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ICA teen educators talk about their experiences as teens.

Teen arts education is central to the ICA, but we also know being a teenager is no easy task. It is a time of both growth and uncertainty. So, we asked our teen education staff look back on their experiences as teenagers and the lessons they’ve learned to get them where they are today!

Carlie Bristow as teenager

Carlie Bristow

Teen Programs Associate

“Listen to yourself more. Also, you are dope and beautiful.”

  1. What were you like as a teenager?
    Confused! I really had no idea where I fit in. I went to a small school in New Hampshire where sports were very important. However, I couldn’t run a mile if I had to and I always found myself in the art building. I fell in love with photography in high school and really found my passion of making things.
  2. If you could tell your teenage-self one thing what would it be?
    I would probably say, “Failure is ok. Low points are important. The universe will guide you. Listen to yourself more. Also, you are dope and beautiful.”

3. How was art important to you as a teenager?
Picking up a camera senior year of high school actually changed my life. No really, it did. At the time, I was applying to liberal arts colleges with no idea what I wanted to study. After I began to take pictures and learn about art history, I decided last minute to apply to art school. I ended up studying (and devoting the rest of my life) to art. Discovering art was the best thing that ever happened to me. It has led me to some of the best people and places – including the ICA!
 

Cliften Bonner-Desravines as a teenager

Cliften Bonner-Desravines

Teen New Media Program Associate

Chill out…no one cares that you like David Bowie AND Tupac at the same time. 

  1. What were you like as a teenager?
    I was a total jock who was a big softie on the inside that liked to play piano and sing in choirs. Basketball took over a majority of my life, but my secret life was filled with all kinds of art, until I got to college and made it more of a full-time thing.
  2. If you could tell your teenage-self one thing what would it be?
    Chill out…no one cares that you like David Bowie AND Tupac at the same time. 
  3. How was art important to you as a teenager?
    It was my only other real release of self-expression. Because of my family, I got pulled into all kinds of art form. It showed me that I could do more with myself and my thoughts. 

Anthony Febo as a teenager

Anthony Febo

Head Coach of ICA Slam Team

I decided I was going to be happy for a living.
 

  1. What were you like as a teenager?
    In high school I was a hip-hop artist but I was also on the wrestling team. I feel like holding simultaneous identities has always been a part of me but it wasn’t until high school that I allowed them to shine.
  2. If you could tell your teenage-self one thing what would it be?
    Join a youth organization. Experience more art. Poetry Slam is a thing, DO IT! Romantic relationships are great, but explore relationships without making them romantic. 
  3. How was art important to you as a teenager?
    I made music. It was bad but I had fun and it paved the way for the rest of my life. I discovered that being on stage made me happy and I decided I was going to be happy for a living.

Gabrielle Wyrick as a teenager

Gabrielle Wyrick

Associate Director of Education

Be kinder to yourself.
 

  1. What were you like as a teenager?
    A study in extremes.
  2. If you could tell your teenage-self one thing what would it be?
    Be kinder to yourself.
  3. How was art important to you as a teenager?
    Essential for survival.

 

Emmanuel Oppong-Yeboah as a teenager

Emmanuel Oppong-Yeboah

Assistant Coach of ICA Slam Team

Like actually, things are going to be okay. Like you have a lot of learning to do, and growth, and it’ll be great I promise.

  1. What were you like as a teenager?
    I think just generally I had a lot to figure out still when I was a teen. I don’t know, I was growing into myself, I guess. I had spent most of middle school as this awkward chubby kid, and I had this growth spurt in high school, and was literally figuring out how to negotiate life now in this very different body, while still also doing high school, and friends, and social things. Everything felt really hard. Everything still feels kind of hard, but I was definitely a lot less sure of myself then.
  2. If you could tell your teenage-self one thing what would it be?
    “BRUH, chill…” Like actually, things are going to be okay. Like you have a lot of learning to do, and growth, and it’ll be great I promise, but for now, chill – shoot your shot, there’s plenty of life ahead. “Also PSTTT…don’t buy into forms of toxic masculinity. Everyone should be a feminist. Look up intersectionality. Shout out to Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lucile Clifton *Insert Lazers* Let me grab one of mom’s meat pies before I go. Kaythanksbye.” 
  3. How was art important to you as a teenager?
    I was a voracious reader when I was a teen; as in most likely not to be paying attention in Latin class because I had my head in a book. Me and my close friends would get together on weekends and just watch movies. I was really dedicated to curating my “aesthetic.” I rolled up my pants and wore colorful socks. I had tumblr before tumblr was tumblr, and reposted EMOTIONAL poems and stuff. I memorized poems and waxed poetic about love. I FELT THINGS, and struggled to communicate them, and so wrote sort of angsty poems – yeah, that was basically my thing. 

