Carolina Caycedo, Nuestro Tiempo/Our Time, 2018. Hand-dyed artisanal fishing net, metal chain, palm mat, wool charm, tambourine, and white flowers 48 x 28 x 18 inches (121. 9 x 11 x 7.1 cm). Installation view, Carolina Caycedo: Cosmotarrayas, Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, 2020. Collection of Tim and Maria Blum, Los Angeles. Photo by Mel Taing. Courtesy of the artist. © Carolina Caycedo
I was mesmerized walking through Carolina Caycedo’s Cosomotarrayas. Hovering around me were these kaleidoscope-like creations, but the more I wandered throughout the room, the more I understood the spiritual scope of what surrounded me. Nuestro Tiempo hangs mysteriously along the wall, a deeply painted purple, white flowers and tambourine in hand, beckoning me to take a closer look. Like an ancient relic, Nuestro Tiempo is eerily quiet, yet at any moment I felt that I might hear the fingers bang upon the tambourine. I imagined that this would transport me to a different time. A time that was simpler, more natural. This was a time when my grandparents would bring out these vibrantly woven hammocks from Guatemala and hang them on the beach or between the trees on our family camping trips. My cousins and I would squish our bodies together to fit in, our bare feet kicking the sand below to make the hammock swing higher. The times sitting on Lake Atitlan watching the lone boats sail across the water, and the women weaving their traditional Mayan textiles along their village shores. That is the impact of Caycedo’s Nuestro Tiempo; like a conduit between the past and present, this net reminded me of things that I greatly miss.
Katherine Gudiel started at the ICA as Customer Relations Manager Assistant in fall 2019, joining the data systems team in supporting all things Tessitura. She is also a painter in her free time with a focus on portraiture.
Friday Art Notes are personal reflections on works of art shown or in the permanent collection of the ICA, written by ICA staff, volunteers, and supporters. Read more
Yayoi Kusama pictured with her work LOVE IS CALLING, 2013 during her solo exhibition I Who Have Arrived In Heaven at David Zwirner, New York, 2013. © YAYOI KUSAMA. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York; Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/Singapore/Shanghai; Victoria Miro, London/Venice
Great for kids and adults to make together, ideal for ages 5+.
Make your own paper tentacles inspired by Yayoi Kusama’s LOVE IS CALLING. Explore themes of fear and love with your family, through mark-making and simple sculpture building. You’ll need 2 sheets of paper per tentacle, scissors, and some mark-making tools like a pencil, markers, or crayons. Oil pastels and black cardstock paper are used in the examples below.
1. Trace + Cut
 |
 |
 |
Cut a slit halfway into each tentacle, one from the top and one from the bottom.
2. Assemble
 |
 |
3. Decorate!
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
4. Optional finishings!
 |
 |
5. Share your creations!
Hooray! You’re all done. Post your work of art on social media (follow us on Instagram, Facebook, + Twitter) and tag #ICAartlab to share with us!
This activity was created by Brooke Scibelli, Family and Art Lab Programs Coordinator.
Ana Mendieta, Silueta Works in Mexico, 1973–77/1991. Pigmented inkjet prints, four parts, 13 1/4 x 20 inches (33.7 x 50.8 cm); eight parts, 20 x 13 1/4 inches (50.8 x 33.7 cm). Gift of Barbara Lee, The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women. Courtesy the Galerie Lelong. © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC.
As a printmaker, I think in impressions. Prints are impressions of the maker’s manipulation of a surface. Prints are memories.
I have been drawn to Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Works in Mexico, pigmented inkjet prints of photographs of the artist’s body covered in natural materials or impressed in the earth, since I first encountered them on view in First Light: A Decade of Collecting at the ICA in 2016. I spent the first hour of every morning with the Silueta series as a Visitor Assistant and I am grateful to revisit them again in Beyond Infinity: Contemporary Art After Kusama.
Ana Mendieta’s impressions of her body in the earth, themselves prints made over forty years ago, have almost certainly been erased from the land. These impressions have been preserved as photographs and then printed decades later, framed, and hung in the gallery. While looking at these familiar works, I straighten my fingers with my arms at my side, mimicking the artist’s position. I raise my arms above my head and bend my elbows, imaging the feeling of being buried by the earth or covered in flowers. I see my silhouette reflected in the glass as a contemporary echo of Mendieta’s movement.
