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A new anchor in the ICA collection, LOVE IS CALLING goes on view September 24, 2019

(Boston, MA—March 20, 2019) The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens Yayoi Kusama’s LOVE IS CALLING (2013) to the public on September 24, announced Jill Medvedow, the ICA’s Ellen Matilda Poss Director. Recently acquired by the ICA, LOVE IS CALLING is the largest and among the most immersive of the artist’s existing Infinity Mirror Rooms. A focused presentation drawn from the ICA’s collection titled Beyond Infinity: Contemporary Art after Kusama accompanies the Infinity Mirror Room, offering audiences insight into Kusama’s influences and her important legacy on contemporary art.

“We are thrilled to share Yayoi Kusama’s groundbreaking work, beloved by audiences around the globe. LOVE IS CALLING offers visitors the opportunity to experience the artist’s notion of the infinite, as well as her public performances that connect personal and political ideas about peace and connectivity,” said Medvedow.

“Yayoi Kusama has indelibly shaped some of the most important art movements of the twentieth century, including Minimalism, Pop art, and feminist and performance art. LOVE IS CALLING encompasses many aspects of Kusama’s unique visual language, including mirrored architectural space, brilliant color, signature polka dots, and the illusion of infinity,” said Eva Respini, the ICA’s Barbara Lee Chief Curator. “Beyond Infinity, the 14th annual presentation of the ICA collection, considers how Kusama’s prescient artistic practice, including her feminist voice and experiments with form and environment, has shaped contemporary art in unique ways.”
 

LOVE IS CALLING

Yayoi Kusama
Sep 24, 2019—Feb 7, 2021
Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929, Matsumoto, Japan) is one of today’s most recognized and celebrated artists. In addition to her widely popular Infinity Mirror Rooms, Kusama creates vibrant paintings, works on paper, and sculpture with abstract imagery. LOVE IS CALLING features vividly colored, tentacle-like, inflatable sculptures covered with the artist’s signature polka dots and encased in a dark mirrored room to create an illusion of infinite space. As visitors walk throughout the installation, a sound recording of Kusama reciting a love poem in Japanese plays continuously. Written by the artist, the poem’s title translates to Residing in a Castle of Shed Tears in English. Exploring enduring themes including life and death, the poem poignantly expresses Kusama’s hope to spread a universal message of love through her art. The largest of Kusama’s existing Infinity Mirror Rooms, LOVE IS CALLING is the first one held in the permanent collection of a New England museum. In 1966, the ICA exhibited an Infinity Mirror Room, now titled Endless Love Show, in the exhibition Multiplicity; the museum also owns a 1953 drawing by the artist. LOVE IS CALLING is organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator.
 

Beyond Infinity: Contemporary Art after Kusama

Sep 24, 2019—Feb 7, 2021
Beyond Infinity: Contemporary Art after Kusama features approximately 15 works from the 1950s to today, encompassing sculpture, painting, film, photography, and drawings. Primarily drawn from the ICA collection with select loans, the exhibition will focus on Kusama’s legacy in three key areas—repetition, the self, and the kaleidoscopic. Beyond Infinity will provide visitors with a deeper understanding of how the immersive environment of LOVE IS CALLING embodies the artist’s longstanding exploration of accumulation, repetition, luminescence, life and death, and happenings. Works featuring Kusama’s obsessive repetition of symbols, patterns, and forms will be paired with works by contemporaries such as Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, and Ana Mendieta, as well as current practitioners such as Nick Cave, Tara Donovan, Jimmy DeSana, Josh Faught, Ellen Gallagher, and Josiah McElheny, whose work reflects the legacy of post-minimalism, performance art, and Pop art. Beyond Infinity: Contemporary Art after Kusama is organized by Ellen Tani, Assistant Curator.
 

Press preview

Tue, Sep 17, 9:30 AM
Media are invited to experience Kusama’s work and tour the exhibition. RSVP to Margaux Leonard, mleonard@icaboston.org
 

Member preview days

Thu, Sep 19—Sun, Sep 22
ICA members are invited to preview LOVE IS CALLING and Beyond Infinity before they open to the public.
 

Exhibition-related programs

The presentation of LOVE IS CALLING and Beyond Infinity will be enriched by a variety of public programs, including gallery and curator 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.

One of the best-loved works in the ICA’s permanent collection goes back on view

(Boston, MA—January 23, 2019) On February 13, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens Ragnar Kjartansson: The Visitors, a monumental nine-channel sound and moving-image installation of a performance staged at Rokeby Farm, a historic 43-room estate in upstate New York. One of the best-loved works in the ICA’s permanent collection and a sentimental portrayal of friendship, love, and loss, Kjartansson’s celebrated The Visitors (2012) features the artist with some of his closest friends and fellow musicians, who occupy different rooms of the rambling and opulent estate, performing a sixty-four-minute arrangement composed by Kjartansson and Davíð Þór Jónsson. Through its unique arrangement of music in space, The Visitors creates a distinctively layered portrait of the house and its musical inhabitants. On view through July 28, 2019, this presentation is organized by Jeffrey De Blois, Assistant Curator.

Each of the nine channels shows a musician or group of musicians—including Kristín Anna and Gyða Valtýsdóttir, founding sisters of the Icelandic band Mùm; Kjartan Sveinsson, former member of Sigur Rós; and Davíð Þór Jónsson, Kjartansson’s longtime collaborator—playing instruments either alone or in groups, separately but simultaneously, occupying different rooms of the romantically dilapidated estate. As the performers leave their individual rooms, the screens turn black until, at the end, the entire group is seen on a single screen walking away from the house through a field.

The arrangement’s lyrics are taken from the poem “Feminine Ways,” written by artist Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir. The title alludes to the 1981 album of the same name from Swedish pop band ABBA, the group’s last record to date, as divorce and internal strife ended their professional and personal relationships. The musical composition coheres in the work’s installation, presenting a dynamic and moving ensemble performance Kjartansson refers to as a “feminine nihilistic gospel song.”

A musician as well as an artist, Kjartansson draws on a variety of cultural sources—from American musical traditions to the landscapes of his native Iceland—to create memorable works that investigate the boundaries between reality and fiction. His videos are often humorous, placing the performer against extreme conditions. Through repetition, Kjartansson’s videos create unexpected meanings, eliciting contradictory feelings of pleasure and anxiety, humor and sincerity, sentimentality and skepticism.
 

About the artist

Ragnar Kjartansson (b. 1976, Reykjavik, Iceland) has had solo exhibitions at the Reykjavík Art Museum, the Barbican Centre, London, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Park, Washington D.C., the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, the New Museum, New York, the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, the Frankfurter Kunstverein, and the BAWAG Contemporary, Vienna. Kjartansson participated in The Encyclopedic Palace at the Venice Biennale in 2013, Manifesta 10 in St. Petersburg, Russia in 2014, and he represented Iceland at the 2009 Venice Biennale. The artist is the recipient of the 2015 Artes Mundi’s Derek Williams Trust Purchase Award, and Performa’s 2011 Malcolm McLaren Award. The artist lives and works in Reykjavík.
 

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 this presentation is generously provided by Kate and Charles Brizius, James and Audrey Foster, Jodi and Hal Hess, Kristen and Kent Lucken, and Tristin and Martin Mannion.