Rose B. Simpson, Root A, 2019. Ceramic, glaze, linen, jute string, steel, and leather. 71 1/2 x 20 1/2 x 16 inches (181.6 x 52.1 x 40.6 cm). Rennie Collection, Vancouver. Courtesy the artist and Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco. © Rose B. Simpson
(Boston, MA—July 13, 2022) The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) presents Rose B. Simpson: Legacies, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in Boston. The artistic practice of Rose B. Simpson (b. 1983 in Santa Clara Pueblo, NM) encompasses ceramic sculpture, metal work, performance, installation, writing, and automobile design, offering poignant reflections on the human condition. Legacies is a tightly conceived exhibition featuring 11 of the artist’s ceramic figurative sculptures, including new works on view for the first time. Her ceramic sculptures, which range from intimately scaled works to monumental standing figures, express complex emotional and psychological states, spirituality, women’s strength, and post-apocalyptic visions of the world. Part of a multigenerational, matrilineal lineage of artists working with clay, Simpson connects traditional processes of producing clay pottery with innovative techniques and knowledge of her own place in the world today. Organized by Jeffrey De Blois, Associate Curator and Publications Manager, the exhibition is on view August 11, 2022 through January 29, 2023.
“Simpson is one of the most compelling voices in contemporary sculpture who consistently asks urgent questions about where we find ourselves in the world today through inventive techniques and materials. We look forward to sharing her powerful work with Boston audiences,” said De Blois.
For Legacies, Simpson’s signature themes and approaches to working with clay are brought together in an open floor plan presentation of individual figures, pairs, and groupings. These ceramic sculptures often incorporate metal, wood, leather, fabric, jewelry, and reclaimed materials, and are frequently marked with a “+” or an “x,” symbols for direction and protection, respectively. While the works included date back to 2014, the focus is on more recent work, including three new ceramic sculptures created for the exhibition. Heights I (original) (2022) is a small, armless standing figure with a series of cup-like vessels growing upwards from its head, suggesting the impulse to reach for new levels of consciousness. Legacy (2022), the work which gives the exhibition its title, is a two-part mother-daughter sculpture made using a technique Simpson refers to as “slap-slab,” involving repeatedly throwing clay against the floor on a diagonal until it is very thin. Built up of overlapping layers of thin clay, these busts are imbued with a sense of watchful vulnerability conveying the shifting complexities of motherhood as your child grows older. In Brace (2022), two armless leaning figures are locked in an evocative embrace, mutually dependent and tenderly joined together with knotted twine adorned with clay beads.
Many of Simpson’s works, like Legacy, consider intergenerational inheritances, or stand as safeguards against legacies of violence. Genesis Squared (2019), located at the gravitational center of the exhibition, features a mother figure who stands holding her child close to her body with feet planted firmly atop an ornately cut metal pedestal. Another cut-metal plate, depicting an intimate scene of mother and child embracing, balances on top of her head like a crown, as an homage to missing and murdered Indigenous women and to address the impact of the ongoing human rights crisis on the children forced to grow up without their mothers. Root A (2019) is a sentinel-like standing figure with crossed arms poised to safeguard women, native lands, and other vulnerable groups against external threats. Made of red, buff, and white clay, Root A is armed with various tools of survival. The figure’s intricately carved face is fixed atop a menacing blade encircling the shoulders. Suggesting an indomitable figure in a post-apocalyptic landscape, Root A “stand(s) tall,” according to the artist, “for justice, healing, and rehabilitation.”
Through such evocative, tactile forms and materials, each with their own commanding presence, Simpson’s work is intended, as she has said, “to translate our humanity back to ourselves.”
Simpson will be in conversation with De Blois. More information will be available soon on icaboston.org.
Rose B. Simpson (b. 1983, Santa Clara Pueblo, NM) has a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Art, a MFA from Rhode Island School of Design, and a MA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts. She has had recent solo exhibitions at the Wheelwright Museum (Santa Fe, NM), the Nevada Art Museum (Reno, NV), SCAD Museum of Art (Savannah, GA), and University of New Mexico Art Museum (Albuquerque, NM). In the past year, her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including at MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA), The Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland, OH), the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley, CA), and The Bronx Museum of Arts (New York). Her work is in many museum collections, including the Denver Art Museum, ICA/Boston, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Portland Art Museum (OR), Princeton University Art Museum, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Simpson lives and works on the Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico. Counterculture, a new large-scale public artwork by Simpson will be on view at Field Farm in Williamstown from June 18 — November 30, 2022 as part of The Trustees’ Art & The Landscape public art series.
