvengadam; a Watershed family day held in conjunction with Eastie Week; and more.

Ticket reservations for the ICA Water Shuttle start May 7 for ICA Members and May 14 for the general public. Admission to the Watershed is always free, and Water Shuttle transportation between the Watershed and the ICA is included with the price of ICA admission, first come first served. Visit icaboston.org for schedule and to reserve tickets.
 

Exhibition

John Akomfrah: Purple
May 26–Sep 2, 2019
Co-commissioned by the ICA and making its U.S. premiere at the ICA Watershed, Purple is an immersive six-channel video installation by the acclaimed artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah (b. 1957, Accra, Ghana). Akomfrah draws from hundreds of hours of archival footage, combining it with newly shot film and a hypnotic sound score to address themes related to the implications of climate change across the planet and its effects on human communities, biodiversity, and the wilderness. Sited in the Watershed’s industrial building, Purple resonates deeply with the Watershed’s harbor location and its proximity to the current and historical maritime industries of the East Boston Shipyard and Marina. Symphonic in scale and divided into five interwoven movements, the film features various disappearing ecological landscapes, from the hinterlands of Alaska and the desolate environments of Greenland to the Tahitian Peninsula and the volcanic Marquesas Islands in the South Pacific. Purple conveys the complex and fragile interrelation of human and non-human life with a sense of poetic gravity that registers the vulnerability of living in precarious environments.
 

Artist Projects

Aquí y allá: juntos a la mesa
(Here and There: Together at the Table)
May 26–Sep 2, 2019
Artist Evelyn Rydz highlights the important role the common table can serve as a site for gathering and for nourishment. Since 2016, Rydz has invited over 250 women to partake in communal meals made of diverse stories through an ongoing multigenerational community project, Comida Casera—Spanish for homemade food or food from home. Participants in Comida Casera events share stories and a dish inspired by a person who had a meaningful impact on their connection to home. Through these simple and welcoming gestures, notions of home and community expand through food and storytelling.

Throughout the summer season, visitors will hear recorded stories collected at past Comida Casera events at Rydz’s lively table. A series of programs and activities on cultivating food, home, and community will be co-hosted by Kannan Thiruvengadam of Eastie Farm and the artist. Visitors will surround themselves with a collection of plants comprising a range of local edible species grown by Thiruvengadam, and reflect on our past, present, and future relationship with food sources. During non-event days/times, visitors are invited to share their stories on cards provided for others to read and reflect on.

Summer 2019 activations of Aquí y allá

Transplant Tales
Sat, Jun 15, 2:30 PM
Stories of transplantation experiences; hosted by Eastie Farm.

Many factors go into how a plant thrives in its soil. Sometimes growers need to transplant their crops from one place to another so it can better flourish. What does it take for not just plants, but also people to successfully take root in a new home? We invite the community to share tales about their own transplantation in this program hosted by Eastie Farm. Listen and participate in this story sharing event about resiliency from the resettling from one home to another.

Solstice Stories
Sat, Jun 22, 2:30 PM
Inspired by the summer sun, farmers share their stories; hosted by Eastie Farm.

What is the Summer Solstice? In this program hosted by Eastie Farm, learn about what role the sun plays in the cultivation of crops in New England compared to other parts of the world. Discussion will also examine the environmental impact on the community from recent and future rising temperatures.

Recetas de casa
Sat, Jul 20, 2:30 PM
Visitors share recipes in this community event with artist Evelyn Rydz.

Artist Evelyn Rydz invites visitors to exchange stories about the food and people in their lives who inspire a sense of home. This is also an opportunity for visitors to speak with Evelyn in person about the project and the ideas surrounding it.

Green Walk/Camino Verde
Sat, July 27, 2:30 PM
A walking tour of community gardens; hosted by Eastie Farm.

Meet at the Watershed to begin a walking tour of community green spaces along East Boston’s Marginal Street. Stops along this walk include the Joseph Ciampa Community Garden, Garden at the Rockies, and the Rockies Urban Wild. Learn from Eastie Farm about how residents of East Boston maintain thriving green spaces in an urban environment, and discuss the role of an “urban wild” in the community.          

