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Visitors of all ages can create their own art inspired by Nance’s wearable sculptures and have the opportunity for their creation to become the artist’s next sculpture

(Boston, MA—October 4, 2018) The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) has invited artist Dennis Nance to create an interactive art installation in the museum’s Bank of America Art Lab with the debut of Character Study, opening October 13. Nance, who has been described as a “wizard of word, wardrobe, and wonder,” makes wearable sculptures that bring a sense of humor and play to our everyday surroundings. Popsicles, cacti, gingerbread men, turkeys, and patched quilts have been among the focus of Nance’s character studies over the years. For the artist, there are many reasons to add laughter and play into our daily lives. His wearable sculptures show us new ways to enjoy our everyday surroundings just by using our imagination and creativity. Nance seeks to find the moment when a costume transforms not only the person wearing it, but the environment it inhabits and the audience it interacts with.

In Character Study, visitors of all ages are invited to explore pattern, texture, materials, and develop their own unique character ideas. These ideas will be displayed as ‘character study’ cards in the Bank of America Art Lab and Nance will choose one completed card to create his next wearable sculpture. Check back with us on February 1, 2019 to see what he creates!

Character Study will be open on Saturdays and Sundays from 12–4 PM, from October 13, 2018 through March 17, 2019. The activity is free for all visitors with museum admission.

Meet the Artist on Saturday, October 20 from 12–4 PM
Visitors are invited to meet Dennis Nance, who will be wearing one of his sculptures, and learn more about his creative process. More information at icaboston.org.

ICA Play Date on October 27 from 10 AM–4 PM

Visitors can tour the galleries and then stop by the Bank of America Art Lab at a forthcoming ICA Play Date with the theme “Spooky (but not scary!) Contemporary Escapades.” Families can also attend hip-hop and freestyle dance and movement workshops in our Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater. For ICA Play Dates, admission is free for up to 2 adults per family when accompanied by children ages 12 and under. Youth 17 and under are always admitted free to the ICA. All ages welcome; programs best-suited for ages 6 and older. 

Also on View
Character Study will be open during the ICA’s collection exhibition Entangled in the Everyday, on view through April 7, 2019. Eliciting the wondrous from the mundane, this exhibition presents major works that showcase artists’ engagement and entanglement with the everyday. It includes works by Tara Donovan, Nari Ward, Lynda Benglis, Sheila Hicks, Anthony Hernandez, Sanya Kantarovsky, Robert Pruitt, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and others from the ICA’s permanent collection. All of these artists have creatively engaged with their daily worlds, inviting others to partake in the beauty, dignity, and reality of the everyday.

About the Artist
Dennis Nance is an artist and curator from Houston, Texas. He was appointed as Curator for the Galveston Arts Center in 2016. From 2007 to 2016, Nance was Exhibitions & Programming Director for Lawndale Art Center in Houston, Texas, where he worked extensively with local and regional artists through over 20 exhibitions annually and the Lawndale Artist Studio Program. He currently serves on the Artist Advisory Board for DiverseWorks, Houston, TX. Nance is a practicing artist and was awarded an Individual Artist Grant from the Houston Arts Alliance and an Idea Fund Award, administered through Aurora Picture Show, DiverseWorks Artspace and Project Row Houses and funded by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, in 2015. He has exhibited his work at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, The Brandon, BOX13 ArtSpace and the Menil Collection bookstore. He received his BA from Austin College in Sherman, TX with a concentration in Fine Arts and French.

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.

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

This September, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) launches the tour of interdisciplinary artist Jason Moran’s first museum exhibition. Moran’s work is grounded in musical composition, yet bridges the visual and performing arts through stagecraft. Moran, who has taught at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston since 2010, is known for using personal experience to create dynamic musical compositions that challenge the conventional form of the medium. His experimental approach to artmaking embraces the intersection of objects and sound, pushing beyond the traditional staged concert or sculpture and drawing to amplify ways that both are inherently theatrical. This exhibition features the range of work Moran has explored, from his own sculptural pieces and collaborations with visual artists to performances. On view from Sept. 19, 2018 through Jan. 21, 2019, Jason Moran is organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and curated by Adrienne Edwards with Danielle Jackson. The Boston presentation is coordinated by Jeffrey De Blois, Assistant Curator.
 
In all aspects of his work, Moran’s creative process is informed by one of the essential tenets of jazz music: the “set” in which musicians come together to engage in a collaborative process of improvisation, riffing off of one another to create the musical experience. The exhibition will highlight Moran’s mixed-media “set” installations STAGED: Savoy Ballroom 1 and STAGED: Three Deuces (both 2015), sculptural vignettes based on storied music venues from past eras that were his acclaimed contributions to the 2015 Venice Biennale. The presentation includes the premiere of a new sculptural commission from this series that takes inspiration from the celebrated New York jazz venue Slugs’ Saloon, which was open from 1964 to the early 1970s. Also featured will be a selection of Moran’s most recent charcoal drawings and time-based media works from his long-standing collaborations, or sets, with visual artists including Joan Jonas, Lorna Simpson, Glenn Ligon, Julie Mehretu and Theaster Gates.
 
In-gallery musical performances, activating the sculptures, will be orchestrated during the run of the show to complement the gallery presentation.
 

Exhibition-Related Programming

Fri, Oct 12, 8 PM
Jason Moran and the Bandwagon
$50 ICA members + students / $60 nonmembers

Hailed as one of contemporary jazz’s most inventive and innovative performers, pianist and composer Jason Moran’s musical influences range from historical jazz giants like Fats Waller and Thelonious Monk to contemporary visual artists like Kara Walker and Glenn Ligon. At the ICA, Moran’s abundant talents will be on full display. The evening opens with a solo piano set, followed by a performance with his trio The Bandwagon, celebrating their 20th anniversary this year.
 

Thu, Nov 15, 7 PM
The Artist’s Voice: Jason Moran with Glenn Ligon

Ten years ago, Jason Moran created the soundtrack for Glenn Ligon’s The Death of Tom, an abstractionist recreation of the final scene of the 1903 silent film Uncle Tom’s Cabin, based on the novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Join the artists in revisiting this important collaboration with a screening and live performance, and hear more about Moran’s expansive creative practice and his first touring exhibition in a conversation led by Ligon. Free with museum admission.
 

About the Artist

Jazz pianist, composer, and visual artist Jason Moran (b. 1975, Houston) earned a degree from the Manhattan School of Music. He was named Ford Foundation The Art of Change Fellow in 2017 with his wife and collaborator Alicia Hall Moran, a MacArthur Fellow in 2010, and is the Artistic Director for Jazz at The Kennedy Center. Moran currently teaches at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, MA. Moran has produced 11 albums and six film soundtracks, including scores for Ava DuVernay’s films Selma and 13th. He has collaborated with visual artists, including Joan Jonas, Adam Pendleton, Glenn Ligon, Kara Walker, Lorna Simpson, Stan Douglas, Theaster Gates, among others. His work was featured in the 2015 Venice Biennale.
 

Tour Schedule

After the ICA, the exhibition will travel to stops in the Midwest and East Coat, including the Wexner Center for the Arts at the Ohio State University (June 1 – August 11, 2019).
 