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 expanding the museum’s role as educator, incubator, and convener. Its exhibitions, performances, and educational programs provide access to the breadth and diversity of 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 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 on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Rose B. Simpson: Legacies is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Additional support is generously provided by Karen and Brian Conway, Steve Corkin and Dan Maddalena, Bridgitt and Bruce Evans, Kim Sinatra, Charlotte and Herbert S. Wagner III, and the Jennifer Epstein Fund for Women Artists.
Jordan Nassar, Beyond the Boundaries, 2022. Hand-embroidered cotton on cotton, 84 × 81 × 1 inches (213.4 × 205.7 × 2.5 cm). The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art at Rollins College, Gift of Barbara ‘68 and Theodore ‘68 Alfond. 2022.2.7. © Jordan Nassar. Image courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle.
(Boston, MA—July 13, 2022) On August 11, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens Jordan Nassar: Fantasy and Truth, a solo exhibition of the New York-based artist whose multifaceted practice draws on traditional Palestinian craft to investigate ideas of home, land, and memory. As a self-taught artist, Nassar (b. 1985 in New York) is mostly known for his use of Palestinian tatreez, a matrilineal tradition of cross-stitching. In collaboration with a Palestinian embroidery collective based in the West Bank, the artist composes his embroideries from numerous individually made panels that together weave breathtaking, layered panoramas suggestive of an expansive sky or a boundless horizon. Fantasy and Truth presents the artist’s largest embroidered panels to date, alongside recent work in wood and glass mixed media. Organized by Anni Pullagura, Curatorial Assistant, the exhibition is on view August 11, 2022 through January 29, 2023.
“Nassar’s work, with its complex patterning and painterly attention to form and color, elevates our understanding of craft traditions as long-standing and deeply meaningful forms of art. We look forward to sharing his work with audiences in Boston for the first time,” said Pullagura.
Tatreez is a tradition deeply rooted in the history and culture of Palestine. Since 1948, it has become closely tied to ideas of nostalgia, nationality, and heritage. Colors, patterns, and designs could distinguish a wearer both by where they were from as well as their social or familial status, or signal different stages of life. Nassar grew up with many of these motifs in his household, and began incorporating tatreez into his practice after meeting with women-led embroidery collectives in Ramallah, Hebron, and Bethlehem, with whom he now collaborates on some of his artworks.
Presented across the gallery space, the embroidered works offer visions of homelands at monumental scale. Nassar’s largest works to date—Song of the Flowers (2022) and Lament of the Field (2022)—are each composed of fifty-seven individual panels in richly varied warm and cool colors, introducing familiar motifs and patterns in an arrangement that together suggests a sun rising over a blue mountain or a moon shining across a red valley. Recalling the fragmentation of memory, time, history, and place, the panels individual language and collective dialogue offer a poetic remark on ideas of fantasy and truth. The exhibition title, as well as the titles of the two large-scale embroideries, draw from the poetry collection A Tear and A Smile (1914) by Lebanese writer Gibran Khalil Gibran (1883–1931), whose melancholic poetics address the ebb and flow of memory and history. Similarly, for Nassar, embroidery holds a tension between conflict and harmony in the relationship between stitch and thread, color and pattern.
“I like to discuss these landscapes as versions of Palestine as they exist in the minds of the diaspora, who have never been there and can never go there,” shares Nassar. “They are the Palestine I heard stories about growing up, half-made of imagination. They are dreamlands and utopias that are colorful and fantastical—beautiful and romantic, but bittersweet.”
In recent years, Nassar has expanded his practice to include glass and wood-based crafts. The ICA exhibition features glassworks in which the artist has arranged hand-flamed glass beads in a steel armature, similar to decorative latticework. In the wood pieces on display, Nassar has layered the natural grains of the wood with brass and mother of pearl to create richly inlaid surfaces; these designs recur in the artist-made benches also created for this exhibition.
