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The largest of the artist’s Infinity Mirror Rooms, LOVE IS CALLING will become a new anchor in the ICA’s collection

(Boston, MA—January 15, 2019)  Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA), announced today the acquisition of Yayoi Kusama’s LOVE IS CALLING (2013), one of the artist’s existing Infinity Mirror Rooms. LOVE IS CALLING is one of Kusama’s most immersive, psychedelic environments and features vividly colored, tentacle-like, inflatable sculptures covered with the artist’s signature polka dots and encased in a mirrored room to create an illusion of infinite space. It is the second work by Kusama to enter the collection, alongside a 1953 work on paper of organic forms, dots, and colors—elements that are characteristic of her work. LOVE IS CALLING has been acquired through the generosity of Barbara Lee, The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women, Fotene and Tom Coté, Hilary and Geoffrey Grove, Vivien and Alan Hassenfeld, Jodi and Hal Hess, Barbara H. Lloyd, and an anonymous donor. A new anchor in The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women, LOVE IS CALLING goes on view in Fall 2019. 

“LOVE IS CALLING showcases the breadth of the artist’s visual vocabulary—from her signature polka dots and soft sculptures, brilliant colors and the spoken word, to endless reflections and illusions of space and self,” said Medvedow. “We are very grateful to our generous donors who made this acquisition possible, and look forward to sharing this immersive experience with our visitors for years to come.”

“Over a six-decade-long career, Kusama has indelibly shaped some of the most important art movements of the twentieth century, including Minimalism, Pop art, and feminist and performance art,” said Eva Respini, the ICA’s Barbara Lee Chief Curator. “LOVE IS CALLING is the largest Infinity Mirror Room of its kind held by a North American museum collection and one of Kusama’s most significant artistic achievements. We are delighted that the ICA will be its new home.”

With LOVE IS CALLING, Kusama offers visitors the opportunity to experience her notion of the infinite. 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.

Kusama came to the United States from Japan in 1957 and was a vital part of New York avant-garde art circles until the 1970s. Departing from her training in traditional nihonga Japanese painting, Kusama’s practice in the early 1950s embraced methods of Western modernism. Shifting from two-dimensional to environmental creations after 1962, Kusama’s sculptural practice emerged in the form of objects such as furniture and clothes covered in soft, phallic protuberances of different colors and patterns. Her first mirrored environment, entitled Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field (1965), signaled a turn to the social: her works became more immersive and her studio practice slowed in favor of protest events, performances, and happenings, which included performers painted in polka dots. Uniquely, Kusama’s art making broadens and evolves in tandem with the cultural, political, and visual revolutions of the psychedelic sixties. Kusama’s early Infinity Mirror Rooms, either mirrored or painted polka dots, were originally celebrated but challenging to collect given their size and were rarely exhibited. In 1966, the ICA exhibited an Infinity Mirror Room, now titled Endless Love Show, in the exhibition Multiplicity. The artist returned to Japan in 1973, and for the next 25 years focused on writing and publishing her poems and novels. In 2002, Kusama constructed Fireflies on the Water, her first darkened Infinity Mirror Room, and in 2013 she premiered LOVE IS CALLING at Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Japan. 

About the artist

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. Work by the artist is held in museum collections worldwide, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Gallery, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; amongst numerous others. In October 2017, the Yayoi Kusama Museum opened in Tokyo. The artist lives and works in Tokyo.

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.

The ICA announces the acquisition of Yayoi Kusama’s LOVE IS CALLING, the largest of her popular Infinity Mirror Rooms to date. Featuring vividly colored, tentacle-like inflatable sculptures covered with the artist’s signature polka dots in an endlessly reflecting mirrored room, LOVE IS CALLING is one of Kusama’s most psychedelic, immersive installations. The ICA exhibited an early Infinity Mirror Room, now titled Endless Love Show, in the exhibition Multiplicity in 1966. 

(Boston, MA—January 7, 2019) The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) announces its exhibition schedule for 2019. Upcoming exhibitions include Huma Bhabha’s largest survey to date, the U.S. premiere of John Akomfrah’s Purple at the ICA Watershed, and a major exhibition that considers how contemporary artists are responding to the migration, immigration, and displacement of peoples today. For more information, please contact Margaux Leonard at mleonard@icaboston.org, 617-478-3176.

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Nina Chanel Abney
January 17, 2019–March 15, 2020
Nina Chanel Abney (b. 1982, Chicago, IL) is known for weaving colorful geometric shapes, cartoons, language, and symbols into chaotic and energetic compositions. At the ICA, she will create a mural that speaks to social tensions in the digital age, including the constant stream of true and false information, the dilemma of liberal racism, and abuses of power that lead to structural inequality. This exhibition is organized by Ellen Tani, Assistant Curator.

A still from The Visitors with a woman playinge cello.

