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After months of collaborative preparation, three ICA teens —  Mithsuca Berry, Sydney Bobb, and Gabe S. — created site-specific original artwork for display on the triptych monitors at many MBTA stops and stations. The themes addressed by the work include “whimsy”, a “love letter to Boston”, and “peace and quiet”. Check out the write-ups in the Boston Globe and the Boston Metro and watch the videos below! 

Building Brave Spaces is coming this November. Leaders from across the nation and across sectors will gather in Boston to mobilize the field of teen arts education. As we look back on the last ten years of our own Teen Convenings, countless teen nights, teen workshops, Teen Artist Encounters and more, we reflect on the long-term impacts of teen programs. We are also looking forward and thinking critically about how to mobilize the field of teen arts education for a better future. Given the challenges teens face today they need arts programs now more than ever—to create, to express, to learn, and most importantly, to be heard.

Teen Arts Education

If you have worked in or with a teen arts program you have probably experienced the benefits and challenges of non-school-based arts programming. You may have seen teenagers experience transformative moments, learn new skills, gain confidence, and develop leadership qualities. But what are the long-term impacts of teen arts education? How do we know we are making a difference that extends beyond the turbulent years of teenhood and influences the formation of one’s long-term identity? What is the value of teen arts programs for teens who might not continue working in the arts? In 2015 Danielle Linzer, now Director of Learning and Public Engagement at the Andy Warhol Museum, was Project Director of Room to Rise, a study led by the Whitney Museum measuring the lasting impacts of teen arts education. Room to Rise quantified impacts through hard data as well as qualitative testimonials from participants in museum-based teen arts programs. We had a conversation with Danielle to dig into above-mentioned questions. The following insights emerged from the discussion and reflect her deep understanding of teen arts education.

But what is it about teens?

Teens. Teenagers. Adolescents. These young humans are experiencing radical emotional, physical, and psychological changes (*cue a stuttering David Bowie). These shifts make teens hypersensitive—experiences are rich, intense, and unforgettable. They are ‘trying on selves,’ becoming independent thinkers, and beginning to think philosophically about life. Experimentation and rebelliousness are central to the transition to adulthood as they fail, learn, and try again. For all of these reasons, art education during the teenage years produces salient moments that impact youth in the long term:

I walked away understanding why it’s important to question who I am. And I don’t think in American society that we really do get that ability; we don’t get to question who we are, because society tells us, this is who you’re supposed to be…Youth Insights allows…young people to learn who they are, but learn who they are through art and in that define themselves.

Charles Galberth, Youth Insights Alum, Whitney Museum of American Art, from Room to Rise

Why non-school based arts programming?

Non-school teen arts education programs create spaces where teens can express the many facets of their growing identities. They can try on the hats of their personalities and learn from their peers. They learn who they want to be and how to be in a space free of the judgments of school teachers or guardians. In museum settings, teens are often valued for the very idiosyncrasies that can make learning in a traditional school environment challenging. A teen reflected on this at the 2016 National Teen Convening at ICA/Boston:

At a discussion, I talked about how very specific abilities, such as mathematical aptitude, are valued over others. I then trailed off unconfidently, but my film teacher Cliff said, “I know exactly what you’re saying. A school has the ability to make or break a person.” Hearing my own teacher affirm the reality of such a poor and often-overlooked part of most schools helped me forgive myself for not being a cookie-cutter student. From that point on, I was more inclined to value the way I am different.

Beatrice Espanola, Fast Forward Member, ICA/Boston
 

In many ways the contemporary artistic practice mirrors the trials of teenhood. Contemporary art deals centrally with pushing boundaries, critiquing and questioning power structures, and designing or imagining future possibilities based around equity, inclusion, and bold creativity. Art allows teens to engage with their criticality and rebellious tendencies through a generative process and consequently experience achievement and confidence.

Other alumni describe similar personal growth—a steadily emerging sense of identity, confidence, achievement, and empowerment—as a powerful, lasting benefit of intensive teen programs.

Room to Rise, 2015

The making of art is also a rigorous process. Teenagers learn from the combination of rigor and creativity demanded of them when working on creative projects, assisting visiting artists, and developing or planning museum events. Through making art, teens are asked to engage in constant decision-making. One must think through outcomes, make choices, and find new solutions when presented with an undesirable result. The transferability of skills like critical thinking, decision making, and creative problem solving are endless. Some teens will go on to work in museums or as artists themselves, but others will move on to become lawyers, farmers, or community leaders and they carry this toolbox with them.

How do we make our teen programs better?

Knowing that anecdotal evidence of long-term impacts of teen programs is backed statistically by hard-won evidence is exciting, but there is real work in figuring out what is next. Now that we know teen arts programs have long term impacts on participants, what can we do to make them better? How can we craft programs that have positive long-term benefits and focused outcomes?

The Room to Rise study included an interesting finding that teens rate their experiences higher when in diverse program groups that incorporate students from multiple ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds. The findings did not clearly depict why this is so—or what in particular about being in diversified groups led to a higher-rated experience, but findings like this help us glean insight about how to create the most impactful programming for teens. They also bolster the idea that teen programming in general supports the long-term social sustainability of a museum. Not only are teens impacted in the long-term, but the museum itself is propelled towards progression, self-reflection, and equity when fully engaged with teen programming across the institution.

Despite a cache replete with evidence for long-term impacts of museum-led arts programs on teens ability to become employed, successfully finish a project, make a work of art, or become a leader among peers, what speaks to us in our current cultural moment is the power of institutional listening. When teens are immersed in non-school, arts-based programming, they feel they are listened to. The value of being heard is unquantifiable—and perhaps immeasurable.