The ICA Store has partnered with Nassar and his clothing brand Adish to develop an exclusive capsule collection available only at the ICA featuring a limited edition embroidered hooded sweatshirt, tote bag, poster, and more. Visit icastore.org for more information.
Jordan Nassar (b.1985, New York, NY) earned his B.A. at Middlebury College in 2007. His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions globally at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Asia Society, New York, NY; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ; Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY; Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY; KMAC Museum, Louisville, KY; Center for Contemporary Art (CCA) Tel Aviv; Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA; James Cohan, New York and The Third Line, Dubai, UAE. His work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Rollins Museum of Art, Florida; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; The Museum of Contemporary Art, California; and Rhode Island School of Design Museum, in Rhode Island, among others.
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 expanding the museum’s role as educator, incubator, and convener. Its exhibitions, performances, and educational programs provide access to the breadth and diversity of 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 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 on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Support for Jordan Nassar: Fantasy and Truth is generously provided by Oliver and Negin Ewald.
Eva Respini. Photo by Liza Voll.
(Boston, MA—June 29, 2022)—The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston announces the promotion of Eva Respini to Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs and Barbara Lee Chief Curator. Respini will lead the vision and strategy for the ICA’s exhibitions and collection, in alignment with the ICA’s mission to provide a wider and more global view of today’s most innovative artists and contemporary art practices. Respini joined the ICA as the Barbara Lee Chief Curator in 2015, after more than a decade as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art. Most recently, she was the curator and co-commissioner of the U.S. Pavilion’s historic Simone Leigh presentation for the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2022. Respini is currently organizing the first mid-career survey exhibition of Leigh’s work, which will open at the ICA in March 2023 before touring across the country.
“I am thrilled to announce Eva’s promotion to this expanded leadership position at the ICA,” said Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director of the ICA. “With creativity, thoughtfulness, and dedication, Eva has developed exhibitions that have advanced our knowledge of contemporary art and artists, and been met with popular and critical acclaim. Hundreds of thousands of people—in Boston, New York, and Venice—are currently experiencing exhibitions developed by Eva and her team, expanding the impact of the ICA on a local, national, and global stage.”
Respini led the significant expansion of ICA’s exhibition program in 2018 with the opening of the ICA Watershed, the museum’s project space in East Boston where audiences encounter and experience large-scale and immersive artworks. In keeping with ICA’s history to champion the most innovative art and ideas of our time, her work has brought attention to under-recognized artists or little-explored themes and practices in the art world. Specializing in global contemporary art and image-making practices, Respini has organized the critically acclaimed exhibitions Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today (2018); When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art (2019); and ambitious solo presentations such as Deana Lawson (2021); Firelei Báez (2021); John Akomfrah: Purple (2019); Huma Bhabha: They Live (2019); William Forsythe: Choreographic Objects (2018); Liz Deschenes (2016); and Nalini Malani (2016). Her other notable exhibitions include a major retrospective of Cindy Sherman (2012), and the surveys Walid Raad (2015) and Robert Heinecken (2014). Respini’s curatorial leadership and commitment to curatorial craft at every level of exhibition-making is evident in all her curatorial projects. Respini has been a visiting lecturer, critic, and speaker at a number of universities and currently teaches a seminar on curatorial practice at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Other universities where she has taught and lectured include School of Visual Arts, Columbia University; Yale University’s School of Art; and the School of Visual Arts, New York. She has published numerous books and catalogues and her writing appears in museum publications and periodicals.
About the ICA/Boston
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 expanding the museum’s role as educator, incubator, and convener. Its exhibitions, performances, and educational programs provide access to the breadth and diversity of 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 is located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA, 02210. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at icaboston.org. Follow the ICA on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Media contact: Colette Randall, crandall@icaboston.org
Simone Leigh: Façade, 2022. Thatch, steel, and wood, dimensions variable. Satellite, 2022. Bronze, 24 feet × 10 feet × 7 feet 7 inches (7.3 × 3 × 2.3 m) (overall). Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery. Photo by Timothy Schenck. © Simone Leigh
(Boston, MA—June 22, 2022)—The U.S. Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia expands its presentation of artist Simone Leigh’s work this fall with Loophole of Retreat: Venice, a convening of Black women intellectuals—performers, writers, filmmakers artists, and activists—that will take place Oct. 7-9 at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini. The project is an extension of the critically acclaimed exhibition Simone Leigh: Sovereignty, commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) in partnership with the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, and reflects the collaborative ethos that is characteristic of artist Simone Leigh’s practice.