Ragnar Kjartansson: The Visitors
February 13, 2019–July 28, 2019
A sentimental portrayal of friendship, love, and loss and one of the best-loved works in the ICA’s permanent collection, Ragnar Kjartansson’s (b. 1976, Reykjavik, Iceland) masterwork The Visitors (2012) is a monumental nine-channel sound and moving-image installation of a performance staged at Rokeby Farm, a historic forty-three-room estate in upstate New York. This presentation is organized by Jeffrey De Blois, Assistant Curator.

A bust by Huma Bhaba, that is gray and organic in texture, with the top covered in light blue paint.

Huma Bhabha: They Live
March 23, 2019–May 27, 2019
Since the early 1990s, Huma Bhabha (b. 1962, Karachi, Pakistan) has developed a distinct visual vocabulary that draws upon a wide variety of influences, including horror movies, science fiction, ancient artifacts, religious reliquary, and modernist sculpture. The largest survey of the artist’s work to date, Huma Bhabha: They Live encompasses sculpture, drawing, and photography, with a special focus on Bhabha’s engagement with the human figure. Best known for her sculptures, Bhabha uses a diverse array of natural, industrial, and found materials to make compelling works that engage the arts and histories of diverse cultures. Her work transcends a singular time and place, instead creating an exploration of what she describes as the “eternal concerns” found across all cultures: war, colonialism, displacement, and memories of home. Huma Bhabha: They Live will also include drawings, photographs, and prints spanning the past two decades, as well as new works made on the occasion of this exhibition. It will be accompanied by a lushly illustrated scholarly publication. This exhibition is organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator

A person in a light windbreaker sits on a bucket in silvery water among abandoned tires.

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

An organic sculpture round in shape.

Less is a bore: Maximalist Art & Design
June 26, 2019–September 22, 2019
Less is a bore: Maximalist Art & Design is a multigenerational survey of strategies of pattern and decoration in art and design. Borrowing its ethos from Robert Venturi’s infamous retort to Mies van der Rohe’s modernist edict “less is more,” this exhibition includes art works that privilege decoration, patterning, and maximalism over modernism’s reductive “ornament as crime” philosophy. Less is a bore: Maximalist Art & Design investigates the impulse toward ornamentation, pattern painting, and decorative modes as a persistent strategy, one that can be deployed to critique, subvert, and transform accepted histories and trajectories related to craft and design, feminism, queerness and gender, beauty and taste, camouflage and masquerade, multiculturalism and globalism, among others. The exhibition surveys a field of interdisciplinary creative production, from art to design, that proves such strategies are multivalent and exceedingly adaptable methods to make art works that play fast and loose with “high” and “low,” and that reference ideas, forms and symbols at once personal and political, contemporary and historical, local and global. This exhibition is organized by Jenelle Porter, guest curator, with Jeffrey De Blois, Assistant Curator.

Hanging unstretched paintings with light coming through them.

Vivian Suter
August 21, 2019–January 5, 2020
Vivian Suter (b. 1949, Buenos Aires, Argentina) works in close partnership with the natural environment surrounding her home and studio in Panajachel, Guatemala. The artist’s first Boston exhibition will feature a single installation filling the galleries with a canopy of color and shapes evocative of the lush setting. Her method often involves moving her canvases between the indoors and outdoors and exposing them to the climate in order to allow nature to comingle with her broad swaths of painted, vivid color. The mud and rain, light through the trees, and animals in the forest work in concert with Suter’s gestural compositions, which are inspired by the surrounding vegetation and landscape. Her installation of layered and suspended canvases invites visitors to discover her unique dialogue with the imagined and natural worlds. This exhibition is organized by Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Curator.

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2019 James and Audrey Foster Prize
August 21, 2019–January 5, 2020
The 2019 installment of the ICA’s biannual James and Audrey Foster Prize exhibition highlighting the work of Boston-area artists will feature four individuals: Rashin Fahandej (b. 1978, Shiraz, Iran), Josephine Halvorson (b. 1981, Brewster, MA), Lavaughan Jenkins (b. 1976, Boston, MA), and Helga Roht Poznanski (b. 1926, Tartu, Estonia). This intergenerational group of artists works across media, including painting, sculpture, film, and video, to explore questions of place, portraiture, and belonging. Their unique and exceptional work demonstrates the breadth and ecology of contemporary art practices in Boston. First established in 1999, the James and Audrey Foster Prize (formerly the ICA Artist Prize) is central to the ICA’s efforts to nurture and recognize local artists, showcase exceptional artwork, and support a thriving local arts scene. This exhibition is organized by Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Curator.

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

About the ICA
Since its founding in 1936, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston has shared the pleasures of reflection, inspiration, imagination, and provocation that contemporary art offers with audiences in Boston and beyond. 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, part of a functioning 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.

Nina Chanel Abney is supported, in part, by Jean-François and Nathalie Ducrest.

Ragnar Kjartansson: The Visitors is a Gift of Graham and Ann Gund to Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and Gund Gallery at Kenyon College.

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. 

Major support for Huma Bhabha: They Live is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.


Huma Bhabha: They Live is generously sponsored by Max Mara.