Acknowledgments

Jason Moran is made possible with generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the William and Nadine McGuire Commissioning Fund. Additional support provided by Mike and Elizabeth Sweeney. Piano by Steinway & Sons.
 

About the ICA

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

The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) presents compelling performances, artist talks, and films as part of the upcoming season. Highlights include a musical performance by interdisciplinary artist and jazz composer Jason Moran with his trio The Bandwagon, dance performances by acclaimed choreographer Twyla Tharp and the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, the Boston debut of Abby Zbikowski’s hyperphysical dance, Alessandro Sciarroni’s evening-length work almost entirely composed of juggling, and a free talk by renowned choreographer and artist William Forsythe.

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.
 

Music

Fri, Oct 12, 8 PM
Jason Moran and the Bandwagon
$50 ICA members + students / $60 nonmembers

Hailed as one of contemporary jazz’s most inventive and innovative performers, pianist and composer Jason Moran’s musical influences range from historical jazz giants like Fats Waller and Thelonious Monk contemporary visual artists like Kara Walker and Glenn Ligon. At the ICA, Moran’s abundant talents will be on full display. The evening opens with a solo piano set, followed by a performance with his trio The Bandwagon, celebrating their 20th anniversary this year. Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Jason Moran, which will be on view in the galleries prior to the performance.
 

Thu, Feb 28, 8 PM
The Music of Klaus Lang featuring Yarn/Wire and Sound Icon
$10 ICA members + students / $20 nonmembers

Austrian composer Klaus Lang’s compositions reflect a keen understanding of the musical canon, from early-17th-century composers like Frescobaldi to 20th-century experimentalists like John Cage and Morton Feldman. Catalyzed by history, his compositions conjure a strange and mesmerizing sound world that exists somewhere between the past and the present. At the ICA, two highly acclaimed ensembles will interpret Lang’s music. The percussion and piano quartet Yarn/Wire will perform molten trees (2017), and members of the Boston-based sinfonietta Sound Icon will perform weisse aepfel (2009). Co-presented with the Boston University Center for New Music.
 

Dance

Fri, Sep 21, 8 PM
Sat, Sep 22, 7 PM
Trajal Harrell
Caen Amour
$15 ICA members + students / $25 nonmembers

Choreographer Trajal Harrell, creator of the series Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at Judson Church, merges history, ritual, and fantasy to reinterpret our ideas of the past. In his newest work, Caen Amour, Harrell and his dancers resurrect the hoochie-coochie show, an exotic and erotic spectacle that debuted at World’s Fairs in Europe and America in the 19th century. These seductive dance spectacles emerged at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, as precursors to vaudeville and striptease. For Harrell, the hoochie-coochie was a pioneering moment when female artists presented performances on the boundary between entertainment, erotic dancing, and early experiments in modern dance. Part fashion show, part strip tease, Caen Amour weaves a spellbinding tableau of history, spectacle, and imagination. Please note: this performance contains nudity.
 

Fri, Nov 9 + Sat, Nov 10, 8 PM
Abby Z and the New Utility
abandoned playground
$15 ICA members + students / $25 nonmembers

In Abby Zbikowski’s abandoned playground, nine dancers rip through the theater performing complex sequences of hyperphysical dance that push them to the brink of their capabilities and endurance. In this evening length work, Zbikowski highlights each dancer’s unique strengths and forges an intense ensemble connection through vocalizations and the channeling of communal energy. Performing such extreme and virtuosic movement at a relentless pace, the dancers invigorate and push each other to overcome their physical and mental exhaustion. Recognized with the 2017 Juried Bessie Award for her “unique and utterly authentic movement vocabulary in complex and demanding structures,” Abby Zbikowski generates her bold, high-intensity, precisely rhythmic choreography from her background of hip-hop, tap, West African, and postmodern dance styles, deeply-rooted punk aesthetic, and close collaboration with her dancers, who bring their specific bodies, psychologies, and training histories to the work.
 

Thu, Dec 13 + Fri, Dec 14, 8 PM
Sat, Dec 15, 2 PM + 8 PM
Sun, Dec 16, 2 PM
Twyla Tharp
Minimalism and Me
Thu + matinees: $45 ICA members and students/$55 nonmembers
Fri + Sat evening: $55 ICA members and students/$65 nonmembers

In Minimalism and Me legendary artist Twyla Tharp, one of the most acclaimed choreographers of her generation, recollects her early works and experiences, as dancers from Twyla Tharp Dance recreate excerpts from the works she discusses. Accompanied by never-before-seen photographs and original cast films of several of her site-specific and gender-fluid performances, the program illuminates the progression of the Minimalism movement in the 1960s and 1970s and the influence it had on her choreography. The program draws from twenty important works Tharp made between 1965 and 1970 created for different spaces, including museums and the outdoors, and performed in silence. There will be a pre-performance talk by former Tharp dancer Richard Colton 30 minutes before each performance. Minimalism and Me is a Summer Stages Dance @ the ICA/Boston project.

Feature dance excerpts:

  • Tank Dive (1965)
  • Re-Moves (1966)
  • Disperse (1967)
  • Generation (1968)
  • After ‘Suite’ (1969)
  • Medley (1969)
  • Dancing in the Streets of London and Paris, continued in Stockholm, and sometimes Madrid (1969)
  • The Fugue (1970)
  • The One Hundreds

 

Thu, Feb 14–Sun, Feb 17 
Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company
Analogy Trilogy
Thu, Feb 14, 8 PM: Analogy/Dora: Tramontane
Fri, Feb 15, 8 PM: Analogy/Lance: Pretty aka The Escape Artist
Sat, Feb 16, 8 PM: Analogy/Ambrose: The Emigrant
Sun, Feb 17, 2 PM: Analogy/Ambrose: The Emigrant
$30 ICA members + students / $40 nonmembers

Developed by Bill T. Jones with Associate Artistic Director Janet Wong, Analogy Trilogy is based on oral histories and inspired by W. G. Sebald’s award-winning novel The Emigrants. Part one, Analogy/Dora: Tramontane, recounts the story of Dora Amelan, a French Jewish nurse, social worker, and World War II survivor. Part Two, Analogy/Lance: Pretty aka The Escape Artist is a tragic yet humorous journey through the sex trade and drug use of the 1980s. The final part of the trilogy, Ambros: The Emigrant, tells the story of a German valet and his glamorous travels with his charge Cosmos through Europe and the Middle East on the eve of WWI, and then his life after Cosmo’s descent into madness and death.
 

Fri, Mar 15 + Sat, Mar 16, 8 PM
Alessandro Sciarroni
UNTITLED­_I will be there when you die
$15 ICA members + students / $25 nonmembers

Italian visual artist and choreographer Alessandro Sciarroni returns to the ICA with a hypnotic reflection on the passing of time. Working with a cast of four professional jugglers, Sciarroni emphasizes the performers’ discipline, focus, and concentration to thrilling effect. By stripping away the trappings of the circus, Sciarroni illustrates the essential elements of juggling and the medium’s nearly endless combination of patterns and tosses. Every toss and every catch marks the passage of time—a hypnotic and thrilling effect—again and again and again.
 