Up close with theater director Lars Jan

Theater director Lars Jan describes his multimedia performance The Institute of Memory (TIMe) as a work about “how the future of remembering is changing right now,” told through the story of his father, a “Cold War operative and privacy-obsessed misanthrope.”

It was an examination of Polish theater director Tadeusz Kantor, and his “obsession with personal history, shards of memory, reams of the forgotten, the archiving of ephemera” that led American director Lars Jan to examine his own past. “The inquiry started with trying to understand what happened to my dad,” says Jan, who grew up in Cambridge and Marshfield. “Why did he become the way he was? Why was he such an enigma? Why was he so paranoid?” Jan’s explorations led him from records in Cambridge City Hall and Massachusetts General Hospital to a bunker of state-gathered surveillance in Poland called The Institute of National Memory. Along the way, Jan developed his own deep interests in ideas of privacy and of archiving, fueled by Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations and by becoming a father himself and considering how the nature of his daughter’s remembering may differ from his own.

As he learned more about his father’s experience, the work shifted from exploring his paranoia to “questioning whether paranoia’s really the right word for it,” Jan says. Born in Poland, Henryk Ryniewicz was a Polish resistance fighter during World War II who moved to Cambridge after the war to take a position at what would become Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Jan had little contact with him in his later life and only learned of his mental decline and death in 2009 18 months after the fact.

“My father was a teenager during World War II, he was in the Polish resistance, his grandfather was killed in the massacre around the fifth day of the war, his country was subsumed by Stalin. Basically, history was very unkind to him and he had incredible experience with being surveilled. He was also tortured in the Polish resistance, so his ability to trust other people was formed by real experiences. For him to postulate that those experiences could happen again, if those people might still be watching, that those people might still be after him…Paranoia indicates an unreasonable degree of caution or concern, but he wasn’t wrong, given his life experience.”

On visits to Poland for theater festivals and research, Jan would talk about his enigmatic father to people he met, and “what was really interesting was that as I described the little that I knew, so many people said, ‘well this is like an archetypal Polish man of the 20th century; this is somebody that we all have in our family in one way or another.’ They really recognized his deep distrust of information and guarding of his personal information, the broken post–World War II traumatic mental state, his inability to connect with others.”

They recommended Jan seek information from the Institute of National Remembrance, which he describes as “a fascinating archive that was started by the Nazis and the taken over by the Soviet Secret Police” and that is comprised “mostly of hearsay, of what the neighbor said this other guy was doing,” but also contained the “extreme surveillance apparatus that was trying to control the population.” Covering the period from 1939 to 1989, the archive is now open to journalists and historians, and Jan was able to get materials on his father through a Polish proxy, two packages of more than a hundred pages each. One covered a visit to Poland in 1958, when Ryniewicz was trailed and his contacts investigated. The second was reported from Cambridge in the late 1960s by multiple spies living there with code names.

Inspired by Kantor, whose work experimented with representing memory, Jan’s genre-bending (TIMe) considers how archiving, from bureaucratic record-keeping to personal memory preservation, has shifted from analog to digital, how “a picture from the 70s looks different from a picture from the 80s, or from the 90s,” how immersing yourself in a box of faded Polaroids under your bed is different from searching through thousands of jpegs saved on your computer. It also looks at “structures of surveillance and privacy and power as a global question.”

Bringing the work to Boston—his first performance in his hometown—feels resonant, Jan says. “Whenever I’m in Cambridge, I always go back to visit his apartment, which was on Oxford Street.” He also plans to take his daughter to see the rhinoceros sculptures at Harvard that his father would take him to play on as a boy, which feature in the design of the show, and to visit his father’s grave in the Cambridge Cemetery, unmarked.

