All Are Welcome for ICA 10 – Commemorating 10 Years in 10 Days with Activities, Performances, Programs, and Free Community Day
2016 is a milestone year for the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA), one of the oldest museums in the United States dedicated solely to contemporary art. It’s the 80th anniversary of its founding in 1936, and on December 10 the ICA will mark 10 years on Boston’s waterfront in its iconic Diller Scofidio + Renfro-designed building. A 10-day celebration, ICA 10, will kick off on Thursday, December 1 with $10 admission and special programming for 9 days, culminating in a Free Community Day on Saturday, December 10 (more details are below or at www.icaboston.org/ica-10).
“When we opened the doors of the new ICA 10 years ago, we knew we were at the beginning of an amazing chapter in our story, as well as in the evolution of the Seaport District,” said Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director of the ICA. “Public access to the arts and all that art museums offer—inspiration, education, history, economic vitality, and community—are more urgent now than ever for building vibrant cities, celebrating diversity, and strengthening social cohesion and democracy. We’re celebrating this moment with 10 days of activity and engagement with art and artists, everyone is welcome, and we want to see and hear from our members, visitors, partners, and friends.”
Founded in 1936 as the Boston Museum of Modern Art—a sister institution to New York’s MoMA—the ICA was conceived as a laboratory where innovative approaches to art could be championed. The museum eventually parted ways with MoMA and changed its name to the Institute of Contemporary Art in 1948. As the ICA’s reputation grew around the nation, it paved the way for other institutes and museums of contemporary art as well as artists’ spaces and alternative venues.
Throughout its history the ICA has been at the forefront internationally in identifying and supporting the most influential artists of its time and bringing them to public attention. More recently, the ICA has been pivotal in establishing the careers of artists and performers including Vanessa Beecroft, Shepard Fairey, Trajal Harrell, Faye Driscoll, Cildo Meireles, Cornelia Parker, Cindy Sherman, Bill Viola, Kara Walker, and Rachel Whiteread.
In 2006 the ICA was the first art museum built in Boston in more than 100 years and a pioneer in the transformation of Boston’s waterfront. Since that time, the museum has become a cultural anchor in the Seaport District and enjoyed a significant number of milestones including:
The festivities will kick off on Thursday, December 1 with $10 admission for 9 days, culminating with a Free Community Day on Saturday, December 10. Throughout the 10-day celebration, visitors will enjoy the galleries and exhibitions, art-making activities, performances, staff-led spotlight tours, and even become part of visual art on view in the museum. In addition, in conjunction with its sponsorship of ICA Teen Programs, UNIQLO will present a few special surprises and giveaways at the Free Community Day.
For the complete schedule of events, visit www.icaboston.org/ica-10. Celebration highlights include:
All Weekdays
Thursday, December 1 (Free admission 5–9 PM)
Friday, December 2
Saturday, December 3
Sunday, December 4
Monday, December 5 (ICA is closed)
Thursday, December 8 (Free admission 5–9 PM)
Friday, December 9
Saturday, December 10: FREE COMMUNITY DAY
Two special exhibitions will be on view during the celebration, including:
First Light: A Decade of Collecting at the ICA (through January 16, 2017) – Coinciding with the tenth anniversary of the ICA/Boston’s move to its iconic waterfront building, this exhibition celebrates the museum’s first decade of collecting, is drawn entirely from the ICA’s collection, and features significant new acquisitions. Conceived as a series of interrelated and rotating stand-alone exhibitions, First Light highlights major singular works from the collection, including a monumental cut-paper silhouette tableau by Kara Walker, work from the Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women, groupings of work by artists such as Louise Bourgeois and Nan Goldin, and thematic and art-historical groupings featuring the work of artists as diverse as Paul Chan, Sharon Hayes, Sherrie Levine, and Cornelia Parker. A new multi-media web platform with artist interviews and commentary from current and former curators was created to mark the occasion.