Fri, Apr 12 + Sat, Apr 13, 8 PM
Claudia Rankine, Will Rawls, and John Lucas
What Remains
$15 ICA members + students / $25 nonmembers

Boston-born choreographer Will Rawls returns for a performance collaboration with MacArthur Fellow Claudia Rankine and filmmaker John Lucas. What Remains is an investigation of cultural violence and disappearance through movement, language, installation, and projection. Inspired by Rankine’s texts on racial violence—Citizen and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely—What Remains explores hidden histories, broken tongues, and premature death in the lives of African Americans. Featuring performers Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, Leslie Cuyjet, Jessica Pretty, and Tara Aisha Willis. What Remains is a Summer Stages Dance @ the ICA/Boston project.
 

Film

Sun, Sep 16, 3 PM
Black Radical Imagination
$5 for members + students / $10 nonmembers

Black Radical Imagination is an international touring program of moving image shorts that highlights new stories by filmmakers and visual artists from within the African diaspora. This year’s program, FUGITIVE TRAJECTORIES, meditates on the various ways Black people are tending to their lives despite traumatic histories, both personal and collective, and a troubling present. Black Radical Imagination is cofounded by Erin Christovale and Amir George, and the 2018 program is curated by Jheanelle Brown and Darol Olu Kae. Participating artists include Ephraim Asili, Frances Bodomo, Alima Lee, Jenn Nkiru, Amelia Umuhire, and dana washington. Jheanelle Brown will be in attendance.
 

Sun, Oct 21, 3 PM 
Where the Pavement Ends
$6 for members + students / $12 nonmembers

The death of Michael Brown, shot by a Ferguson, Missouri police officer in 2014, was national news after protests erupted there. But the history of Ferguson, a formerly whites-only “sundown town,” and the neighboring black town of Kinloch, now semi-abandoned, is not well known. Incorporating reflections of residents of Kinloch and Ferguson (including Gillooly, who grew up in Ferguson), this film explores the relationship between these two towns. Beginning with a 1960s roadblock that divided then-white Ferguson from black Kinloch, the film depicts a micro-history of race relations in America. Filmmakers Jane Gillooly, Khary Saeed Jones, Aparna Agrawal, in attendance.
 

Sun, Nov 11
Boston Jewish Film Festival
$5 for members + students / $10 nonmembers

Join the ICA for the 30th Annual Boston Jewish Film Festival on November 11. The Boston Jewish Film Festival presents premieres of documentary and narrative films with Jewish themes from around the world. Films are followed by conversations with filmmakers and special guests. The Boston Jewish Film Festival runs November 7–19 and will be at the ICA all day on November 11. Check bjff.org for more details.
 

Talks

Free with museum admission, unless otherwise specified.

Thu, Sep 27, 7 PM
The Artist’s Voice: Dindga McCannon 

Exhibiting artist Dindga McCannon visits the ICA for the closing week of the exhibition We Wanted A Revolution. McCannon, who is an author, illustrator, painter, and more, actively participated in critical moments in the history of art, including as a member of the Weisui Artist Collective in the 1960s and the Where We At collective composed of professional women of color who supported one another’s creative careers in the 1970s. Join McCannon as she recalls her earlier years as an artist in New York, her many subsequent accomplishments as an artist, and her active involvement in this expansive touring exhibition that recognizes the many important contributions of women of color from the 1960s to 80s. 
 

Thu, Nov 15, 7 PM
The Artist’s Voice: Jason Moran with Glenn Ligon

Ten years ago, Jason Moran created the soundtrack for Glenn Ligon’s The Death of Tom, an abstractionist recreation of the final scene of the 1903 silent film Uncle Tom’s Cabin, based on the novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Join the artists in revisiting this important collaboration with a screening and live performance, and hear more about Moran’s expansive creative practice and his first touring exhibition in a conversation led by Ligon.
 

Thu, Feb 21, 7 PM 
The Artist’s Voice: William Forsythe

William Forsythe is counted among the foremost choreographers of our time. Parallel to his stage productions, Forsythe has developed installations, sculptures, and films that he calls Choreographic Objects. In this public program, Forsythe will be in conversation with Barbara Lee Chief Curator Eva Respini about his artistic practice, choreographic objects, physical thinking, and problem solving in his work.
 

Fall Exhibitions

Jason Moran
Sep 19, 2018–Jan 21, 2019

The first museum presentation of interdisciplinary artist Jason Moran features the full range of Moran’s work from performance and collaborations with visual artists to his own sculptural works. Moran, who has taught at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston since 2010, is known for using personal experience to create dynamic musical compositions that challenge the conventional form of the medium. His experimental approach to artmaking embraces the intersection of objects and sound, pushing beyond the traditional staged concert or sculpture and drawing to amplify ways that both are inherently theatrical. In-gallery musical performances, activating the sculptures, will be orchestrated during the run of the show. Jason Moran is organized by the Walker Art Center; the Boston presentation is organized by Jeffrey De Blois, Assistant Curator.
 

William Forsythe: Choreographic Objects
Oct 31, 2018–Feb 24, 2019

The ICA presents the first comprehensive U.S. exhibition of celebrated artist and world-renowned choreographer William Forsythe. Spanning over two decades of Forsythe’s work, this major exhibition includes room-size interactive sculptures, participatory objects, and video installations. Since the 1990s, parallel to his stage productions, Forsythe has developed site-responsive, interactive works that are designed to stimulate movement and invite the viewer to confront and engage with the fundamental principles of choreography. Forsythe calls these works Choreographic Objects. Via the artist’s instructions for action posted on the wall next to the works, visitors are encouraged to move freely through the performative exhibition and generate an infinite range of individual choreographies. In shifting choreographic thinking from the trained dancer to the layperson, and from the stage to the gallery, Forsythe emphasizes that choreography is possible everywhere. This exhibition is organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Jeffrey De Blois, Assistant Curator.

 

Acknowledgments

Support for the ICA’s 2018–19 Performance Season is provided by Vivien and Alan Hassenfeld and Ellen Poss. 
 
Coproduction support for Caen Amour: Barbican Center (London), Kampnagel (Hamburg), Festival Avignon, Theater Freiburg, Arsenic (Lausanne), Gessnerallee (Zurich), ICA/Boston, Kaaitheater (Brussels), Productiehuis Rotterdam.
 
Also supported by TANZFONDS ERBE- German Federal Cultural Foundation Initiative
 
The ICA’s presentation of Twyla Tharp: Minimalism and Me is made possible, in part, with the generous support of George and Ann Colony.

Minimalism and Me and What Remains are Summer Stages Dance @ the ICA/Boston projects and are made possible, in part, with the support of Jane Karol and Howard Cooper, David Parker, The Aliad Fund, George and Ann Colony, and Stephanie and Leander McCormick-Goodhart.
 
Additional support for Will Rawls’s residency comes from the American Repertory Theater.
 