The three-day symposium is organized by Rashida Bumbray, director of Culture and Art at the Open Society Foundations, with curatorial advisors Saidiya Hartman, University Professor, Columbia University, and Tina M. Campt, Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities and Modern Culture and Media, Brown University. For more information, visit simoneleighvenice2022.org.
Loophole of Retreat: Venice builds on an eponymous one-day convening held in 2019 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. The conceptual frame is drawn from the 1861 autobiography of Harriet Jacobs, a formerly enslaved woman who, for seven years after her escape, lived in a crawlspace she described as a “loophole of retreat.” Jacobs claimed this site as simultaneously an enclosure and a space for enacting practices of freedom—practices of thinking, planning, writing, and imagining new forms of freedom.
“Leigh is committed to the lineage of Black women artists and intellectuals that make her practice possible. As such, in connection with her exhibition at the U.S. Pavilion in Venice, she continues her work of making Black women’s intellectual labor more visible. Loophole of Retreat will elevate a global conversation on Black feminist thought in order to nurture the intergenerational and interdisciplinary connections between Black women thinkers and makers,” said Bumbray.
Loophole of Retreat: Venice will feature a global roster of participants that includes visual artist Deborah Anzinger (Jamaica); cultural anthropologist, dancer, and choreographer Aimee Meredith Cox (U.S.); filmmaker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich (U.S.); filmmaker Gessica Geneus (Haiti); visual artist Bouchra Khalili (Morocco); poet Raquel Lima (Portugal); choreographer Paloma McGregor (St. Croix /U.S.), multidisciplinary collective Black Quantum Futurism (U.S.); choreographer Kettly Noël (Haiti/Mali), medical anthropologist Stella Nyanzi (Uganda); artist Lorraine O’Grady (U.S.); writer Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts (U.S.); and choreographer Nelisiwe Xaba (South Africa); among others. See full list below.
The symposium will feature performances, film screenings, and conversations organized around key directives, including:
Maroonage: Maroons refer to the people who escaped slavery and created independent communities on the outskirts of enslaved communities. The maroonage directive is informed by the artist Deborah Anzinger’s explorations of fugitivity and resistance in Jamaica’s Cockpit Country, which is a site of historical refuge and resistance for Maroons.
Manual: This directive is inspired by the Manual for General Housework from Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval.
Magical Realism: Magically real forms are the music, literature, and movement languages developed by Black people in the New World as a result of the catastrophes of colonialism and the middle passage.
Medicine: This directive is inspired by how we cope with the natural and supernatural world around us. It draws on our approaches to diverse ailments; physical, spiritual, natural, and supernatural. For this gathering, we consider the work of root and leaf doctors, traditional healers and conjurors of the rural Black American South and the global South.
Sovereignty: The title of the U.S. Pavilion exhibition, Sovereignty, speaks to notions of self-determination, self-governance and independence for both the intellectual and the collaborative.