“Even though I kept him at arm’s length and hadn’t been that exposed to him a lot of my life, I realized that the void of him, the massive space that he protected and all the secrets that he had kept around all of my family and the rest of his life was a void that actually left a very large impression on me,” Jan says. “I formed my identity in part around the contours of that void.”

 

The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) presents inspiring performances and compelling artist talks as part of its upcoming season. 

July 25, 2017

Highlights include new and indie music by Weyes Blood, performances by award-winning choreographers Faye Driscoll, Pam Tanowitz, and Okwui Okpokwasili, a concert by the Arditti Quartet featuring all-female composers, and a free talk by legendary artist and Academy Award-winning filmmaker Steve McQueen (12 Years A Slave).

All events take place in the Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater at the ICA, 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston. Ticketed programs go on sale to ICA members on July 25 and to the general public on July 27. Tickets can be purchased at www.icaboston.org or by calling 617-478-3103.

MUSIC

THU, SEP 14 | 8 PM
Weyes Blood
$15 for ICA members + students / $20 for nonmembers
Active in underground music since 2006, singer-songwriter Natalie Mering has released four records as Weyes Blood. Mering, together with co-producer Chris Cohen and some special guests, contrasts live-band intimacy with the postmodern electric sheen of A.M. radio atmospherics. Experimental flourishes sparkle amid succinct, thoughtful arrangements. With arpeggiated piano, acoustic guitar, druggy horns, and outer-space electronics, this is the folk music of the near future. 

SUN, OCT 1 | 7:30 PM
Zola Jesus
$20 for ICA members + students / $22 for nonmembers
Nika Roza Danilova has been recording music as Zola Jesus for over a decade. Her most recent music was written in pure catharsis, and as a result, the songs are heavy, dark, and exploratory. Danilova has crafted a profound meditation on loss and reconciliation that speaks of tragedy with wisdom and clarity. Returning to the ICA, Danilova’s live performance will plumb the dark depths of her past, but reflect on the light of new beginnings. Opening set by John Wiese.

THU, OCT 12 | 8:00 PM
Mr. Harrison’s Gamelans featuring Johnny Gandelsman, Sarah Cahill, and Gamelan Galak Tika
Performing Suite for Violin and American Gamelan, Concerto for Piano with Javanese Gamelan, and By the Numbers
$15 for ICA members + students / $25 for nonmembers
The ICA and MIT present a centennial celebration of composer Lou Harrison. MIT’s Gamelan Galak Tika joins forces with violinist Johnny Gandelsman and pianist Sarah Cahill to present a program of Harrison’s groundbreaking works for gamelan and western instruments, performed on two gamelans built by the composer and William Colvig and curated by Jody Diamond. The concert will also feature the world premiere of composer and MIT Professor Evan Ziporyn’s “By the Numbers,” an homage to Harrison for violin and re-tuned piano.

SUN, OCT 22 | 3 PM
Arditti Quartet
$15 for ICA members + students / $20 for nonmembers
“The world’s pre-eminent contemporary music quartet” (The Guardian), the acclaimed Arditti Quartet returns to the ICA in collaboration with the Boston University Center for New Music. Founded in 1974 by Irvine Arditti, the quartet’s concerts and albums of 20th- and 21st-century music have been praised for their technical expertise and spirited interpretations. At the ICA, the Arditti Quartet will perform a concert of prominent 21st-century female composers.
Program:
Liza Lim, Hell 
Clara Iannota, Dead wasps in the jam jar
Rebecca Saunders, Fletch interval
Hilda Paredes, Bitacora Capilar 
Olga Neuwirth, In the realms of the unreal 

SUN, DEC 3 | 7:30 PM
Emily Haines and the Soft Skeleton
$28 for ICA members + students / $33 for nonmembers
Emily Haines, lead vocalist and songwriter of the band Metric and a member of Broken Social Scene, brings her solo project Soft Skeleton to the ICA for an intimate concert event. Haines is touring in support of her new album Choir of the Mind, her first solo release in a decade. Her distinctive vocals are the focal point of her new songs, which she uses to create spellbinding orchestrations for an effect that is subtle, ghostly, lush, and deeply powerful.