We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 is organized by the Brooklyn  Museum. Support for the Boston presentation is provided by The Robert E. Davoli and Eileen L. McDonagh Charitable Foundation, Fotene Demoulas and Tom Coté, Allison and EdwardJohnson, Barbara Lee, David and Leslie Puth, and Charles and Fran Rodgers.
 
Jason Moran is organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and is made possible with generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the William and Nadine McGuire Commissioning Fund. Additional support provided by Mike and Elizabeth Sweeney. Piano by Steinway & Sons.


 
William Forsythe: Choreographic Objects is sponsored by First Republic Bank and Saks Fifth Avenue. 
 
Additional support is generously provided by Edward Berman and Kathleen McDonough and Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser.

Bill T. Jones, Analogy/Abrose: The Emigrant. Photo by Paul B. Goode 

First comprehensive U.S. exhibition provides an in-depth look at the art of world-renowned choreographer

(Boston, MA—July 27, 2018) On October 31, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens the first comprehensive U.S. exhibition of celebrated artist and world-renowned choreographer William Forsythe. Spanning over two decades of Forsythe’s work, this major exhibition includes room-size interactive sculptures, participatory objects, and video installations. Since the 1990s, parallel to his stage productions, Forsythe has developed site-responsive, interactive works that are designed to stimulate movement and invite the viewer to confront and engage with the fundamental principles of choreography. Forsythe calls these works Choreographic Objects. Via the artist’s instructions for action posted on the wall next to the works, visitors are encouraged to move freely through the performative exhibition and generate an infinite range of individual choreographies. In shifting choreographic thinking from the trained dancer to the layperson, and from the stage to the gallery, Forsythe emphasizes that choreography is possible everywhere. On view October 31, 2018 through February 21, 2019, William Forsythe: Choreographic Objects is organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Jeffrey De Blois, Assistant Curator. 

“In this sweeping survey, William Forsythe presents movement and gesture as a mindful and expressive act for all human beings,” said Jill Medvedow, the ICA’s Ellen Matilda Poss Director. “Forsythe’s work is inspiring, generous, and empowering. The ICA is proud to present the artist’s first comprehensive solo museum exhibition in the United States.”

“Forsythe goes beyond the innovations of avant-garde dance and performance art to query the relationship between performer and audience,” said Respini. “Through the medium of choreography, he explores ideas that resonate with some of the most daring artistic experiments of the past fifty years. His overarching proposition is radical in the way that it alters our understanding of the body as a material to be molded within the public sphere.”

Forsythe is counted among the foremost choreographers of our time. For over four decades, he has created productions that redefine classical ballet’s vocabulary, and his groundbreaking approach to choreography, staging, lighting, and dance analysis has influenced countless choreographers and artists. William Forsythe: Choreographic Objects coincides with Forsythe’s long-term partnership with Boston Ballet. On March 7, 2019, Boston Ballet will debut his first world premiere created on an American company in over two decades at the Boston Opera House as part of the Full on Forsythe program, presenting a unique opportunity for audiences to experience the full range of Forsythe’s pioneering body of work—both in the galleries and on stage.

Exhibition Highlights
The exhibition presents large-scale installations, objects, and videos, encompassing several aspects of movement and audience participation. Forsythe’s Choreographic Objects fall into three broad categories: large-scale interactive installations that invite viewers to move through an environment; smaller-scale sculptures that engage them in a haptic, or tactile, experience; and video-sculptures where the body is the sole sculptural element. Each work answers the driving question posed by Forsythe ‘What could physical thinking look like?’ in a different way, and each visitor answers it in their own deeply personal way. Several works have been developed in response to the architecture of the ICA.

  • In Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time, No. 3 (2015), Forsythe creates an interactive maze with eighty hanging pendulums that the viewer is invited to enter and navigate through. The participants are instructed to avoid touching the pendulums with their body. The pendulums are programmed to move separately, thus challenging visitors’ perceptions and reflexes as they move through the installation.
  • In Towards the Diagnostic Gaze (2013), participants are instructed to hold a feather duster absolutely still, an impossible task because of the continuous internal movements of the body that are often otherwise undetectable. As in all of Forsythe’s Choreographic Objects, participants are compelled to consider the body’s physical capacities, casting into relief its strengths and limitations as part of Forsythe’s decades-long investigation of action-based knowledge.
  • In The Fact of Matter (2009), which is comprised of dozens of gymnastic rings hanging from the ceiling at varying heights, the artist invites viewers to traverse the space only using the rings. Participants become acutely aware of gravitational pull and are prompted to think about physical limitations, the illusion of weightlessness, the inevitability of failure, and the heroism of Sisyphean endeavor, all steadfast concerns of Forsythe.
  • The video installation Alignigung 2 (2017) features the dancers Rauf “Rubberlegz” Yasit and Riley Watts, who both have highly flexible joints and unique organizational sensibilities. At first glance, the work appears to be a still image, but close looking reveals it to be a video showing a knot of bodies moving with glacial slowness. In this human “entanglement,” the complex “threading” of these bodies into their own negative spaces creates visual conundrums that frequently defy the apparent logic of the situation. The title is a word play that, like the human situation it describes, threads two languages together. The English word “align” sounds like the German word allein (alone) and is fused with the German word Einigung (agreement). The result is a pun and a paradox—to align with oneself and another at the same time.

Catalogue
The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated publication, co-published with Prestel Publishing/Delmonico Books, which will be an important resource and scholarly contribution. The publication features major essays by writers from the disciplines of both art and dance, including Respini, Roslyn Sulcas, Rebecca M. Groves, Daniel Birnbaum, Susan Leigh Foster, Molly Nesbit, as well as a conversation between Forsythe and co-editor Louise Neri.

The Artist’s Voice: William Forsythe
Thursday, February 21, 7 PM
In this public program, Forsythe will be in conversation with Barbara Lee Chief Curator Eva Respini about his artistic practice, choreographic objects, physical thinking, and problem solving in his work. Event is free, but tickets are required.

About the Artist
William Forsythe was born in New York in 1949, and resides in Vermont. Trained in classical ballet in Florida and New York, Forsythe joined the Stuttgart Ballett in 1973 and went on to direct the Ballett Frankfurt for twenty years. He directed the smaller, more specialized The Forsythe Company, in Frankfurt and Dresden, from 2005 to 2015. His Choreographic Objects have been exhibited internationally in venues such as Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, London, the Venice and Sydney Biennales, La Villette/Grande Halle, Paris as part of Festival d’automne, and museums such as Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany; and Hayward Gallery, London. He has received numerous awards and was honored with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2010.

Acknowledgements

William Forsythe: Choreographic Objects is sponsored by First Republic Bank and Saks Fifth Avenue. 

Additional support is generously provided by Edward Berman and Kathleen McDonough and Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser.

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

 

The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) announces its events and programs for Summer 2018. With the opening of the Watershed, a new seasonal art space unlike any in Boston, as well as a schedule of free programs that engage new communities and exhibitions that speak to the issues of our time, this is truly a watershed summer for the institution.

