get tickets

Advance tickets are now available for visits through September 1. Book now

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.

 


Last week, 5 ICA Slam Team members took part in the competition for the Massachusetts Brave New Voices team — and our poets Victoria and Sydney made the team! We’re so proud of them!

That means this summer they’ll be going all the way to Houston with the rest of the MA BNV team to compete with teams from across the country and around the world.

Check out pictures from the event below.

The Teen New Media Program at the ICA is having its annual Spring Showcase on May 25th, from 5-9. 

Come and see:

  • performances by our Advanced Music Production class
  • poems from Slam Team members
  • an ICA Teens photography exhibition 
  • and as always, a film screening of shorts made in the Fast Forward program! 

The event is free and open to the public. 

LOCATION

Institute of Contemporary Art
25 Harbor Shore Drive
Boston, MA 02110

MBTA STOPS

Red Line to South Station
Silver Line to Courthouse

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.

The ICA Slam Team headed to the Strand Theater in Dorchester last Saturday, April 28th, to compete in the final round of this year’s Louder Than a Bomb youth slam festival. Carloyn, Tubby, Vicrtoria, Mithsuca, and Sydney ate a delicious lunch together with their coaches — and last year’s team member Cece and her new baby Cha’Niyaa! 

The sun was out. They practiced all afternoon. Finals is always a special day, but this was extra sentimental because it’s Mithsuca, Carolyn, Victoria, and Sydney’s last year with the team.

The event began with individual poems — Mithsuca, Carloyn, Victoria and Sydney performed and they killed it! The whole event was amazing and everybody was super impressive. The last round was for group pieces, and Tubby, Sydney, Victoria, and Mithsuca did a piece together.  Cece and Cha’Niyaa were amazing cheerleaders through the whole event! 

The whole night was completely magical, and in the end it was announced that the ICA slam team came in 2nd place! We are so proud and happy for our poets and all their hard work. 

On top of it all, Coach Febo received the 2018 Charmaine Santiago Galdon Coaches award. A huge and well-deserved honor! 

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.