DANCE

FRI, OCT 20 | 8 PM
SAT, OCT 21 | 2 PM + 8 PM
Faye Driscoll
Thank You For Coming: Play
$15 for ICA members + students / $25 nonmembers
Free pre-performance talks 30 minutes prior to curtain.
Faye Driscoll and company return to the ICA with the second installment of her Thank You For Coming series. Play revisits Driscoll’s ongoing concerns about the experience and performance of self, of being among others and being alone. While the first installment, Attendance, foregrounded movement and the relationship between audience and performers, Play explores our reliance on stories to relate to one another and form our identities as individuals and citizens. Play highlights how language both defines and reduces our lived experiences. Five multitalented and energetic performers ventriloquize, shape-shift, sing, and speak through and for each other in this strange and enthralling collage of gesture, image, voice, and persona.

FRI, DEC 8 + SAT, DEC 9 | 8 PM
SUN, DEC 10 | 2 PM
Pam Tanowitz and Simone Dinnerstein
New Work for Goldberg Variations
$25 for ICA members + students / $35 nonmembers
Free pre-performance talk 30 minutes prior to curtain.
New Work for Goldberg Variations is an evening-length piece for piano and seven dancers created by classical pianist Simone Dinnerstein and choreographer Pam Tanowitz. Inspired by and set to a live performance of Bach’s iconic and demanding Goldberg Variations, the work is performed by Dinnerstein with Tanowitz’s company, Pam Tanowitz Dance. The artists spent a week in the ICA’s theater this summer developing the work. Dinnerstein, who distinguished herself internationally with her impassioned interpretation of the Variations, brings her nuanced understanding of the demanding score to the project; Tanowitz’s choreography adds a slyly deconstructed classical dance vocabulary to translate Bach’s intricate score into movement.

FRI, MAR 9 + SAT, MAR 10 | 8 PM
Okwui Okpokwasili
Poor People’s TV Room
$15 for ICA members + students / $25 nonmembers
Bessie Award–winning artist Okwui Okpokwasili and director-designer Peter Born use an interdisciplinary approach to examine gender, culture, and identity in the lives of four women. Poor People’s TV Room recovers buried histories and forgotten stories of women’s resistance movements and collective action in Nigeria. This exploration was set in motion by two historical incidents: the Women’s War of 1929, a resistance movement against British colonial powers, and the Boko Haram kidnappings of more than 300 girls in 2014, which launched the Bring Back Our Girls movement.
Through choreography, song, text, and film, Okpokwasili and Born, along with a multigenerational cast of women, craft a performance of haunting intensity and visceral beauty. Poor People’s TV Room plays out like a fever dream, a potent reflection on history’s erasure of female resistance.
 
FRI, MAY 18 + SAT, MAY 19 | 6:30 PM and 8:30 PM
Ryan McNamara
MEƎM: A Story Ballet About the Internet
$15 for ICA members + students / $25 nonmembers
Through our smartphones and laptops, we now have access to infinite streams of information available in an instant. We can get lost in the internet for hours, clicking through hundreds, if not thousands, of videos, links, and images at a dizzying rate. Visual artist Ryan McNamara reimagines our impulse to click, copy, paste, and share in MEƎM 4 Boston: A Story Ballet About the Internet, an immersive, museum-wide, and unforgettable performance experience. Working with a cast of 13 dancers, McNamara samples and remixes music and movement—from classical ballet to contemporary dance—in an inventively staged physical realization of our virtual experience. 
 

THEATER

FRI, NOV 17 + SAT, NOV 18 | 8 PM
Lars Jan/Early Morning Opera
The Institute of Memory (TIMe)
$15 for ICA members + students / $25 nonmembers
Called “incendiary with hope…” (Los Angeles Magazine), The Institute of Memory (TIMe) is a multimedia performance about how the future of remembering is currently changing. Two men hunt each other as a kinetic light sculpture hovers and cuts through the air, signaling keystrokes from a hacked 1950s typewriter. Featuring archival wire-tap transcriptions, communist spy missives, and MRI brain scans, TIMe conjures a portrait of director Lars Jan’s enigmatic father — a Cold War operative whose story exhibits how the future of privacy looks dangerously like the darkest era of its past. The son of émigré parents from Afghanistan and Poland, Jan grew up in Cambridge, where his father, Henryk Ryniewicz, moved after World War II to take a position at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Today Lars is a director, writer, visual artist, and the founder of Early Morning Opera, a genre-bending performance and art lab whose works explore emerging technologies. 
 

TALKS + MORE
Free with museum admission, unless otherwise specified.