Cosecha Comida (Harvest Food)
Sat, Aug 3, 2:30 PM
Exploring harvesting stories; hosted by Eastie Farm.

Cultures across the globe have celebrated different forms of harvest festivals for much of human existence, often taking place in the late summer and early fall after crops have grown bountiful. Thanksgiving, Pongal, and Sukkot are just a few examples of these. Eastie Farm invites participants of this program to tell tales of their experiences of coming together with friends and family to celebrate the sharing of food. 

Eco-walk
Sat, Aug 17, 2:30 PMMeet at the ICA Watershed and tour the East Boston Greenway with conversation about climate and community; hosted by Eastie Farm.

Explore the urban greenspaces of East Boston on this Eco-walk with Eastie Farm. Participants will visit Piers Park and the East Boston Greenway. While touring these spaces near the Waterfront, discuss East Boston’s plans for climate preparedness & resiliency.

Garden Taste
Sat, Aug 24, 2:30 PM
Local chefs discuss their use of local food sources. 

Join artist Evelyn Rydz and co-host Ellie Tiglao, chef and co-owner of Filipino-American restaurant Tanam in Somerville. Surrounding the Aquí y allá installation space, edible plants are grown. Participants are invited to enjoy the harvest by garnishing their dishes with herbs grown on site, and join in community story telling about ancestral food and narrative cuisine. 

A Community in Focus: East Boston
May 26–Sep 2, 2019

This installation of photographs created by teens from the ICA’s digital photography programs highlights their perspectives on East Boston—home for many of them. This initiative was an opportunity to highlight their daily observations and discover new neighborhood sights. Individuals associated with East Boston’s Atlantic Works Gallery, Eastie Farm, and Zumix guided the photographers to favorite sights, introduced them to community members, and shared stories about themselves and the neighborhood. The ICA provided teens with digital cameras to document the people and places, which helped them to gain a better understanding of placemaking and of East Boston’s past and present, and to imagine the neighborhood’s future and their own place within it. Many of the teens continued this exploration on their own time, with cameras in hand. Says ICA Teaching Artist Marlon Orozco, “From exploring the waterline art installations to public gardens, our teens went beyond the lens.”

The ICA offers a variety of programs for teens in schools and neighborhoods throughout the city, including East Boston. Please visit icateens.org to learn more about these programs and to view additional artwork in a range of media.

 

Public Programs

Gallery Talk: Marlon Orozco and Betsy Gibbons
Sun, Jun 9, 2 PM
The ICA Teens spent time in East Boston, exploring the area and interacting with community members. The result of this endeavor is A Community in Focus: East Boston, an exhibition that features twelve captivating photographs by nine youth artists. Join Marlon Orozco, ICA’s teaching artist, and Betsy Gibbons, Director of Teen Programs, as they discuss the process of working on the exhibition with young people, and learn more about the show from the artists themselves.

Watershed Family Day
Sat, Jul 13, 12–4 PM
Join us as we celebrate Eastie Week with a special family day event at the Watershed featuring art making activities, pop-up dance performances, tours in English and Spanish, food, music, and fun! Community partners Bibliocycle, East Boston Social Centers, East Boston Neighborhood Health Center, Maverick Landing Community Services, and Veronica Robles Cultural Center will be on hand with activities. Add a boat ride in the mix with the purchase of an ICA admission ticket for round-trip Water Shuttle service between East Boston and the Seaport. Admissions tickets can be purchased online starting July 5—purchase ahead to reserve your time slot for the Water Shuttle.

 

Tours

ICA Watershed en español
Jun 8, Jun 22, Jul 13, Jul 27, Aug 10, Aug 24 1 PM
Acompañe a un educador bilingüe del ICA el segundo y cuarto sábado de cada mes para realizar una visita guiada gratuita en español en el Watershed del ICA. Estas visitas guiadas dialogadas incluirán una introducción a la historia del Boston Harbor Shipyard and Marina y John Akomfrah: Purple. No se requiere inscripción previa.