The Artist’s Museum (November 16, 2016–March 26, 2017) – This exhibition departs from the impulse to collect and connect, bringing together photography, film, video, installation, sculpture, and sound works that use artworks, images, and history as material for new works. These multilayered projects reimagine the lives of other artworks, demonstrating how social history, personal connections, and ideology shape our relationships to objects, images, and the cultures they produce. Among the artists featured in The Artist’s Museum are: Rosa Barba, Carol Bove, Anna Craycroft, Christian Marclay, Xaviera Simmons, Rosemarie Trockel, and Sara VanDerBeek. Engaging the realms of dance, music, popular culture, natural history, image archives, and design–as well as art history–the twelve artists address a constellation of issues such as gender, sexuality, technology, and digital culture, charting forms and themes across cultures and through time.
The ICA invites its social media followers to use #ICA10 to share their thoughts, experiences, and photos on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Gillian Wearing, Rock ‘n’ Roll 70, 2015. Framed c-type prints, 48 x 72 inches (121.9 x 182.9 cm). Courtesy the artist; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; Maureen Paley, London; and Regen Projects, Los Angeles. (framed work); Background image: Gillian Wearing, Wallpaper, 2015. Wallpaper, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; Maureen Paley, London; and Regen Projects, Los Angeles. © Gillian Wearing
Gillian Wearing (b. 1963, Birmingham, UK) has created Rock ‘n’ Roll 70 (2015/2016), a monumental, site-specific photographic mural for the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston’s Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall. On view from December 9, 2016 through January 1, 2018, this new work is the first presentation in Boston of the celebrated artist’s work and was organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Jessica Hong, Curatorial Assistant.
Best known for her photographic and video works that intimately capture aspects of our familial and personal histories, Wearing began her career photographing strangers she encountered on London’s streets and continues to explore the nuances of identity, the intersections of public and private, and the performativity of self. Over her career, Wearing has also mined her own life and history, having meticulously sculpted masks of her loved ones and donned them to create eerie self-portraits as her brother, mother, or her own self at an earlier age.
For Rock ‘n’ Roll 70, Wearing asked individuals working with age-progressing technology to digitally enhance self-portraits created at age 50 (her current age) to see what she might look like at age 70. Printed as wallpaper, these aged portraits show the diversity of possibilities of the artist’s future self. They differ slightly or drastically from each other, revealing the limitations of what we believe to be pioneering technology, exploring how identity can be represented, and further emphasizing the uncertainty of what lies ahead.
On top of the wallpaper hangs a framed triptych of photographic portraits, consisting of Wearing at her current age, an enhanced portrait, and a blank space, as the artist intends to make a self-portrait when she turns 70 to complete the triptych. In a world oversaturated by images, particularly “selfies,” Wearing explores the complexities of identity mediated through technology, which is a topic that’s more urgent than ever.
The ICA’s Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall is dedicated to site-specific works by leading contemporary artists, commissioned annually. Located along the eastern interior wall of the museum’s glass-enclosed lobby, the most public space in the museum, the Art Wall is the visitor’s first encounter with art upon entering the building. Wearing’s photographic mural highlights the diverse range of possibilities for the Art Wall, a fitting site for this installation as it further collapses the public and private spheres. Rock ‘n’ Roll 70 will explore the lobby as a psychological space—the artist’s portraits are confrontational and alluring, discomfiting and thought-provoking.
Based in London, Wearing gained critical attention after winning the acclaimed Turner Prize in 1997. She was nominated for the Vincent Award presented by the Gemeentemuseum/GEM in The Hague, Netherlands (2014) and for the Liberty Human Rights Awards for her public sculpture A Real Birmingham Family (2014). Since the early 1990s, Wearing has been working primarily in video and photography, utilizing the public as her subject matter to investigate what we as private individuals carry with us in the public sphere. With the Internet boom and social media explosion, the public and private realms have all but collapsed. This has become a dominant theme for many contemporary artists and a significant issue for the culture-at-large. Wearing describes her methodology as “editing life,” similar to how we present ourselves to our online public. However, unlike reality culture of our day, which is full of judgment and emotive responses, the artist photographs her subjects and herself with as little subjectivity as possible, contrasting with the type of online personas we wish to portray.
Support was provided, in part, by Jean-François and Nathalie Ducrest and Area9 Group.