THU, SEP 14 | 6 PM
Curator’s Perspective: Eva Respini with Danielle Legros Georges on Dana Schutz
Barbara Lee Chief Curator Eva Respini discusses Dana  Schutz’s paintings with Danielle Legros-Georges, Lesley University professor and Boston Poet Laureate, in the galleries. Visitors will gain a greater understanding of Schutz’s artistic influences, get a curator’s perspective on hanging an exhibition of contemporary painting, and consider some of the challenges of organizing a show amidst artist controversy. Capacity is limited; admission is first-come, first served.
 
THU SEP 28 | 7 PM
ICA Forum: Representation and Responsibility in Creative Spaces
Within social, political, and cultural arenas, issues of representation—the act of depicting and/or speaking on behalf of someone—and responsibility have come into even sharper focus in recent months. These issues, surfacing in the commentary surrounding the leadership of the Women’s March, contentious government elections, speeches by literary figures, and calls for the removal of artworks in museums, proliferate news and social media feeds as communities try to make sense of it all in a new era of rapid consumption of information. Within the arts, important questions are being raised, primarily: who gets to represent whom in art? The ICA and Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research invite you to join artists, scholars, and educators in a series of conversations this fall and spring that address ideas of cultural appropriation and creative license in the 21st century. 
 
THU, OCT 5 | 7 PM
The Artist’s Voice: Mark Dion
“He is a genealogist of sorts, tracing the bloodlines of Western intellectual history to ask, among other things, how European colonial expansion, environmental plundering and the creation of the museum all relate to the ecological disasters we face today.” —The New York Times
 
Artist Mark Dion, whose exhibition Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 21st-Century Naturalist in on view October 4, 2017 through January 1, 2018, takes on art, science, our evolving understanding of the natural world, and his own practice in conversation with Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Curator at the ICA.
 
SAT, NOV 4 | 2 PM                                                                           
The Artist’s Voice: Steve McQueen
“He holds his lens steady to achieve a truer sense of bodies in real time, and to give the viewer no choice but to let their mind unravel the implications behind the images.”  —The Atlantic
Filmmaker and artist Steve McQueen, recipient of both the Academy Award and Turner Prize, will be in conversation with Hamza Walker, Director of LAXART and former curator at the Renaissance Society. McQueen’s Ashes, currently on view at the ICA, is a freestanding video installation that shows a young carefree fisherman and his unexpected fate. McQueen’s upcoming film Widows will be released next fall.
 

OPENING THIS FALL:

Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 21st-Century Naturalist
OCT 4, 2017 – JAN 1, 2018
The artist’s first U.S. survey examines 30 years of his pioneering inquiries into how we collect, interpret, and display nature. Since the early 1990s, Mark Dion (b. 1961, New Bedford, MA) has forged a unique, interdisciplinary practice by exploring and appropriating scientific methodologies. Often with an edge of irony, humor, and improvisation, Dion deconstructs both scientific and museum-based rituals of collecting and exhibiting objects by critically adopting them into his artistic practice. He has traveled the world to gather plant and animal specimens, conducted archeological digs, and rummaged through forgotten collections, arranging his finds into brimming curiosity cabinets and charismatic sculptures. His projects and exhibitions offer novel approaches to questioning institutional power, which he sees as connected to the control and representation of the natural world. 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First Republic Bank is proud to sponsor the ICA’s 2017–18 Performance Season.

First Republic Bank logo

The Music of Lou Harrison is co-presented with MIT as part of the MIT Sounding concert series.

The Arditti Quartet is co-presented with the Boston University Center for New Music.

Dance UP is presented by 

WorldMusic CrashArts logo

Thank You for Coming: Play is co-commissioned by Summer Stages Dance @ the ICA.  Driscoll and Company were in residence in the Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater for two weeks in the summer of 2015. The presentation of Thank You For Coming: Play was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with additional support from the National Endowment for the Arts. 

NEFA logo

Anne Myer and Dancers is presented by

WorldMusic CrashArts logo

New Work for Goldberg Variations was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. General Operating support for Pam Tanowitz Dance was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project with funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. New Work for Goldberg Variations is part of Summer Stages Dance @ the ICA/Boston and is made possible, in part, with the support of Jane Karol and Howard Cooper, David Parker, The Aliad Fund, George and Ann Colony, and Stephanie McCormick-Goodhart.