MUSIC

HARBORWALK SOUNDS
July 5–August 30 | 6-8:30 PM
On ICA Free Thursday nights, visitors can enjoy outdoor concerts on the waterfront as part of Harborwalk Sounds, a collaboration between the ICA and Berklee College. These popular evenings include free admission to the galleries, free concerts by up-and-coming musicians from around the globe, and summer-inspired food and drink. This summer will also include occasional dance performances by Berklee students. 

July 5 | Spencer Nicholson
July 12 | Mirella Costa
July 19 | 7th Degree
July 26 | Niu Raza with dance performance by Avery Gerhardt
August 2 | AJNA + Triple Tea
August 9 | Nicole Zignago and Nani with Dance Performance by Christine Morrison
August 16 | Common ₵ents
August 23 | One Drop: A Bob Marley Tribute
August 30 | Martin Tamisier with dance performance by John Chin

SUMMER FRIDAYS AT THE ICA
Visitors can kick start their weekend at the ICA every Friday evening in July and August with waterfront music, dancing, and the best vibes in the city. The museum’s popular First Fridays program (June 1, July 6, August 3, September 7) is rounded out with DJ nights, and an expansion of the ICA’s multi-disciplinary performance series, Culture Club.

FIRST FRIDAYS
The first Friday of every month from 5 to 10 PM is an evening of art, music, fun activities, specialty cocktails, and dancing all night. FREE for members. $15 for nonmember advance purchases/$20 day-of.

July 6 | Set Sail
August 3 | White Hot Volume V
September 7 | Summer Nights

DJ NIGHTS
Fridays July 13–August 24* | 6:30–10 PM
DJ dance parties, vibrant art, and the perfect waterfront setting.
$5 ICA members/$15 general admission unless otherwise noted
*except August 3, a First Friday

July 13 | DJ Jazzy Jeff $10 ICA Members/$20 general admission
July 27 |  Helado Negro
August 10 | Tim Hoey of Cut Copy DJ Set
August 24 | Madame Gandhi

CULTURE CLUB
6:30–10 PM
This ongoing series pairs DJ sets and live performances with vibrant art installations by Boston-area artists for energetic and exploratory nights on the harbor.
$5 ICA members/$15 general admission

Culture Club (Part 3)
Friday, July 20
Live performance by Vintage Lee, DJ sets by NomaNomz, Wex, Flee + Dreaveli; visual installations by Furen Dai, Derek Hoffend, and Julia Emiliani.  

Artist Furen Dai presents a large-scale installation using mylar balloons and handmade lanterns to address the immigrant experience in Boston and modern-day censorship in China. Derek Hoffend explores sound as a medium intersecting with physical forms, bodies, light, and spaces to create an immersive and participatory experience. Acclaimed local illustrator Julia Emiliani adds playful animations. Featuring a live performance by Roxbury-based Vintage Lee, a “rising rap force to be reckoned with.” (FACT Magazine)

Culture Club (part 4)
Friday, August 17
DJ sets by East Meets beats (Rilla Force, Deha + Ra Lo); visual installations by Sabato Visconti, Rudolf Lingens, and the Safarani Sisters.

Brazilian multimedia artist Sabato Visconti experiments with glitch processes to create a highly unique interactive video booth experience. In the ICA Common Room, Rudolf Lingens brings us an uncanny sculptural installation with interactive role-play. And Iranian identical twins the Safarani Sisters will debut a durational live performance installation on the Harborwalk. DJ lineup curated by East Meets Beats, an electronic music showcase dedicated to cultivating the community of underground producers, DJs, and musicians in Boston and beyond.

ICA LIVE: DANCE

Will Rawls Open Rehearsal
Sunday, July 22 | 2–4 PM
Free with museum admission

Boston-born choreographer Will Rawls returns to his hometown for a weeklong Summer Stages Dance @ ICA residency. While at the ICA, Rawls and his collaborators will investigate cultural violence and disappearance through movement, language, installation, and projection for his upcoming performance What Remains. Created with writer Claudia Rankine and filmmaker John Lucas, What Remains explores the erasure and exposure that drives the historical disturbance of black citizens.    

ICA KIDS

FREE FUN FRIDAY
Fri, August 10 | 10 AM–9 PM
The ICA opens its doors at no cost to visitors all day long thanks to the tenth annual Free Fun Fridays program sponsored by the Highland Street Foundation. Activities for the whole family will take place throughout the day. For a complete schedule of participating institutions, visit highlandstreet.org.

PLAY DATES
Family Play Dates are the last Saturday of every month from 10 AM–4 PM with themes and activities varying each month.
Admission is FREE for up to 2 adults per family when accompanied by children ages 12 and under. Youth 17 and under are always admitted free to the ICA.

Changing the Rules
Saturday, June 30
Families are invited to take inspiration from contemporary artists including works created with hopes of inspiring new rules for society and are create their own artworks portraying  ‘new rules’ to mix into their everyday life. Local musician Alastair Moock will play song songs to encourage change in the theater at 2 PM.

Creating Hope Together
Saturday, July 28
Families take in view at the ICA (and the Watershed) while enjoying kids’ gallery games, staff-led book readings, art-making projects, and harborside family yoga. Visitors are invited to participate in a dance and work together to create a large-scale sculptural collage sharing messages of hope.

Seaport Adventure
Saturday, August 25
Families are invited to explore the galleries, try a family pop-up talk, sketch the view, and take in a performance or film in the theater, and create artwork together in our Bank of America Art Lab installation.

ICA TEENS

Summer Teen Night
Wednesday, August 1 | 6–9 PM
Free for teens
Teens take over the museum with art-making, youth performances, a photo booth, an open mic and an epic dance party.

The Current
Saturday, August 25 | 2–4 PM
Free for teens
The Current is an ICA Teen drop-in program created, implemented, and hosted by ICA teens as an ongoing series of gatherings for youth dialogue and engagement around social issues through the arts. For the summer installment, we’re focusing on the exhibition We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85. Teen artists from Boston are also invited to submit original artwork to be displayed and engaged with at the event.

EXHIBITIONS

OPENING THIS SUMMER

We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85
June 27–September 30
Focusing on the work of black women artists, We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 examines the political, social, cultural, and aesthetic priorities of women of color during the emergence of second-wave feminism. It is the first exhibition to highlight the voices and experiences of women of color in order to reorient conversations around race, feminism, political action, art production, and art history in this significant historical period. 

Arthur Jafa: Love is the Message, The Message is Death
June 27–September 30
A single-channel video installation set to Kanye West’s stirring, gospel-inspired song “Ultralight Beam,” Love is the Message, The Message is Death comprises original and found footage from concerts, marches, music videos, news reports, police cameras, and YouTube videos. Amplified by the musical track, Love is the Message, The Message is Death presents glimpses of the joys and traumas of black life—nuanced, complex, and multifaceted—in the United States.

ONGOING

Kevin Beasley
May 9–August 26
One of the most exciting artists to emerge in recent years, New York–based Kevin Beasley uniquely combines sound and clothing—his core artistic materials—in stunning, densely packed sculptures and immersive acoustic experiences. Clothing, often the artist’s own, is central in Beasley’s diverse sculptural work, ranging from compositions of shredded t-shirts and hoodies to fitted hats, do-rags, and basketball jerseys.