Installation view, Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos, New Museum, New York, 2012–13. Courtesy New Museum, New York. Photo by Benoit Pailley. © Rosemarie Trockel, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 resp. ARS
Press are welcome to preview the exhibition on Tuesday, Nov 15 between 10 AM and 1 PM. Please contact Lisa Colli, lcolli@icaboston.org, if you need additional information, images, or would like to visit the exhibition on November 15.
The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) presents The Artist’s Museum, an exhibition focused on the creative impulse to collect and connect, featuring work by twelve American and European artists, including a major new commission for the exhibition by Anna Craycroft, as well as by Rosa Barba, Christian Marclay, Rosemarie Trockel, Carol Bove, Rachel Harrison, Louise Lawler, Mark Leckey, Pierre Leguillon, Goshka Macuga, Xaviera Simmons, and Sara VanDerBeek. Occupying the West Gallery, The Artist’s Museum showcases artworks that combine appropriated images, pre-existing artworks, and collected artifacts to create unexpected relationships across cultures and history in installations, photography, film, and video. The exhibition is organized by Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator, with Jeffrey De Blois, Curatorial Assistant, the exhibition is on view from November 16, 2016 through March 26, 2017.
The desire to collect objects and images of personal significance and to make connections between them is a near-universal experience. Since the early 20th century, artists’ collections of artworks and artifacts have served as inspiration for and material in their work, helping them create highly individualized models of their worlds. The Artist’s Museum includes artworks that gather a wide variety of appropriated materials and images ranging from magazines and animated characters to postcards and curios. These artists are also influenced by the advent of search engines, the internet’s digital image and data saturation, and the networked culture that defines our digital age.
Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director at the ICA/Boston, said, “Seeing the world through artists’ eyes and the objects the artists collect offers a window into our shared and different values and views of history, and our individual and collective selves. In The Artist’s Museum, Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator, has created a dramatic platform for all our visitors to experience the unique worlds and perspectives of twelve extraordinary artists.”
Byers said, “An ‘artist’s museum’ may not be a museum at all, but rather a conceptual approach to the creative organization of artworks and other objects to make sense of the world. The exhibition is about artists re-telling forgotten, hidden, or overlooked histories through cultural artifacts and images. Further, it reveals the secret lives of artworks and the personal relationships we all have with images and art. Each installation charts recurring forms and themes across cultures and history, subjecting artworks, images, and objects to new systems of relation and connectivity. They employ the language of museum display to engage many subjects, from dance, music, and design to gender, sexuality, and technology.”
An exhibition highlight is a major new ICA/Boston commission by Craycroft, The Earth is a Magnet (2016), the artist’s most ambitious work to date. Made up of more than 150 objects covering two small galleries, the work brings together the photography, biography, and inventions of Berenice Abbott—celebrated for both her street photography and her rigorously scientific images made at MIT—with video, sculpture, and photography by a peer group of younger artists. They include Fia Backström, Katherine Hubbard, Matt Keegan, Jill Magid, MPA, Lucy Raven, Mika Rottenberg, A. L. Steiner, and Erika Vogt. Other highlights include:
The presentation of The Artist’s Museum will be enriched by gallery talks and artist talks (details to be announced soon).
The Artist’s Museum is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with texts by Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator, ICA/Boston; Claire Bishop, art historian, critic, author, and Professor in the Art History Department at CUNY Graduate Center, New York; Lynne Cooke, Senior Curator, Special Projects in Modern Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; and Ingrid Schaffner, Curator of the 2018 Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art. Designed by Chad Kloepfer, The Artist’s Museum catalogue also includes a historical compendium of influential 20th-century artworks and exhibitions that provide important precedent to the works in this exhibition. Available for $49.95 at the ICA Store or online at icastore.org.
Major support is provided by Barbara Horwich Lloyd, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Additional support is generously provided by Steve Corkin and Dan Maddalena, Tristin and Martin Mannion, Ellen Poss, Charlotte and Herbert S. Wagner III, Anonymous, FACE Foundation/ Etant Donnés Contemporary Art, and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States.