NEFA logo

The presentation of Poor People’s TV Room was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with additional support from the National Endowment for the Arts. 

NEFA logo

The Institute of Memory (TIMe) is funded in part by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Theater Project, with lead funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. 

NEFA logo

 

Dana Schutz Opens July 26 at the ICA

(BOSTON, MA – July 24, 2017) — On July 26, The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens Dana Schutz. Schutz is among the foremost painters of her generation and is part of a group of artists leading a revival of painting today. Her distinct combination of figuration and abstraction, expressive color palette, and her use of imagined and hypothetical scenarios are unique among her contemporaries. The artist’s work captures the frenzy, tension, vulnerability, and struggle of life today, as her subjects actively manage, even fight, both the limitations of the canvas and their depicted environments.

The impressive scale of many of Schutz’s paintings reference the monumentality of history painting, the genre considered most important in the history of Western art. Her paintings challenge history painting’s typical subjects–heroic portrayals of historical and allegorical events–and instead monumentalize everyday scenes (laying in bed, getting dressed, carpooling, riding in an elevator).  Schutz confronts the traditional hierarchies of painting and expands the possibilities for the medium today.

Dana Schutz, a concise survey of the artist’s recent work, comprises 17 paintings, several at monumental scale and including two new ones, and four charcoal drawings. Schutz’s enormous new painting, Big Wave (2016), acquired by the ICA in December, is on view for the first time in the United States. Open through November 26, Dana Schutz is organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Jessica Hong, Curatorial Associate.

“Drawing on the legacies of both figurative and abstract painting, with nods to touchstone figures such as George Grosz and Max Beckmann, Schutz’s unique voice in painting exemplifies the expansive possibilities of the medium today,” said Respini.

Over the last decade, Schutz has honed her approach to painting, creating tightly structured scenarios and compressed interiors. Her works capture subjects who seem to be actively managing, even fighting, the limitations of their depicted environments—boundaries set by the canvases’ actual borders.

Schutz’s paintings often show hypothetical or impossible physical feats and explore the uncanny through wit and the expressive use of color. Her physically imposing canvases—one nearly 18 feet—are worlds onto themselves. Building the Boat While Sailing (2012) displays a mass of people, working, sailing, and lounging, all at once. Shaking out the Bed (2015) portrays a couple in bed seen from a birds-eye vantage point, a common gesture transformed by the artist into a tornado of energy that includes pizza slices, body parts, cups, and dirty laundry. In Big Wave (2016) two figures in the foreground play in the sand, seemingly oblivious to the ferocious incoming tidal wave that is swallowing up fish, a tangle of bodies, and assorted objects.

Dana Schutz also includes several paintings illustrating single figures involved in everyday scenarios such as showering or getting dressed. Works that have a more melancholy tenor include Piano in the Rain (2012) and Slow Motion Shower (2015), where each protagonist is encased within the work’s tight borders. Schutz’s vibrant color palette is widely expressive, encompassing violence, wit, melancholy, and absurdity. Teeming with energy, commotion, and struggle, her paintings capture a high level of tension and compression that is part of today’s zeitgeist.

Artist Bio

Dana Schutz was born in Livonia, a suburb of Detroit, in 1976. The artist earned a B.F.A. at the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2000 and an M.F.A. at Columbia University, New York, in 2002. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Rose Museum, Brandeis University (2006); Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto (2010); Neuberger Museum of Art (2011); Miami Art Museum (2012); Denver Museum of Contemporary Art and Denver Art Museum (2012); Hannover Kesterngesellschaft and Hepworth Wakefield (2013); Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2015/2016), her first solo exhibition at a Canadian institution; and a forthcoming exhibition at The Cleveland Museum of Art (2017). She was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, where one of her paintings ignited a vigorous debate around the role of art, artists, and institutions in the representation of race, a conversation that resonates with larger issues in our current political and cultural landscape.

Exhibition-related programming

THU, SEP 14 | 6 PM
Curator’s Perspective: Eva Respini with Danielle Legros Georges on Dana Schutz
Barbara Lee Chief Curator Eva Respini discusses Dana  Schutz’s paintings with Danielle Legros-Georges, Lesley University professor and Boston Poet Laureate, in the galleries. Visitors will gain a greater understanding of Schutz’s artistic influences, get a curator’s perspective on hanging an exhibition of contemporary painting, and consider some of the challenges of organizing a show amidst artist controversy. Capacity is limited; admission is first-come, first served.