I understand now the importance of making my voice heard in a productive way, and that is something that will last a lifetime.

Cecelia Halle, Teen Arts Council. ICA Boston

 

Read the full Room to Rise report.

We are thrilled to have Danielle on the Advisory Committee for Building Brave Spaces: Mobilizing Teen Arts Education national conference!

Danielle Linzer is the Director of Learning and Public Engagement at The Andy Warhol Museum. At The Warhol she oversees education, interpretation, programming, and outreach strategies for audiences of all ages and abilities, both in the museum and in the community. Prior to her arrival at The Warhol, Danielle was Director of Access and Community Programs at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she managed broad institutional programming, compliance, and audience development efforts around accessibility and inclusion, as well as community-based partnerships and outreach strategies for populations that have traditionally been underserved by cultural organizations. In 2016 she published Room to Rise, findings from a multi-year research initiative investigating long-term impacts of teen programs in art museums, in collaboration with the Walker Art Center, the Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Danielle received her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and holds an M.S. in Leadership in Museum Education from Bank Street College.

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.

Artful ways to spend your days: art, events, and fun for you, your family, and friends all around Boston. 

  • Palehound w/ Oompa, Melissa Lozada-Oliva at The Sinclair
    Fri, Mar 16 | 8–11:30 PM
    THE SINCLAIR, 52 cHURCH sT, cAMBRIDGE
    The sophomore album from the Boston trio Palehound, A Place I’ll Always Go, is a frank look at love and loss, cushioned by indelible hooks and gently propulsive, fuzzed-out rock. Catch them with the incredible Oompa, a nationally-renowned, Boston-born, poet, educator, and lyricist, and Melissa Lozada-Oliva, a poet and educator living in New York!

    Can you say Friyay?

  • ICA After 5: Crochet Soiree
    Fri, Mar 16 | 5–8 PM
    Grab a hook and join the party – veteran and newbie crocheters welcome! Explore the new installment of the ICA Collection: Entangled in the Everyday, and get inspired. Then learn the basics of crochet (or bring your own project!) and start your masterpiece.
    Free with museum admission

  • Closing Reception Boston Does Boston XI
    Fri, Mar 16 | 6–8 PM
    PROOF GALLERY, 516 EAST 2ND STREET, SOUTH BOSTON
    This year, in the eleventh Boston Does Boston, six artists sense an equilibrium of wills — a latent restlessness. (A document) a picture (the picture?) Finally, an image on the verge — something alert- work toward it.
    Last Chance

  • Let’s Shoot Boston x Boston Girl Collective Mixer
    Sat, Mar 17 | 12–3 PM
    WAREHOUSE XI, 11 SANBORN COURT, SOMERVILLE
    a community networking event focused on the womxn of our community. They will be taking over Warehouse XI, a creative event space where people will come together for an afternoon of speed dates, a community photography project, and open conversation and laughs. Members of LSB, BGC, and new friends are all welcome.
    Mix, mingle, collaborate + create!

  • Members Bring a Friend for Free Weekend
    Sat, Mar 17–Sun, Mar 18 | 10 AM–4 PM
    Attention members! Did you know you can bring a friend for free for the opening weekend of every new exhibition? The weekend of March 17 to 18, be among the first to see the ICA’s new collection exhibtion Entangled in the Everyday. This exhibition presents major works that showcase artists’ engagement and entanglement with the everyday. Interest in common materials and quotidian subjects has been a defining theme of artistic practice in the 20th century, inspiring Cubist collage, found sculpture, and the widespread embrace of photography. Take advantage of this great benefit and introduce your museum to friends and family!
    Bring your BFF

  • Rudresh Mahanthappa’s Indo-Pak Coalition Featuring Rez Abbasi + Dan Weiss
    Sun, Mar 18 | 7:30 PM
    With Mahanthappa on alto saxophone, Rez Abbasi on guitar, and Dan Weiss on tabla, Rudresh Mahanthappa’s Indo-Pak Coalition creates a mesmerizing brand of jazz blended with eastern Indian roots music. The vibrant presence of Indian rhythmic and melodic elements is supercharged in a modern improvisational framework born of the New York jazz scene.
    Don’t miss this fiery blend

  • Opening Night Juan Obando: Full Collabs
    Fri, Mar 16 | 7–10 PM
    DISTILLERY GALLERY, 516 EAST 2ND STREET, SOUTH BOSTON
    Full Collabs showcases a new body of work by Obando exploring this newfound landscape through app development, photo-installation, sculpture, and video. This exhibition proposes an immersive reflection on the circular logic of capitalism, the closed loops of ideology, and the tensions between public and private signaling modeled by digital media.
    See It First

  • Get Cozy + Explore Our Collection
    Dive into the ICA’s collection from the comfort of your coziest spot. 
    Get your art on

  • The Society of Arts + Crafts
    100 Pier 4 Boulevard, Suite 200, Boston,
    Visit our new neighbors and check out their current exhibitions, shop, or learn more about CraftBoston. The mission of the Society of Arts and Crafts is to support excellence in crafts by encouraging the creation, collection, and conservation of the work of craft artists and by educating and promoting public appreciation of fine craftsmanship.
    Get crafty

  • Seaport Beer Run
    Sundays | 10:30 AM
    Harpoon Brewery
    Starting and finishing at the Harpoon Brewery in Boston’s Seaport District, this 6.5-mile guided running tour takes runners at an easy pace through historic sights including the Old North Church and the final resting place of beer brewer and patriot Samuel Adams.
    Brews + views