Photo by Paula Court
Big Dance Theater in Short Form. Photo by Liz Lynch, courtesy of American Dance Institute (ADI)
Photo by Liz Lynch, courtesy of American Dance Institute (ADI)
From interpreting classical Greek plays to choreographing for David Bowie and David Byrne, iconoclast Annie-B Parson creates work like none other.
If you don’t know Annie-B Parson, you should. In addition to 25 years co-directing the New York-based company Big Dance Theater with artistic and life partner Paul Lazar, the consummate innovator has choreographed David Byrne’s musical Here Lies Love and the David Bowie musical Lazarus; created movement for marching bands, choruses, and inanimate objects; and developed a unique blend of dance, literature, and theater that is as incisive as it is irresistible.
Parson sat down with the ICA in advance of Big Dance Theater’s presentation of their 25th-anniversary celebration Short Form to talk inspiration, process, not selling your audience short, and what makes her “art heart” weep.
Short Form is a program of five short pieces celebrating your 25th anniversary, but the works are new, yes? How did you choose this approach?
The dances were, by and large, new work when they premiered at the Kitchen in January. However, the final piece on the program, Goats, was a favorite work that Paul Lazar and I made for another company years back and wanted to revisit. I revised it based on my experiences working in the theater since the original production, and tailored it for Big Dance.
Why work short?
It occurred to me, after sitting through many, many shows in downtown dance, that they all run roughly about the same length, and I wanted to disrupt that aspect of form. And, I had been reading very short fiction that seemed rooted in both poetic forms and our contemporary attention span. I found the short form compelling—it has different operating principles—so, I challenged myself to create works that are granular, brief—a short story rather than a tome. I got really involved in all things short for a little while.
Was it more or less difficult than you expected?
It’s very difficult. In fact, I don’t think I’ve mastered it, but I enjoyed this period! It felt I was drawing rather than painting; the scale is lithe and flexible. However, I think I more organically understand how to develop materials and ideas over an hour-to-two-hour piece. Duration, it turns out, is personal.
There are few authors who are masters of both the long and short form. Chekhov always wrote short pieces—he never wrote a novel. His novellas are my favorite works of his. I think Balanchine also worked best at a certain scale. Of course he made long-form pieces; we know them well. But he was a master at making the 15-to-20-minute piece.
Duration, it turns out, is personal.
Big Dance Theater is celebrating its 25th anniversary. How did you come to develop the company’s particular language straddling dance and theater back in 1991?
I was a young choreographer who trained in dance, and then I was asked by a theater company to choreograph for them. I stepped into three roles with this group that were formative: co-director/sound designer/choreographer—all in one—this combination of generative roles became central to my young voice. At the time, I didn’t know much about theater, but I knew my Balanchine, Cunningham, Judson Church…honestly, I had never really been interested in plays. Dance people can be quite sequestered in their art.
At that moment, Pina Bausch came to town—I think these were her first pieces at BAM in the early 1980s. It was fascinating to see how she affected the dance community, because she really shakes down from a different family tree than the tree we were falling from. We were more like the children of the Judson Church family tree, where we prized pedestrianism, the prosaic, and the anti-theatrical. Before Pina, NYC was inventing a virtuosity of structure. And there comes Pina, with her costumes and her gigantic sets and her sense of Theater with a capital “T”! Off came the ubiquitous drawstring pants and I swear, for a while I saw lots of evening gowns and high heels on the downtown stages.
It was a really interesting moment, and I was very affected by Pina Bausch, both structurally and theatrically, as I was just starting. I didn’t notice that I was blending things—I was just playing out my imagination. I didn’t really think that I was living on this cusp between dance and theater. I never really thought about it. But I was certainly borrowing theatrical elements: character, causation, relationship, and mixing them with dance structures, yet always avoiding the straight-up narrative form of story ballet, or plays that tell stories and suggest moralities.
I didn’t notice that I was blending things—I was just playing out my imagination.
Has the company’s tone or practice significantly changed over the 25 years?