Join an ICA educator on the second and fourth Saturday of the month for a free tour in Spanish at the ICA Watershed. These conversational tours will include an introduction to the history of the Boston Harbor Shipyard and Marina and John Akomfrah: Purple. No pre-registration is required.

ICA Watershed Public Tours
Saturdays, June–Aug, 1:30 PM
Learn more about the ICA Watershed and John Akomfrah: Purple during these free, conversational tours led by volunteer tour guides at the ICA. No pre-registration is required.
 

About the Watershed

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.
 

Watershed hours

Tuesday + Wednesday, Saturday + Sunday: 11 AM–5 PM
Thursday + Friday: 11 AM–9 PM
Closed on Mondays, but will be open for special community days on Memorial Day and Labor Day.
 

About the ICA

Since its founding in 1936, the ICA has shared the pleasures of reflection, inspiration, imagination, and provocation that contemporary art offers with its audiences. A museum at the intersection of contemporary art and civic life, the ICA has advanced a bold vision for amplifying the artist’s voice and augmenting art’s role as educator, incubator, and convener for social engagement. Its innovative exhibitions, performances, and educational programs provide access to contemporary art, artists, and the creative process, inviting audiences of all ages and backgrounds to participate in the excitement of new art and ideas. Spanning two locations across Boston Harbor, the ICA offers year-round programming at its iconic building in Boston’s Seaport and seasonal programming (May-September) at the Watershed in an East Boston shipyard.

The ICA is located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA, 02210. The Watershed is located at 256 Marginal Street, East Boston, MA 02128. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at icaboston.org. Follow the ICA at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

John Akomfrah: Purple is organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Cara Kuball, Curatorial Project Manager.

John Akomfrah: Purple has been commissioned by the Barbican, London and co-commissioned by Bildmuseet Umeå, Sweden, TBA21-Academy, The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon and Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow.

Free admission to the ICA Watershed is made possible by the generosity of Alan and Vivien Hassenfeld and the Hassenfeld Family Foundation.

The Boston Foundation welcomes you to the ICA Watershed.

The Boston Foundation logo

The ICA Watershed is supported by Fund for the Arts, a public art program of the New England Foundation for the Arts.

NEFA logo

 

Sweeping exhibition features work of an intergenerational group of artists, including Polly Apfelbaum, Sanford Biggers, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Jeffrey Gibson, Joyce Kozloff, Jasper Johns, Sol LeWitt, Virgil Marti, Howardena Pindell, Miriam Schapiro, Ettore Sottsass, and Kehinde Wiley

(Boston, MA—April 2, 2019) The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) presents Less Is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design, a sweeping survey examining how artists have used ornamentation, pattern, and decorative modes to critique, subvert, and transform accepted histories and trajectories related to craft and design, gender, multiculturalism, beauty, and taste. Less Is a Bore begins in the early 1970s with works of art that sought to challenge established hierarchies that privileged fine art over applied art, and Western art over other art histories and traditions. The exhibition continues to the present, dipping into 1980s postmodern painting and appropriation art, multiculturalist expressions of the 1990s, and more recent craft-based practices that chart the legacy and transformation of these trajectories. The exhibition features more than 40 artists and is comprised of over 60 works, including a new site-specific, room-size installation by Virgil Marti and works made for the exhibition by Ron Amstutz, Polly Apfelbaum, Taylor Davis, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Dianna Molzan, and Pae White. On view June 26 through September 22, 2019, Less Is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design is organized by Jenelle Porter, guest curator, with Jeffrey De Blois, Assistant Curator

“Less Is a Bore dazzles us with works by well-known artists like Sol LeWitt and Jasper Johns presented in a new light and alongside artists like Howardena Pindell and Miriam Schapiro who, in the 1970s, used materials and techniques long associated with craft, domesticity, and women. As with all of Jenelle’s exhibitions, she visually upends conventional thinking and established narratives, offering a more horizontal view of creativity and artistic production,” said Jill Medvedow, the ICA’s Ellen Matilda Poss Director.