Prints are memories linking the artist’s physical touch to the contemporary viewer, distorted and removed from their origin by the indirect process of the press—or in case of Silueta Works in Mexico the camera and the inkjet printer. As the viewer, I am simultaneously connected to Ana Mendieta but distanced by space, time, and the photographic process. The Silueta series is an impression of the artist’s body in space, a memory of her presence.
Emily Mogavero started at the ICA as a Visitor Assistant in 2016 and currently manages visitor surveys and outreach as Marketing Associate for audience development. She is also a painter/printmaker whose work explores history, portraiture, and abstraction.
Friday Art Notes are personal reflections on works of art shown or in the permanent collection of the ICA, written by ICA staff, volunteers, and supporters. Read more
Installation view, Beyond Infinity: Contemporary Art after Kusama, the Insitute of Contemporary Art/Boston, 2019. Photo by Charles Mayer. At left: McArthur Binion, Route One: Box Two: V, 2017. Oil stick, ink, and paper on board, 84 x 84 inches (213.4 x 213.4 cm). Gift of Erica Gervais and Ted Pappendick. At right: Gilbert & George, Sky Blue World, from the series 25 Worlds, 1989. Postcards mounted on board, 95 x 96 inches (241.3 x 175.3 cm). Gift of Sandra and Gerald Fineberg.
It has always been interesting to me what we choose not to see. Perhaps this impulse to look away is a form of self-preservation, a strategy of survival when the reality of trying to keep going in our current political climate feels so bleak. As an able-bodied immigrant, a person of color, and a woman, I am sure I share this impulse with many others. And perhaps McArthur Binion, even as he rejects the imposition on Black artists to create art only about Black life, is thinking about this impulse, too. Through a compelling yet minimal use of line, form, and media, perhaps what Binion is really asking us to do is to see differently, to look harder at what we don’t want to see, and to accept that what we want to turn away from is still present, affecting our sightlines even when we try to hide from them.
What I learn from looking at Binion’s work is how to slow down looking itself. The tender details in his paintings and drawings reward our attentions, even as works like Route One: Box Two: V (2017), on view in Beyond Infinity: Contemporary Art after Kusama, still appear to hold something back from us. For a moment, I get the impression that something important remains beneath these repeated images of Binion’s Mississippi childhood home, just out of eyesight and boxed into tiny rows and columns beneath dense hand-applied oil stick paint.
I remember feeling this way the last time I was in Mississippi, driving down U.S. Route 49 between Sumner and Money, two towns at the heart of the story of Emmett Till’s lynching in 1955. Highway 49 is one of the most important roads in Mississippi. It’s a crucial site in Southern folklore and music; it’s a government-mandated evacuation route for climate emergencies; and it remains the only major artery between Mississippi’s Gulf Coast and the state capital. And it’s the last road that Emmett ever saw.
It’s hard not to think about what he saw traveling down that highway in August 1955. It’s even more astonishing to realize how little Route 49 has changed since then, too. Apart from a few areas of development, it’s quite literally the same road; very little has been paved over or rerouted. In general, the same few families own the same few parcels of land, and while new crops like soybeans have been introduced, it’s still cotton framing the views from the road, however much we want to look elsewhere instead.
In Route One: Box Two: V, Binion’s gridlines leaves us with small, slight gaps to catch our breath, to take a step back before returning close to the work once more. Without conflating this history with theme or subject matter, or requiring that we need to hold these ideas always in tense or tight relation to each other, Binion makes it clear that to hold ourselves back from looking closely is as much a misapprehension as to force ourselves to see only one way.
— Anni Pullagura joined the ICA as a Curatorial Assistant in 2020. She is completing a PhD in American Studies from Brown University.
Friday Art Notes are personal reflections on works of art shown or in the permanent collection of the ICA, written by ICA staff, volunteers, and supporters. Read more
On December 17th, the ICA’s Special Focus digital photography class traveled to Harvard, to prepare their photographs for exhibition in the Monroe C. Gutman Library. Led by teaching artist Marlon Orozco, these teens have been working hard to perfect their skills with a camera!
The young photographers were enthusiastic, engaged, and helpful to one another. One could say that they were laser-focused throughout! Leading up to this event, the Special Focus class developed their editing abilities, learned advanced forms of digital photography, and learned about image composition.
This presentation was the culmination of the workshop; and was what they prepared for throughout the semester. They had learned so much from where they started and now they’re able to do amazing things with photography! It has been a long journey for these ICA teens.