It has. Some of that has to do with Paul [Lazar]: after I made the first couple large-scale pieces, he started to co-direct with me. He came from the theater tradition, and that perspective affected the work, of course. With Paul, we straddled the worlds of dance and theater more than ever, and sometimes even did plays. I wouldn’t have done a play on my own, but I was a dancer interested in literature—so it was exciting. Before he came in, I had made pieces that theatricalized and borrowed from literature (Flaubert, Pinter, the Greeks) but Paul brought in ideas around how to perform the self on stage, as well as how to technically approach text, and this changed the character of the work.
In the past 25 years we have had the incredible good fortune to tangle with some extraordinary literature: Euripides, Chekhov, Anne Carson, Flaubert, Twain, Tanizaki, Sibyl Kempson, Mac Wellman—and “found” text is one of our favorite authors!
Yet dance remains the sacred object in the room. In Short Form, one of the things I wanted to do was return to making some pieces that are dance-based, simply. I hadn’t done that in a long, long time.
You’ve mentioned sensing audience discomfort with abstraction and non-narrative work. What can artists or presenting organizations like the ICA do to help audiences feel more comfortable with this kind of work?
You’re asking the wrong person! I am really not supportive of hand-holding. Maybe the best thing we could do is warm up the audience with a vaudeville act—or karaoke!
When the audience feels alert, their imaginations kick in, they wake up. Or, from a more intellectual perspective, presenting ideas around how to think about abstraction, and what abstraction is made up of, is helpful—not in terms of a particular work, like, “this is what the artist thinks they’re doing”—but concepts around abstraction and how it’s present in our world all the time. I’m looking at three lampshades right now, and you could say their relationship is non-narrative, so it’s abstract. Here, the subject matter is purely shape and light. What great content: shape and light! How can you look at abstract elements and see the world from the perspective of these elements? But to explain work to audiences—no. That’s selling everyone short!
When I am moved by the art of the choreography I feel my art heart weeping.
A common response your work seems to be “I’ve never seen anything like it.” What feeds your creativity?
Everything! Literature; stoop sales; overheard phone calls on the street; the structure of things; politics; taking a walk; how people behave toward each other, how they move and don’t move; even our conversation today. Really, as much as I can become aware of in any given moment and then synthesize it into what we are working on. When I am in the middle of creating a new work, my mind is a magpie and a scavenger, looking at everything as material.
Do you have a regular creative practice?
I think choreography is like playing the violin: you have to practice constantly. I feel like I’m always working, but I don’t have a studio, so it’s not regulated.
Outside of Big Dance Theater, you’ve choreographed for David Byrne, St. Vincent, Nico Muhly, and the recent David Bowie musical Lazarus, among many other projects. How do you decide whether to take on a project?
The music. If I can relate to the music from an artistic perspective, I am drawn to the project. If I personally understand and am compelled by it, have a take on it from a dance perspective that is my own, then I want to do the project.
It must be different to choreograph for people you don’t know as opposed to your own company.
Well, we share no common vocabulary or memory for sure! But I love how non-dancers dance, when they dance with intentionality. I’ve choreographed for symphony orchestras and marching bands, objects, masses of singers; I like limitations. Once I understand these limitations, I can then be generative. Exploit the negative! as Richard Foreman says.
That sounds like how you work with your company—finding common ground.
Well, in the context of Big Dance, I feel I’m pushing people hard in my group, and seeing how they respond; its exciting—like playing an intense tennis match. It’s gigantically rare and precious to be allowed the time and space to make dance, so the stakes must be high. I become disinterested when I look at work where people don’t ask very much of their performers.
It’s so difficult to explain to a non-dance lover how a piece moves or inspires you. How would you describe what you prize or value or what inspires you in a dance or theater performance?