Additional support is generously provided by Karen and Brian Conway, Steve Corkin and Dan Maddalena, Fotene Demoulas and Tom Coté, Cynthia and John Reed, and Charlotte and Herbert S. Wagner III. 

Support for the Huma Bhabha: They Live publication provided by Salon 94.

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

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

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

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

Nina Chanel Abney, I Left Three Days Ago, 2016. Acrylic and spray paint, Library Street Collective, Detroit, Michigan. Courtesy of Nina Chanel Abney studio. © Nina Chanel Abney. | Ragnar Kjartansson, The Visitors, 2012. Nine-channel HD video projection, 64 minutes, Edition 4 of 6, Gift of Graham Gund to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and the Gund Gallery, Kenyon College. Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik. © Ragnar Kjartansson | Huma Bhahba, Four Nights of a Dreamer (detail), 2018. Cork, Styrofoam, acrylic, oil stick, and lacquered wood pedestal, 74 ½ × 36 × 36 inches (189.2 × 91.4 × 91.4 cm). Courtesy the artist and Salon 94, New York. © Huma Bhabha | John Akomfrah, Purple (still), 2017. Six-channel HD color video installation with 15.1 surround sound; 62 minutes. Courtesy Lisson Gallery. © Smoking Dogs Films | Haegue Yang, The Intermediate — Inceptive Sphere, 2016. Artificial straw, steel stand, powder coating, artificial plants, artificial fruits, plastic twine, Indian bells, and caster. 53 ⅛ x 45 ¼ inches (134.9 x 114.9 x 114.9 cm). General Acquisition Fund. Photo by Charles Mayer. © Haegue Yang | Vivian Suter, Nisyros (Vivian’s bed), 2016–17. Installation view, Kassel, Germany, for Documenta 14. © Vivian Suter | Helga Roht Poznanski, Untitled, c. 2018. Watercolor on paper, 17 x 24 inches. Courtesy the artist. © Helga Roht Poznanski | Woven Chronicle, 2011–2016. Installation view, Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter, October 1, 2016 – January 22, 2017, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo by Jonathan Muzikar.© The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY

(Boston, MA—December 18, 2018)  On Jan. 17, Chicago-born artist Nina Chanel Abney debuts a monumental, site-specific mural at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA). Abney, born in 1982, is at the forefront of a generation of young artists that is reenergizing narrative figurative painting. A skillful storyteller, Abney masterfully weaves colorful geometric shapes, language, and symbols into energetic and chaotic scenes that address the complex social dynamics of today. Created for the museum’s Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall, the new work—Abney’s first presentation in Boston—features vibrant vinyl cut-outs of various colors, forms, and sizes collaged into a visually compelling storyboard. Referencing what it means to “level the playing field” politically and socioeconomically, a bold black-and-white checkerboard pattern grounds the various characters, or “players,” in Abney’s narrative. On view through March 15, 2020, Abney’s installation is organized by Ellen Tani, Assistant Curator.

“Abney is a fantastic painter: creating vibrant, pulsing colossal compositions of figures, words, and shapes and using a brilliantly colored palette to express and dissect the notion of self in a dynamic and fraught world,” said Jill Medvedow, the ICA’s Ellen Matilda Poss Director. “The Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall, located in the museum’s glass-enclosed lobby, is an open, free and public space for visitors to encounter Abney’s art.”

“Nina is inspired by the power of public messaging—whether billboards, graffiti, current events, or digital information—as such, her approach is intuitive, improvisational, and responsive to social climate. The ICA installation draws on her current practice of creating site-specific public murals whose vibrant colors, recognizable imagery, and balance of chaos and order invite the viewer to both consume and consider their content,” said Tani.

Abney’s artistic practice is grounded in painting but spans a variety of forms, from fashion collaborations to playground surfaces to large-scale public murals. Often working improvisationally in spray paint, she makes brightly-colored compositions that channel the velocity of information cycles and viral content. Abney renders what comes across her radar through social media, popular culture, and the internet as a visual language of signs and icons that is both playful and challenging, and evokes feelings of stimulation and fatigue. Responding to the seemingly inescapable and weighty conditions of suffering that permeate much of the news today, Abney describes her artwork as “easy to swallow and hard to digest.”

The ICA’s Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall is dedicated to site-specific works by leading contemporary artists, commissioned annually.
 

About the artist

Nina Chanel Abney (b. 1982 in Chicago) earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Augustana College, IL in 2004, where she studied computer science and studio art. She earned a Master of Fine Arts at Parsons School of Design in 2007. Abney’s first solo exhibition, Nina Chanel Abney: Royal Flush, opened at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in 2018. Her work is held in private and public collections including the Brooklyn Museum, The Rubell Family Collection, Bronx Museum, and the Burger Collection, Hong Kong. She currently lives in New York.
 

About the ICA

Since its founding in 1936, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston has shared the pleasures of reflection, inspiration, imagination, and provocation that contemporary art offers with audiences in Boston and beyond. 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, part of a functioning 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 provided, in part, by Jean-François and Nathalie Ducrest.