“The artists in Less Is a Bore subscribe to a maximalist philosophy. They embrace heterogeneity, complexity, and excess. They resist expediency. The experience of the exhibition, in real life, is intended to be lush, crowded, overwhelming, seductive, haptic, adorned, patterned, and decorated,” said Porter.

Borrowing its attitude from architect Robert Venturi’s witty retort to Mies van der Rohe’s modernist edict “less is more,” the exhibition showcases a field of creative production that proves decoration, patterning, and ornament to be multivalent and exceedingly adaptable methods to make artworks that reference ideas, forms, and symbols at once personal and political, contemporary and historical, local and global. Less Is a Bore includes painting, sculpture, furniture, costume, print, collage, drawing, textile, video, film, photography, performance (in recorded forms), tapestry, and wallpaper. Spanning a concise fifty-year period, the exhibition focuses on shared connections among artists and designers who espouse strategies that include pattern, decoration, and maximalism, and on the ways that appropriation, quotation, and borrowing can in fact be considered tools of fidelity to original sources.

The first two rooms of the exhibition situate the work of artists associated with Pattern and Decoration, an art movement inaugurated in New York in 1975, such as Valerie Jaudon, Robert Kushner, Joyce Kozloff, Miriam Schapiro, and Robert Zakanitch alongside other works from the same era that challenged entrenched artistic categories. Jaudon’s Pantherburn (1979), a metallic painting that synthesizes the architectural language of Romanesque and Gothic arches, for example, hangs next to Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing 280 (1976), an architecturally-scaled work and one of the artist’s earliest to adopt color. The exhibition continues these juxtapositions, for example with formally similar patterning in Jasper Johns’s print Scent (1976), Howardena Pindell’s Autobiography: Artemis (1986), and Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates’s custom fabric Grandmother (1983).

The third room includes a gathering of works that explore the use of vegetal ornamentation, from arabesques and French curves to other natural motifs. Frank Stella’s Brazilian Merganser, 5.5X (1980) from his Exotic Bird series—which marked the artist’s radical turn to dimension, color, and shape—is viewed with Nancy Graves’s Trace (1979–80), a cast-bronze polychromed and patinated sculpture that resembles a schematic tree. The flower and plant motifs that characterize paintings by Christopher Wool and Philip Taaffe echo in Polly Apfelbaum’s floor-bound painting Small Townsville (2001) and Laura Owens’s frieze-like Untitled (2015), creating a rich constellation of works that share a vocabulary of ornamentation.  

The exhibition continues by looking to both the decorated body and the body in décor. The provocative “Looks” of Leigh Bowery, an iconic and iconoclastic fashion designer and performer captured by photographer Fergus Greer, are presented along with Jeffrey Gibson’s DON’T MAKE ME OVER (2018), an adorned performance garment that hangs from horizontally suspended teepee poles. Miriam Schapiro’s Vestiture: Paris Series # 2 (1979), a robe shape composed of collaged printed fabrics is installed next to  Ellen Lesperance’s Wounded Amazon series, colored gouache paintings based on knitting patterns that depict abstracted garments commemorating ancient and recent tragedies. 

The final room of the exhibition gathers recent maximalist artworks and design objects. From Sanford Biggers’s painting on collaged antique quilts and Betty Woodman’s monumental installation of painted ceramic surfaces, to Marcel Wanders’s sensuous, golden Bon Bon chair and Virgil Marti’s decorated trompe l’oeil environment, these works demonstrate the continued significance of pattern, decoration, and maximalism in contemporary practice.  
 