Participants:
Aimee Meredith Cox
Annette Lane Harrison Richter
Aracelis Girmay
Autumn Knight
Ayana Evans
Black Quantum Futurism
Bouchra Khalili
Canisia Lubrin
Cecily Bumbray
Christina Sharpe
Daniella Rose King
Deborah Anzinger
Denise Ferreira da Silva
Diane Sousa da Silva Lima
Dionne Brand
dream hampton
Firelei Baez
Françoise Vergès
Gail Lewis
Gessica Geneus
Gloria Wekker
Grada Kilomba
Holly Bass
Ja’Tovia Gary
Janaína Oliveira
Javiela Evangelista
Jessica Lynne
Kettly Noël
Las Nietas de Nonó
Legacy Russell
Leslie Hewitt
Lisa Marie Simmons
Lorraine O’Grady
Maaza Mengiste
Mabel O. Wilson
Maboula Soumahoro
Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich
Mistura Allison
Negarra A. Kudumu
Nelisiwe Xaba
Nomaduma Masilela
Nontsikelelo Mutiti
Nora Chipaumire
Okwui Okpokwasili
Olumide Popoola
Oluremi Onabanjo
Paloma McGregor
Phoebe Boswell
Raquel Lima
Rizvana Bradley
Robin Coste Lewis
Saidiya Hartman
Sandra Jackson Dumont
Senam Okudzeto
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts
Stella Nyanzi
Tarana Burke
Tina Campt
Tsedaye Makonnen
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson
Zara Julius
ABOUT THE ORGANIZERS
Simone Leigh (b. 1967, Chicago, IL) has created an expansive body of work in sculpture, video, and performance, over the past two decades, that centers Black femme interiority. Inflected by Black feminist theory, Leigh’s practice intervenes imaginatively to fill gaps in the historical record by proposing new hybridities. Leigh’s sculptural works join forms derived from vernacular architecture and the female body, rendering them via materials and processes associated with the artistic traditions of Africa and the African diaspora. The collaborative ethos that characterizes Leigh’s videos and public programs pays homage to a long history of Black female collectivity, communality, and care. In 2019, Leigh was the first artist commissioned for the High Line Plinth, New York. Recent exhibitions include The Hugo Boss Prize 2018: Simone Leigh, Loophole of Retreat at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2019); the 2019 Whitney Biennial; Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon (2017) at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Psychic Friends Network (2016) at Tate Exchange, Tate Modern, London; Hammer Projects: Simone Leigh (2016–17) at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; inHarlem: Simone Leigh (2016–17), a public installation presented by The Studio Museum in Harlem at Marcus Garvey Park, New York; The Waiting Room (2016) at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; and Free People’s Medical Clinic (2014), a project commissioned by Creative Time. Leigh’s work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; Cleveland Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the ICA/Boston, among others.
The works that comprise Leigh’s exhibition for the U.S. Pavilion will be featured in her first museum survey exhibition at the ICA in 2023, which will subsequently tour to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. (Fall/Winter 2023/24), and a joint presentation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and California African American Museum (CAAM) in Spring/Summer 2024 in Los Angeles, CA. The exhibition will be accompanied by the first comprehensive monograph dedicated to Leigh’s work.
Rashida Bumbray is director of Culture and Art, the Open Society Foundations’ program dedicated to advancing diverse artistic practices and strengthening locally led cultural spaces around the world. Since joining the Open Society Foundations in 2015, Bumbray has launched and overseen many new grantmaking initiatives in global contexts including the Global Initiative for the Restitution of African Cultural Heritage, the Soros Arts Fellowship and the OSF Arts Forum on Art, Public Space and Closing Societies. With colleagues from Haiti’s FOKAL, she helped to inaugurate a new Caribbean cultural foundation, and in collaboration with Open Society-US, she established the Alternative Monuments Initiative. Bumbray began her curatorial career in 2001 at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, where she coordinated major exhibitions including Frequency (2005) and Freestyle (2001). As associate curator at The Kitchen, New York, Bumbray organized critically acclaimed exhibitions and commissions including Simone Leigh’s solo exhibition You Don’t Know Where Her Mouth Has Been (2012), among many others. She was guest curator of Creative Time’s public art exhibition Funk, God, Jazz and Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn in 2014, which included Leigh’s Free Peoples’ Medical Clinic. Bumbray is also an accomplished choreographer whose practice draws from traditional African American vernacular and folk forms. Her performances have been presented by Tate Modern, London; the New Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harlem Stage, and SummerStage, all in New York; and Project Row Houses, Houston.
ABOUT SIMONE LEIGH: SOVEREIGNTY
Simone Leigh: Sovereignty features a new body of work made for the United States Pavilion at the Biennale Arte 2022, commissioned by the ICA in partnership with the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Sovereignty commingles disparate histories and narratives, including those related to ritual performances of the Baga peoples in Guinea, early Black American material culture from the Edgefield District in South Carolina, and the landmark 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition. With a series of bronzes and ceramics both outside and inside the Pavilion, Leigh intervenes imaginatively to fill gaps in the historical record by proposing new hybridities. Learn more at simoneleighvenice2022.org.