I think it’s hard to iterate because it’s purely kinetic—you can’t logic it out; you need to go into a liminal space to experience dance. There’s even a great term for it: kinesthetic empathy. This is the physical experience of you in the audience feeling like your body is moving as the performer’s body is moving, that you soar as they leap; it’s a falling in love, in a way. Dance owns this physical empathy with the audience. But dance must also operate as an art form that has structures that are as brilliantly constructed as a great technician. When I am moved by the art of the choreography I feel my art heart weeping. This is the highest experience for me viewing dance—more than a great leap—a virtuosic structure; it has to do with the boning, the architecture in the material. And it takes just a few minutes when you’re in the audience to see what the dance maker’s contract is with the audience. Once the dancemaker lays out her stuff, it’s like, “Ok, I see what you’re up to, now let’s see what you do with it.” And you watch it unfold. I find that really suspenseful.
Before you go, we have to talk about the party, complete with ping-pong and beer, during the intermission of Short Form.
I initially envisioned the party as a piece called Intermission. It’s a piece that’s a party and the audience are the performers, but they don’t know that. Its also a device, both to create community in the theater, and as a tool to wake up the audience. After the intermission party, the audience returns to their seats, they seem very aware, listening and watching harder, because they’ve moved and talked and played. It works!
Faye Driscoll, Thank You For Coming: Play. Photo by Maria Baranova.
Reggie Wilson / Fist and Heel Performance Group, Citizen
David Henry, the ICA’s Bill T. Jones Director of Performing Arts, shares his picks for the best dance in Boston and beyond this fall.
There’s tons to look forward to this season, including performances by two of the most adventurous and creative female choreographers working today — who both happened to develop these works in residencies as part of our Summer Stages Dance at the ICA/Boston program.
First up is Maria Hassabi’s STAGED at the Kitchen in New York October 4–8. Maria and her company of four dancers were at the ICA for two weeks this past July focusing on the choreography, staging, and lighting for this work. I like to refer to Maria’s work as the slowest dance ever, as the dancers move, almost imperceptibly at times, from one form to another. But upon close looking, which her work demands, you realize that they are in constant movement—their breath, the spasms of muscles, their gaze. And with that close, careful looking, you fall into their trance. It is intimate. It is hypnotic. It is beautiful. And it will be coming to the ICA in March!
…their breath, the spasms of muscles, their gaze. And with that close, careful looking, you fall into their trance. It is intimate. It is hypnotic. It is beautiful.
Next is Faye Driscoll’s Thank You for Coming: Play at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, November 16–19. Faye and company were the Summer Stages Dance at the ICA/Boston artists in residence in 2015. It was here that they began work on this, the second part of Driscoll’s Thank You for Coming trilogy. (The first, Attendance, was staged here a year ago.) In her work, performers and audience members come together to explore the spaces between what we say and what we mean.
Also on my list, the French Institute Alliance Française puts on a festival in New York called Crossing the Line that is consistently amazing. This year is no exception, with shows by Rachid Ouramdane, Jérôme Bel, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Tim Etchells, and more. Sep 22–Nov 3
Because I have the great privilege of seeing some of the most creative contemporary choreographers from around the world, I always wish I had the capacity to present more. For this reason I am thrilled that New Movement Collaborative and Green Street Studios have come together with a new festival, “Lion’s Jaw.” Performances by 11 nationally recognized choreographers, including Miguel Gutierrez, The Body Cartography, Paul Matteson, K.J. Holmes, and Sara Shelton Mann, will present Boston a survey of what contemporary dance is now. Many of the artists will also be offering classes, workshops, and labs, giving the local dance community a chance to work closely with these innovative choreographers. Oct 7 + 8.
I hope I can get to BAM to see Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performing Group’s newest dance, Citizen in December. Reggie was a Summer Stages Dance resident artist in 2014 and presented Moses(es) during our 2014–15 season. He was already talking about this work then (it was the same year we had Claudia Rankin here to read from her book Citizen.) This brand new work is inspired by African-American figures throughout history who were conflicted and chose not to leave their home country in spite of pervasive racism. Five dancers perform in a series of provocative solos that overlap and intersect, asking: What does it mean to belong, and to not want to belong?
In addition to Driscoll and Wilson, BAM’s Next Wave Festival is also celebrating Stephin Merritt’s 50th birthday, Bill T. Jones is premiering a new work at the Joyce, and Lars Jan has a new work at New York Live Arts. All in all there will be too, too much. See you on the Northeast Corridor tracks!