Caitlin Keogh: Blank Melody
May 9–August 26
New York–based Caitlin Keogh’s vivid, seductive paintings combine the graphic lines of hand-drawn commercial illustration with the bold matte colors of the applied arts to reimagine fragments of female bodies, natural motifs, pattern, and ornamentation to explore questions of gender and representation, and the construction of artistic identity

AT THE WATERSHED

The ICA will open its new Watershed to the public on July 4, expanding artistic and educational programming on both sides of Boston Harbor—the Seaport and East Boston—and connecting two historically isolated neighborhoods. Admission to the ICA Watershed will be free. Access to the Watershed is available by boat, car, and public transportation. The museum is contracting water taxis through Boston Harbor Cruises for the six-minute boat ride from the ICA to the Watershed, which will be free to ICA members, included with regular museum admission, and free to visitors age 17 and under.

Diana Thater
July 4–October 8
Diana Thater is renowned for immersive, atmospheric spatial transformations using moving images of the natural world and vividly colored light washes. In the inaugural Watershed exhibition, Thater transforms the Watershed through light and moving-image projections, Thater’s installation for the ICA reflects on the fragility of the natural world. The exhibition will center on Thater’s artwork Delphine, reconfigured in response to the Watershed’s raw, industrial space and coastal location. In this monumental work, underwater film and video footage of swimming dolphins spills across the floor, ceiling, and walls in several large-scale voluminous projections. Upon entering the gallery, visitors will be immersed in an otherworldly underwater environment while remaining firmly connected to the waterfront landscape just outside. As viewers interact with Delphine, they become performers within the artwork, their shadowy silhouettes moving and spinning alongside the dolphins, across the gallery walls. 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ICA Summer is presented in partnership with Converse

Support for ICA First Fridays is provided by

Summer Stages Dance @ the ICA/Boston is made possible, in part, with the support of Jane Karol and Howard Cooper, David Parker, The Aliad Fund, George and Ann Colony, and Stephanie and Leander McCormick-Goodhart. Additional support for Will Rawls’s residency comes from American Repertory Theater.

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

Lead support for Teen Programs provided by Wagner Foundation.


 
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.

Teen Programs are made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Award Number MA-10-17-0447-17.

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

We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 is organized by the Brooklyn Museum. 

Support for the Boston presentation is provided by The Robert E. Davoli and Eileen L. McDonagh Charitable Foundation, Fotene Demoulas and Tom Coté, Allison and Edward Johnson, Barbara Lee, David and Leslie Puth, and Charles and Fran Rodgers.

Support for Arthur Jafa: Love is the Message, The Message is Death is generously provided by Fotene Demoulas and Tom Coté and Bridgitt and Bruce Evans.

Support for Kevin Beasley is generously provided by Fotene Demoulas and Tom Coté, The Coby Foundation, Ltd., Bernard Lumpkin and Carmine Boccuzzi, and Miko McGinty.

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

The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) will open its new Watershed to the public on July 4, expanding artistic and educational programming on both sides of Boston Harbor—the Seaport and East Boston—and connecting two historically isolated neighborhoods. Admission to the Watershed will be free. Access to the Watershed is available by boat, public transportation, and taxi service. The museum is contracting ferries through Boston Harbor Cruises for the six-minute boat ride from the ICA to the Watershed, which will be free to ICA members, included with regular museum admission, and free to visitors age 17 and under.

“The ICA is committed to ensuring that art and artists’ voices are central to civic life,” said Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director of the ICA. “Our new Watershed will create immersive encounters with the art and issues of our time, be a center for social experiences and community-based education, and catalyze explorations of the environment, equity, and social justice. We are honored to become part of the cultural and natural landscape of East Boston.”

Located in a former copper pipe and sheet metal facility in the Boston Harbor Shipyard and Marina, a working shipyard in East Boston, the Watershed will be a raw, industrial space for art unique in Boston. Award-winning firm Anmahian Winton Architects (AW) is designing the renovation of the 15,000 square foot facility and restoring the formerly condemned building for new use. The Watershed will comprise an orientation gallery that will introduce visitors to the historic East Boston shipyard; an expansive, open area for artist projects; a flexible space for gathering, teen programs, and education projects; and a small outdoor patio with waterfront views back to the ICA. The Watershed will be open July 4 through October 8 in its inaugural year. Next year and moving forward, it will open to the public seasonally, from late May to early October.

The ICA is partnering with the East Boston Neighborhood Health Center, East Boston Social Centers, Maverick Landing Community Services, and Zumix to develop programming for their communities at both the ICA and the Watershed.

The Watershed builds upon the extraordinary momentum achieved by the museum since opening its visionary waterfront building, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, in 2006. The ICA has been a catalyst in expanding audiences for contemporary art through groundbreaking exhibitions and performances, and innovative programs—increasing its attendance tenfold and welcoming over 2.5 million visitors to the museum since 2006. 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.

Inaugural Exhibition at the ICA Watershed
 

Diana Thater
July 4–October 8

Diana Thater (b. 1962, San Francisco) has been a pioneering voice in video installation art since the early 1990s. In the first major presentation of her work in Boston, Thater will create a site-responsive installation for the inaugural exhibition at the ICA Watershed. Thater’s installation will reflect on the fragility of the natural world, transforming the space through light and moving image projections. The exhibition will center on Thater’s artwork Delphine, reconfigured in response to the Watershed’s coastal location. In this monumental work, underwater film and video footage of swimming dolphins spills across the floor, ceiling, and walls, creating an immersive underwater environment. As viewers interact with Delphine, they become performers within the artwork, their own silhouettes moving and spinning alongside the dolphins.

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

In addition to Delphine, the Watershed will feature Thater’s recent sculptural video installations, A Runaway World and As Radical as Reality, produced in Kenya in 2016 and 2017. Conceived as both portraits and landscapes, these works focus on the lives and worlds of two species on the verge of extinction—rhinos and elephants—and the illicit economies that threaten their survival.

Thater’s projected video installations will be punctuated by representative examples of her work with video walls including Untitled Videowall (Butterflies), a work that sits on the floor, screens facing up inviting visitors to circumnavigate an assemblage of vibrant orange monarch butterfly wings.

Ribbon Cutting and Press Preview
June 22, 2018 | 2:30 PM
Media are invited to attend a ribbon-cutting ceremony and reception at the ICA Watershed, located at 256 Marginal Street, East Boston, MA 02128. Following the ribbon cutting, join us for a tour of the new building and Diana Thater exhibition led by Eva Respini, the ICA’s Barbara Lee Chief Curator.

RSVP to Margaux Leonard, mleonard@icaboston.org
Please note, there is no public parking at the Watershed but there is limited accessible parking.

Member Preview
June 30, July 1 + 3 | 10 AM–5:00 PM
ICA members and East Boston residents are invited to preview the ICA Watershed before it opens to the public.