ABOUT THE ICA/BOSTON
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 expanding the museum’s role as educator, incubator, and convener. Its exhibitions, performances, and educational programs provide access to the breadth and diversity of 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 is located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA, 02210. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at icaboston.org. Follow the ICA on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
ABOUT LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA
Established in 1895, La Biennale di Venezia is acknowledged today as one of the most prestigious cultural institutions. La Biennale stands at the forefront of research and promotion of new contemporary art trends and organizes events in its specific sectors of Arts (1895), Architecture (1980), Cinema (1932), Dance (1999), Music (1930), and Theatre (1934), alongside research and training activities. The International Art Exhibition is considered the most prestigious contemporary art exhibition in the world, introducing hundreds of thousands of visitors to exciting new art every two years. The 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (April 23–November 27, 2022) is directed by Cecilia Alemani.
ABOUT THE U.S. PAVILION
The United States Pavilion, a building in the neoclassical style in the Giardini della Biennale, Venice, opened on May 4, 1930. Since 1986, the U.S. Pavilion has been owned by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and managed by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, which works closely with the U.S. Department of State and exhibition curators to install and maintain all official U.S. exhibitions presented in the Pavilion. Every two years, museum curators from across the country detail their visions for the U.S. Pavilion in proposals that are reviewed by the National Endowment for the Arts’ Federal Advisory Committee on International Exhibitions (FACIE), a group comprising curators, museum directors, and artists, who then submit their recommendations to the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Past exhibitions can be viewed on the Peggy Guggenheim Collection’s website at https://www.guggenheim-venice.it/.
ABOUT THE BUREAU OF EDUCATIONAL AND CULTURAL AFFAIRS, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
The U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) builds relations between the people of the United States and the people of other countries through academic, cultural, sports, professional, and private exchanges, as well as public-private partnerships and mentoring programs. These exchange programs improve foreign relations and strengthen the national security of the United States, support U.S. international leadership, and provide a broad range of domestic benefits by helping break down barriers that often divide us, like religion, politics, language, and ethnicity, and geography. ECA programs build connections that engage and empower people and motivate them to become leaders and thinkers, to develop new skills, and to find connections that will create positive change in their communities. For more information, please visit https://exchanges.state.gov/us.
Simone Leigh is presented by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston in partnership with the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State.
With warmest thanks, the ICA/Boston gratefully acknowledges the following philanthropic partners for their magnificent support.
Major support is provided by the Ford Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Lead corporate support is provided by eu2be.
Generous support is provided by Bloomberg Philanthropies, Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser, The Girlfriend Fund, and Wagner Foundation.
Leadership gifts are provided by Amy and David Abrams; Stephanie Formica Connaughton and John Connaughton; Bridgitt and Bruce Evans; James and Audrey Foster; Agnes Gund; Jodi and Hal Hess; Hostetler/Wrigley Foundation; Barbara and Amos Hostetter; Brigette Lau Collection; Kristen and Kent Lucken; Tristin and Martin Mannion; Ted Pappendick and Erica Gervais Pappendick; Gina and Stuart Peterson; Helen and Charles Schwab; the Terra Foundation for American Art; and VIA Art Fund.
Essential support is also provided by Suzanne Deal Booth; Kate and Chuck Brizius; Richard Chang; Karen and Brian Conway; Steven Corkin and Dan Maddalena; Federico Martin Castro Debernardi; Jennifer Epstein and Bill Keravuori; Esta Gordon Epstein and Robert Epstein; Negin and Oliver Ewald; Alison and John Ferring; Helen Frankenthaler Foundation; Glenn and Amanda Fuhrman; Vivien and Alan Hassenfeld and the Hassenfeld Family Foundation; Peggy J. Koenig and Family; The Holly Peterson Foundation; David and Leslie Puth with Mark and Marie Schwartz; Cindy and Howard Rachofsky; Leslie Riedel and Scott Friend; Kim Sinatra; Tobias and Kristin Welo; Lise and Jeffrey Wilks; Kelly Williams and Andrew Forsyth; Jill and Nick Woodman; Nicole Zatlyn and Jason Weiner; Marilyn Lyng and Dan O’Connell; Komal Shah and Gaurav Garg Foundation; Kate and Ajay Agarwal; Eunhak Bae and Robert Kwak; Jeremiah Schneider Joseph; Barbara H. Lloyd; Cynthia and John Reed; and anonymous donors.