Artist list

Ron Amstutz (b. 1968, Youngstown, OH)
Polly Apfelbaum (b. 1955, Abington Township, PA)
Jennifer Bartlett (b. 1941, Long Beach, CA)
Sanford Biggers (b. 1970, Los Angeles)
Tord Boontje (b. 1968, Enschende, The Netherlands)
Leigh Bowery (b. 1961, Sunshine, Australia; d. 1995, London) and Fergus Greer (b. England)
Roger Brown (b. 1941, Hamilton, AL; d. 1997, Atlanta)
Taylor Davis (b. 1959, Palm Springs, CA)
Nathalie Du Pasquier (b. 1957, Bordeaux, France)
Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian (b. 1922, Qazvin, Iran; d. 2019, Tehran, Iran) 
Jeffrey Gibson (b. 1972, Colorado Springs, CO)
Nancy Graves (b. 1939, Pittsfield, MA; d. 1995, New York)
Valerie Jaudon (b. 1945, Greenville, MS)
Jasper Johns (b. 1930, Augusta, GA)
Joyce Kozloff (b. 1942, Somerville, NJ)
Robert Kushner (b. 1949, Pasadena, CA)
Ellen Lesperance (b. 1971, Minneapolis)
Sol LeWitt (b. 1928, Hartford, CT; d. 2007, New York)
Liza Lou (b. 1969, New York)
Babette Mangolte (b. 1941, Montmorot, France) and Lucinda Childs (b. 1940, New York)
Virgil Marti (b. 1962, St. Louis)
Dianna Molzan (b. 1972, Tacoma, WA)
Joel Otterson (b. 1959, Los Angeles)
Laura Owens (b. 1970, Euclid, OH)
Howardena Pindell (b. 1943, Philadelphia)
Lari Pittman (b. 1952, Los Angeles)
Ruth Root (b. 1967, Chicago)
Lucas Samaras (b. 1936, Kastoria, Greece)
Zoe Pettijohn Schade (b. 1973, Boston)
Miriam Schapiro (b. 1923, Toronto; d. 2015, Hampton Bays, NY)
Ettore Sottsass (b. 1917, Innsbruck, Austria; d. 2007, Milan)
Frank Stella (b. 1936, Malden, MA)
Stephanie Syjuco (b. 1974, Manila, Philippines)
Philip Taaffe (b. 1955, Elizabeth, NJ)
Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates (founded 1960 as Venturi & Associates, Philadelphia)
Marcel Wanders (b. 1963, Boxtel, The Netherlands)
Pae White (b. 1963, Pasadena, CA)
Kehinde Wiley (b. 1977, Los Angeles)
Franklin Williams (b. 1940, Ogden, UT)
Betty Woodman (b. 1930, Norwalk, CT; d. 2018, New York)
Christopher Wool (b. 1955, Chicago)
Haegue Yang (b. 1971, Seoul)
Ray Yoshida (b. 1930, Kapaa, Hawaii, HI; d. 2009, Kauai, HI)
Robert Zakanitch (b. 1935, Elizabeth, NJ)

Catalogue

The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated publication featuring essays by Elissa Auther, Amy Goldin, and Jenelle Porter.
 

Exhibition press preview

June 25, 2019 | 9:30–11:00 AM
Media are invited to attend a tour of the exhibition led by Jenelle Porter. RSVP to Margaux Leonard, mleonard@icaboston.org.
 

Exhibition-related programs

The presentation of Less Is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design will be enriched by gallery talks and artist talks. More details to be announced soon.
 

About the ICA

Since its founding in 1936, the ICA has shared the pleasures of reflection, inspiration, imagination, and provocation that contemporary art offers with its audiences. A museum at the intersection of contemporary art and civic life, the ICA has advanced a bold vision for amplifying the artist’s voice and augmenting art’s role as educator, incubator, and convener for social engagement. Its innovative exhibitions, performances, and educational programs provide access to contemporary art, artists, and the creative process, inviting audiences of all ages and backgrounds to participate in the excitement of new art and ideas. Spanning two locations across Boston Harbor, the ICA offers year-round programming at its iconic building in Boston’s Seaport and seasonal programming (May-September) at the Watershed in an East Boston shipyard.

The ICA is located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA, 02210. The Watershed is located at 256 Marginal Street, East Boston, MA 02128. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at icaboston.org. Follow the ICA at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Support for Less Is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design is generously provided by Kate and Charles Brizius, Karen and Brian Conway, Fotene Demoulas and Tom Coté, Alan and Vivien Hassenfeld, Jodi and Hal Hess, Tristin and Martin Mannion, and Cynthia and John Reed.

Support for the Less Is a Bore publication provided by Peggy J Koenig and Dell and Tim Mitchell.