THU, SEP 28 | 7 PM
ICA Forum: Representation and Responsibility in Creative Space
Within social, political, and cultural arenas, issues of representation—the act of depicting and/or speaking on behalf of someone—and responsibility have come into even sharper focus in recent months. These issues, surfacing in the commentary surrounding the leadership of the Women’s March, contentious government elections, speeches by literary figures, and calls for the removal of artworks in museums, proliferate news and social media feeds as communities try to make sense of it all in a new era of rapid consumption of information. Within the arts, important questions are being raised, primarily: who gets to represent whom in art? The ICA and Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research invite you to join artists, scholars, and educators in a series of conversations this fall and spring that address ideas of cultural appropriation and creative license in the 21st century. 

SUN, OCT 8 | 2 PM
Gallery Talk: Josephine Halvorson on Dana Schutz
Join artist Josephine Halvorson as she shares her insights on Dana Schutz’s monumental painting Big Wave. Halvorson, whose own artistic practice emphasizes attention to detail and experience, will shed light on Schutz’s painting, which reflects the moods and anxieties of everyday contemporary life. Halvorson is Professor of Art and Chair of Graduate Studies in Painting at Boston University. She was previously Senior Critic in the MFA Painting and Printmaking program at Yale University.

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; 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.

ICA staff share their recommendations for the best music, film, shopping, but mostly ART to check out this summer.

ART

  • Common Exchange
    Through Sep 30, 2017
    Cambridge Common
    I’m looking to soak up as much sunshine as I can this summer, so outdoor art installations are especially intriguing. Common Exchange is a summer-long set of installations and performances around “The Common,” a historic park outside side of Harvard Square where George Washington is noted to have assembled troops during the Revolutionary War in the 1770s. I’m excited about many projects, especially Carmen Papalia’s visionless walking tours, Allison Smith’s colonial-era crafting workshops, and Kelly Sherman’s banners presenting individuals’ recollections of personal events that happened on the common. I’m marking my calendar to take part in as many as possible.
    —Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Curator
  • STAND UP: All Women* Group Exhibition at Gallery Kayafas
    July 10 – July 13
    Gallery Kayafas

    I can’t wait for this exhibition, chock full of fantastic female and gender-nonbinary artists from around town, many of whom have shown at the ICA, worked here, or otherwise crossed our path. It’s short—only 4 days—but looks mighty, taking on tough issues especially top-of-mind these days, such as class, race, identity, representation, power, and privilege.
    —Kris Wilton, Associate Director of Creative Content and Digital Engagement

  • Expanding Abstraction
    Through Sep 17, 2017
    decordova sculpture park
    The deCordova has a lovely outdoor rambling space in their sculpture park that’s great for folks of all shapes and sizes. Now on view they have an exhibition called Expanding Abstraction: New England Women Painters, 1950 to Now, which I found intriguing as it depicts the lesser-known history of abstract painting in New England.
    —Fabienne Keck, Curatorial Department Coordinator
  • The Meeting House
    Rose Kennedy Greenway
    The Rose Kennedy Greenway is always fun to stroll down, and I can’t wait to enter Mark Riegelman’s recently installed, topsy-turvy meeting house. Its colonial and ochre-yellow shape sunken into the grass is striking.
    —Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Curator
  • Into the Light
    Through 2017
    MASS MoCA
    I made my first trip to MASS MoCA a couple weeks ago and already can’t wait to go back! The converted factory campus is beautiful to walk around and perfect for a picnic. The highlight of the day was by far James Turrell’s new exhibition, Into the Light–the galleries were specifically constructed to house his sculptural light installations and I’ve never seen anything like it. Perfectly Clear, one of the bigger installations that requires advance reservations, is a must-see and totally mind-blowing.  
    —Kate Ryan, Events Manager
  • Glass Flowers
    Harvard Museum of Natural History
    Harvard’s Natural History Museum’s famous glass flowers exhibit was recently renovated and presents an incredible selection of their glass models of plants and flowers. A fun, family-friendly exhibit, these almost true-to-life objects are a marvel! 
    —Jessica Hong, Curatorial Associate
  • An Inventory of Shimmers: Objects of Intimacy in Contemporary Art
    Through Jul 16, 2017
    MIT List Visual Arts Center
    This compelling group exhibition at MIT’s List Center looks at artworks that engage with the nebulous concept of affect—one that is bracingly urgent to explore as we consider shifting capacities for intimacy and empathy in our present moment.
    —Jeffrey De Blois, Curatorial Associate
  • The Philosophy Chamber
    Through Dec 31, 2017
    Harvard Art Museums
    When inside, I’m looking forward to being enchanted by The Philosophy Chamber at the Harvard Art Museums, an exhibition of a now-defunct teaching cabinet—a collection of objects assembled between 1760 and 1820 to teach from and orate within. I’m intrigued by the many extractions and recontextualizations present within such an endeavor as well as the deep intertwining of knowledge that used to be the university. I’m looking forward to learning a lot.
    —Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Curator