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 atwww.icaboston.org. Follow the ICA at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

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

 

The artist’s first Boston presentation features widely acclaimed video installation

This June, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens Arthur Jafa: Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2016), a masterful video installation by artist, filmmaker, and award-winning cinematographer Arthur Jafa. The seven-minute, single-channel video presents glimpses of the joys and traumas of black life in the United States, which the artist sees as nuanced, beautiful, and multifaceted. Set to Kanye West’s stirring, gospel-inspired hip-hop track, “Ultralight Beam” (2016), Love is the Message traces African American identity and representation through a vast spectrum of imagery, including found footage of civil rights leaders, news reports of riots, scenes of athletic prowess, and musical performances. The installation also includes snippets of Jafa’s acclaimed 2014 documentary Dreams are Colder than Death, which lyrically reflects on Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy and contemporary black experiences. “This groundbreaking work is an ode to the triumphs, tragedies, and resilience of black life in the United States,” says ICA assistant curator Jessica Hong. “As an artist, Jafa asserts the importance of black culture, and in particular music, which for him is a critical mode of social, even political, expression.” Arthur Jafa: Love is the Message, The Message is Death is organized by Jessica Hong, Assistant Curator, and is on view from June 27 through September 30, 2018.

About the Artist
Arthur Jafa (b. 1960, Tupelo, Mississippi) currently lives and works in Los Angeles. He studied at Howard University in Washington, D.C. His work has recently been exhibited at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2017-18); Serpentine Gallery, London (2017); The Met Breuer, New York (2017); and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2017). Jafa was the cinematographer on Spike Lee’s Crooklyn (1994) and Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991), as well as director of photography on Solange Knowles’s music videos Don’t Touch My Hair (2016) and Cranes in the Sky (2016). He directed APEX (2013), Deshotten 1.0 with Malik Sayeed (2009), Tree (1999), Slowly This (1995), and co-founded TNEG (motion picture studio). In 2015, he received the Best Documentary award at the Black Star Film Festival for Dreams are Colder than Death (2014). His writing has appeared in publications such as Black Popular Culture and Everything but the Burden.

Also on View
On view concurrently is the exhibition We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-1985, which focuses on the work of more than 40 artists and activists and examines the political, social, cultural, and aesthetic priorities of women of color during the emergence of second-wave feminism. This groundbreaking exhibition is the first to highlight the voices and experiences of women of color—distinct from the primarily white, middle-class mainstream feminist movement—in order to reorient conversations around race, feminism, political action, art production, and art history in this significant historical period. We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 is organized by the Brooklyn Museum and coordinated at the ICA by Jessica Hong, Assistant Curator.

Opening Reception
Thursday, June 28, 2018 | 6:00 PM
Media are invited to take a first look at Arthur Jafa: Love is the Message, The Message is Death and We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–1985. At 6:00 PM, there will be a public talk with ICA assistant curator Jessica Hong and curators Catherine Morris and Rujeko Hockley, organizers of We Wanted a Revolution at the Brooklyn Museum, followed by a special opening reception that will be open to the public. RSVP to Margaux Leonard, mleonard@icaboston.org.

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.

Landmark exhibition shines spotlight on the work of black women artists, and examines the political, social, cultural, and aesthetic priorities of women of color during the emergence of second-wave feminism.

On June 27, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-1985. Focusing on the work of over 40 artists and activists, this groundbreaking exhibition examines the political, social, cultural, and aesthetic priorities of women of color during the emergence of second-wave feminism. It is the first exhibition to highlight the voices and experiences of women of color—distinct from the primarily white, middle-class mainstream feminist movement—in order to reorient conversations around race, feminism, political action, art production, and art history in this significant historical period. On view through September 30, We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 is organized by the Brooklyn Museum. The ICA’s presentation is coordinated by Jessica Hong, Assistant Curator.

“We Wanted a Revolution illuminates a fervent—and too little known—period of art making and social activism by an extraordinary group of women artists,” says Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director of the ICA. “The exhibition makes visible the wide diversity of media, styles, materials, and genres reflective of the political, cultural, and social concerns of the day.”

“We are thrilled to bring We Wanted a Revolution to Boston,” says Hong. “Our audiences will gain so much from this robust exhibition, which like the ICA’s Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women, underscores the museum’s commitment to bring under-recognized artistic voices to the fore.”

The exhibition features a wide array of work, including conceptual, performance, film, and video art, as well as photography, painting, sculpture, and printmaking by a diverse group of artists and activists who lived and worked at the intersections of avant-garde art worlds and radical political movements.

Organized in a general chronology around a key group of movements, collectives, actions, and communities, the exhibition builds a narrative based on significant events in the lives of the artists including:

  • Concepts such as Black Feminism
  • Spiral and the Black Arts Movement
  • Collectives such as “Where We At” Black Women Artists, Heresies, Combahee River Collective
  • Art world activism, including the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC), the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC), Women, Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation (WSABAL), and the Judson Three
  • Just Above Midtown Gallery in New York
  • Groundbreaking exhibitions, such as New York’s A.I.R. Gallery exhibition Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States
  • A section focused on the cultural production and activities in the 1980s

Artists in the exhibition include Emma Amos, Camille Billops, Kay Brown, Linda Goode Bryant, Beverly Buchanan, Carole Byard, Elizabeth Catlett, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Ayoka Chenzira, Christine Choy and Susan Robeson, Blondell Cummings, Julie Dash, Pat Davis, Jeff Donaldson, Maren Hassinger, Janet Henry, Virginia Jaramillo, Jae Jarrell, Wadsworth Jarrell, Lisa Jones, Loïs Mailou Jones, Barbara Jones-Hogu, Carolyn Lawrence, Samella Lewis, Dindga McCannon, Barbara McCullough, Ana Mendieta, Senga Nengudi, Lorraine O’Grady, Howardena Pindell, Faith Ringgold, Alva Rogers, Alison Saar, Betye Saar, Coreen Simpson, Lorna Simpson, Ming Smith, and Carrie Mae Weems.

Also on View
On view concurrently is the exhibition Arthur Jafa: Love is the Message, The Message is Death, a seven-minute single-channel video installation by artist, filmmaker, and award-winning cinematographer Arthur Jafa. Called a “crucial ode to black America” by The New Yorker, the masterful installation comprises original and found footage from concerts, marches, music videos, news reports, police cameras, YouTube videos, as well as scenes from Jafa’s well-known 2014 documentary Dreams are Colder than Death, which lyrically reflects on Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy and contemporary black experiences. The swelling, stirring, gospel-inspired melody of Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam,” juxtaposes the rapid succession of imagery, presenting glimpses of the joys and traumas of black life in the United States, which the artist sees as nuanced, beautiful, and multifaceted.

Opening Reception
Thursday, June 28, 2018 | 6:00 PM
Media are invited to take a first look at We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–1985 and Arthur Jafa: Love is the Message, The Message is Death. At 6:00 PM, there will be a public talk with ICA assistant curator Jessica Hong and curators Catherine Morris and Rujeko Hockley, organizers of We Wanted a Revolution at the Brooklyn Museum, followed by a special opening reception that will be open to the public. RSVP to Margaux Leonard, mleonard@icaboston.org.

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.

We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 is organized by Catherine Morris, Sackler Family Senior Curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, and Rujeko Hockley, former Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum. The Boston presentation is coordinated by Jessica Hong, Assistant Curator, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston.

Support for the Boston presentation is provided by David and Leslie Puth.