Music

  • Nite Jewel
    Jul 26, 8 PM
    ONCE Sommerville
    Ramona Gonzalez, who records as Nite Jewel, creates music that sounds equal parts the DIY ethos of Grimes, the icey-coolness of Jessy Lanza, and the 90’s R&B flare of Janet Jackson. She recently released a terrific new album, Real High, that is the perfect set of summer jams! Real High comes just a year after she released a stellar set of releases in 2016 including another solo album, Liquid Cool, and a collaborative EP with one of my favorite artists (Dam-Funk) as Nite-Funk.
    —Chris Hoodlet, Membership Manager
  • Boston GreenFest
    Aug 11–13
    Boston City Hall Plaza
    Boston GreenFest combines art of all mediums into one big multicultural music and environmental festival! The focus is creating a green/healthy world for everyone! I enjoy the music stage the most. The main stage acts like a world stage where performances from all over the world come to perform. The food choices represent many different cultures as well, and you will also find eco vendors that serve to educate (and exhibit services and crafts). Local artisans come together to create murals for the festival—it’s a lot of fun!
    —Angie Brutus, Admissions + Box Office Associate

Film

  • Gook
    The new movie Gook (a derogatory term for a Korean person) is about two Korean-American brothers in LA who own a store and befriend a young black girl, Kamilia, and explores their friendship in the context of the LA riots. As it’s the 25th anniversary of the LA riots, there has been increased attention in examining this time period and the heightened racial tensions in the city as well as throughout the country. Watch the trailer here. It has received critical acclaim and was shown at Boston’s recent film festival. It will have an August release, so check your local listings!
    —Jessica Hong, Curatorial Associate

Shop Till You Drop

  • City-Wide Friends Book Sale
    Aug 5, 10 AM–4 PM
    Boston Public Library
    My pick is the City-Wide Friends book sale at the Central Library in Copley Square. You never know what gems you’ll find among all the donated and withdrawn books, CDs, and records! The books are super cheap (most are $1–$2), and the money goes to supporting the library. So you can find some awesome books or music and contribute to a great cause!
    —Julie Streeter, Theater Production Manager

Out of State

  • Public Art Fund Open House
    Through Sep 24, 2017
    Doris C. Freedman Plaza, New York City
    I’m looking forward to experiencing the New York Public Art Fund’s Open House–a new commission by Los Angeles–based (but Boston-born!) artist Liz Glynn that explores distinctions between public and private space, opulence and access, design for the few vs. for the many. Doris C. Freedman Plaza is transformed into an open-air ballroom with scattered furnishings that evoke a grand Gilded Age residence but are cast in mundane concrete. Glynn invites the participation of visitors, who cannot help but think about the lack of accessible, affordable housing characteristic of today’s ever-stratified American urban centers.  
    —Katie Mayshak, Director of Development
  • We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-1985
    Through Sep 17, 2017
    Brooklyn Museum
    I’m looking forward to going to New York City, more specifically to Brooklyn, to see the Brooklyn Museum’s We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–1985 because I’ve heard so many great things about this exhibition from friends near and far. In my mind, the stirring contemporary relevance of this show cannot be underscored enough!
    PRO TIP: If you can’t make it to Brooklyn this summer, catch this brilliant show at the ICA next summer from Jun 26 – Sep 30, 2018.
    —Fabienne Keck, Curatorial Department Coordinator