Largest museum exhibition to date of Kevin Beasley’s work

First in-depth solo exhibition of Caitlin Keogh features all-new body of work

 

On May 9, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens solo exhibitions of Kevin Beasley and Caitlin Keogh, offering a closer look at the work of these important emerging artists.

Kevin Beasley
May 9 – August 26
One of the most exciting artists to emerge in recent years, New York–based Kevin Beasley (b. 1985, Lynchburg, VA) uniquely combines sound and clothing—his core artistic materials—in stunning, densely packed sculptures and immersive acoustic experiences. Kevin Beasley, the largest museum exhibition to date of his artwork, will present a selection of sculptures made over the past five years. The exhibition is organized by Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Curator, with Jeffrey De Blois, Assistant Curator.

“Beasley carries forward strong threads of appropriation and improvisation developed in the practices of artists such as Noah Purifoy and David Hammons,” says Erickson. “Like these artists, the importance of personal memory and lived experience intersects with broader examinations of power and race in America.”

Beasley’s early works harnessed the physical qualities of sound, deploying vibrations and echoes that penetrate the bodies of both performers and audience. He has embedded microphones and other electronic musical equipment in sculptures made of sneakers and foam, manipulating their sonic possibilities in his live performances. Objects and clothing, often the artist’s own, are central in Beasley’s diverse sculptural work, ranging from compositions of shredded t-shirts and hoodies to fitted hats, du-rags, and basketball jerseys.

More recent works are constructed from colorfully patterned housedresses stiffened with resin that stand on the floor and protrude from the walls. Appearing like satellite dishes or clusters of ghostly figures, these works become conduits for absent bodies and histories that the artist evokes through color, pattern, and texture. Rather than contrasting the materiality of objects to the immateriality of music and performance, as is so often the case, Beasley forges strong affinities between the physical and the aural in his multidisciplinary practice.

Caitlin Keogh: Blank Melody
May 9 – August 26
Caitlin Keogh: Blank Melody is the first in-depth solo museum presentation of New York–based artist Caitlin Keogh (b. 1982, Anchorage, Alaska) and will feature an all-new body of work. Keogh’s work considers the history of gender and representation, the articulation of personal style, and the construction of artistic identity. Her vivid, seductive paintings combine the graphic lines of hand-drawn commercial illustration with the bold matte colors of the applied arts to reimagine fragments of female bodies, natural motifs, pattern, and ornamentation. Drawing from clothing design, illustration, and interior decoration as much as art history, Keogh’s large-scale canvases dissect elements of representations of femininity with considerable wit, pointing to the underlying conditions of the production of images of women. The exhibition is organized by Jeffrey De Blois, Assistant Curator.

“The fragmented and idealized female body is a loaded political metaphor in Keogh’s figuration, symptomatic of the kinds of violence that too often undergird representations of women,” says De Blois. “Each of her paintings reduces a constellation of references to their simplest form as a self-contained image, in order to emphasize their specific poetic and metaphoric capacities to address such concerns.”

The exhibition takes its title from an interpretive poem written by Charity Coleman for Keogh’s recent artist book Headless Woman with Parrot (2017). “Blank Melody” comes from a line in Virginia Woolf’s experimental novel The Waves (1931), a book comprised of soliloquies spoken by its multiple characters. For the exhibition, Keogh is creating a new body of work—a tight-knit group of paintings, text-based drawings on mirror that use the poem as material, and painted wooden furniture made with the artist Graham Anderson—in response to and in conversation with Coleman’s poem, exploring the interplay between text and its illustrative interpretation.

Artist bios

About Kevin Beasley
Beasley currently lives and works in New York City. He grew up in Virginia and received a B.F.A. from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit in 2007 and an M.F. A. from Yale in 2012. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at kim? Contemporary Art Center, Riga, Latvia (2017); Casey Kaplan, New York (2017); The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2017); and the High Line, New York (2015).  He has a forthcoming solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the fall of 2018. In 2016, he completed inHarlem: Kevin Beasley, a year-long public art project through the Studio Museum. He has recently presented performances at CounterCurrent17, in collaboration with Project Row Houses, Houston (2017); and Lincoln Center in New York (2016); and the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (2016). His work was included in When the Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination and the American South, which traveled to the ICA/Boston in 2014. His work is in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, and Tate Modern, London.

About Caitlin Keogh
Keogh was born in Anchorage, Alaska in 1982. She lives and works in New York. Keogh received a B.F.A. from Cooper Union School of Art, New York and a M.F.A from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Keogh’s work has recently been shown at White Cube, London (2017), 12th A.I.R. Biennial, New York (2017), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016), Queens Museum, New York (2013), Melas Papadopolous, Athens (2013), MoMA PS1, New York (2012), and Kunsthalle Zurich, Switzerland (2011).

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.

Support for Kevin Beasley is generously provided by Fotene Demoulas and Tom Coté, The Coby Foundation, Ltd., Bernard Lumpkin and Carmine Boccuzzi, and Miko McGinty.

New project by artist Saya Woolfalk and six-year-old daughter Aya invites visitors to contribute their own art using digital programming language Scratch

Saya Woolfalk is a New York-based artist who uses science fiction, technology, and fantasy to re-imagine the world and think about how combining cultures can create more utopian societies. In Hybrid-Digital Home, Saya Woolfalk has collaborated with her six-year-old daughter Aya Woolfalk Mitchell, to reinvent the ICA’s Bank of America Art Lab as a warm domestic environment made up of a lively combination of textile patterns from around the world and computer-generated patterns based on visitor drawings created in Scratch. Developed at MIT, Scratch is a free programming language and online community where children can program and share interactive media. Taking pride of place in the center of the room is a large-scale work, drawn by hand then digitally altered by Aya Woolfalk Mitchell.
 
Visitors of all ages are invited to contribute drawings to be digitally patternized and added to the wall, creating a collaboratively generated portrait of home.
 
Meet the artists on Saturday, April 14 from 12–2 PM
Visitors are invited to meet the artists and learn about their creative process as a mother-daughter team. More information at icaboston.org.
 
Learn to use Scratch at an ICA family workshop on August 4
Visit icaboston.org for more details.
 
Also on view
Hybrid-Digital Home will be open during the ICA’s exhibition Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today. This group exhibition examines how the internet has radically changed the field of art, especially in its production, distribution, and reception. The exhibition comprises a broad range of works across a variety of mediums—including painting, performance, photography, sculpture, video, and web-based projects—that all investigate the extensive effects of the internet on artistic practice and contemporary culture.

About the artist
Saya Woolfalk (Japan, 1979) received a B.A. from Brown University and a M.F.A from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has recently been exhibited at Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse  NY(2016), Kenucky Museum of Art and Craft, Lexington KY (2016), and Seattle Art Museum, Seattle WA (2015).  In 2015, Woolfalk collaborated with her daughter Aya Woolfalk Mitchel on The Pollen Catchers’ Color Mixing Machine, a six-wall mural at the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling, New York, NY.
 
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.

Hybrid-Digital Home is supported in part by the Raymond T. & Ann T. Mancini Family Foundation.