Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA), has announced two major grants from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Warhol Foundation grant of $100,000 will support the exhibition The Artist’s Museum, opening in Nov. 2016, which examines the nature of collections and reveals art’s unexpected relationships through the lens of contemporary artists. The Mellon Foundation grant of $500,000 will support curatorial research, graduate fellowships, and publications for three major curatorial projects: Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today (2018); Mark Dion (2017); and The Artist’s Museum (2016).
Upon announcement of the two grants, Jill Medvedow commented, “We are tremendously grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon and Andy Warhol Foundations. These projects continue the ICA’s scholarly explorations into urgent questions in contemporary art, specifically: the impact of the Internet and digital culture on contemporary artists, curators, and museums; the way knowledge is organized and made accessible; and the related tension between the ephemeral and the material in contemporary art practice and museums.”
Under the leadership of Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, the ICA continues its inquiry into key shifts in contemporary art and culture over the last 25 years. The three Mellon-funded curatorial projects—Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today; Mark Dion; and The Artist’s Museum—all address the relationships between the making of objects and the acquisition of knowledge, highlighting the transformation of both activities since the advent of the Internet and its impact on creating, collecting, and curating art today. “We are very grateful to have been selected for these awards,” said Respini. “These funds support our mission to provide inspiration, education, and build a creative community through public access to contemporary art and artists.”
Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today will examine how the Internet has changed how artists see the world, make their work, and disseminate information and images. Highlighting Boston’s role as a leading center of technology, the exhibition will involve Boston-area arts organizations on innovative programmatic events to create a dynamic, citywide experience. Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today features the work of approximately 30 artists from around the globe and is comprised of a variety of mediums—including painting, performance, photography, sculpture, and video— that incorporate the extensive effects of the Internet in their realization. Themes explored in the exhibition include emergent ideas of the body and notions of human enhancement; the Internet as a site of both surveillance and resistance; the circulation and control of images and information; possibilities for new subjectivities, communities, and virtual worlds; and the aesthetics of corporate culture and branding. Throughout, the work in this landmark exhibition addresses the Internet-age democratization of culture that comprises our current moment.
The first U.S. survey of the internationally recognized artist, Mark Dion spans the past 25 years, bringing together many of the artist’s most significant works. The exhibition combines a series of single-room installations with large gallery presentations of sculpture, drawing, and photography, as well as models of major public artworks. Informed by a deep knowledge of history and contemporary issues, these diverse projects illuminate the wondrous, absurd, and macabre outcomes that occur when the natural and cultural worlds collide.
The Artist’s Museum presents immersive installations which feature collections of art, artifacts, and natural material, creating distinct models from each artist’s world. Employing the language of museum display, the artists chart the recurrence of forms and themes across cultures and history, revealing unexpected relationships and affinities and engaging a variety of disciplines and subjects, from dance, music, and design, to gender, sexuality, and technology. Among the artists included are Rosa Barba, Carol Bove, Anna Craycroft, Mark Leckey, Pierre Leguillon, Goshka Macuga, and Christian Marclay.
Dave Ortega
Dave Ortega
Dave Ortega
Photo by Lauren Anca.
There’s something for everyone this February vacation at the ICA: a bunch of fun, creative + FREE activities, exciting exhibitions, wintry waterfront views, and many more reasons to spend the week with us!
Play gallery games, listen to book readings especially for families, enjoy the view, and try your hand with mixed-media storytelling.
Local artist Dave Ortega has spent years interviewing his now 100-year-old abuela (grandmother) and telling her story in comics. In the Bank of America Art Lab he’ll create a giant comic book where participants can explore how stories and pictures are arranged to create narrative and experiment with telling their own stories.
Create Comics with Artist Dave Ortega
Meet the artist during vacation week! Dave Ortega will be in attendance at the museum Fri, Feb 19, 2–4 PM. Join the artist in the Bank of America Art Lab to explore how stories and pictures are arranged to create narrative and experiment with telling stories of your own.
Have a wee one in tow? Create an engaging museum experience for even the littlest visitor with ICA Gallery Games, a free pack filled with activities and tips for looking at and talking about the art on view. Available at the Holly and David Bruce Visitor Center. Recommended for ages 2 and up.
Spend some down-time in our Family Library in the Poss Family Mediatheque. Selected to complement exhibitions, highlight the creative process, or give insight into architecture, these books are best for children ages 3–8.
Saturdays and Sundays at 11 AM and 2 PM, snuggle up on big comfy pillows for in-gallery story hours at Books and Looks, staff-led readings of picture books that relate to the art on view and are accompanied by looking activities. Ask Visitor Assistants for themes and locations. Times may vary during Play Dates or holidays.
Do your kids like to draw? Ask the front desk staff for sketching supplies to use during your museum visit. Sketch with pencil in our galleries.
Hit all the galleries, then stop by the Poss Family Mediatheque to learn more about the art and artists on view at the ICA. Browse photos, videos, interviews, and much more.
Installation view, Nalini Malani: In Search of Vanished Blood, Galerie Lelong, New York, September 6 – October 26, 2013. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Lelong, New York. © Nalini Malani.
(Boston, MA — Jan. 13, 2016) On July 1, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens an immersive video installation by Mumbai-based artist Nalini Malani (b. 1946, Karachi). Organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, In Search of Vanished Blood will open to the public on June 29 and remain on view until October 16, 2016. Malani, India’s foremost media and installation artist, has dedicated her career to artistic achievement as well as activism for women’s rights in her home country and across the globe. This exhibition showcases her groundbreaking installation, In Search of Vanished Blood, which was commissioned by Documenta 13, and premiered in Kassel, Germany in 2012. This immersive multi-media work features six 11-minute projections cast through painted rotating Mylar cylinders suspended from the ceiling. Visitors will witness an intricate shadowplay as an array of layered images are cast onto the gallery walls, enveloping viewers in a dazzling multi-media environment.
Born in Karachi, but forced to move to India following the 1947 partition of India, Malani channeled her life experiences directly into her art. Initially trained as a painter, Malani expanded her interests into video and installation projects that invoked references to her cultural and historical past while also grappling with the inequities of women’s rights. In Search of Vanished Blood takes its name from a poem written by Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz which captures the intricacies of love, war, loss, and bloodshed within a country rocked by political unrest. Malani’s installation revives this history by painted elements that adorn the suspended Mylar cylinders as reference to Eastern and Western historical and cultural iconography, including sources such as Homer’s Illiad to the Ramayana. When illuminated, these icons dance around the room, complemented by an audio track. Malani brings these rich and complex historical narrative threads together with In Search of Vanished Blood.
The presentation of Malani’s installation will be accompanied by additional works on paper and a stop-motion animation.
About the artist
Born in Karachi, India (now Pakistan) in 1946, Nalini Malani received her artistic training at the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art in Mumbai (1964-1969). Malani’s work is influenced by her experiences as a refugee of the Partition of India. She places inherited iconographies and cherished cultural stereotypes under pressure. Her point of view is unwaveringly urban and internationalist, and unsparing in its condemnation of a cynical nationalism that exploits the beliefs of the masses. Hers is an art of excess, going beyond the boundaries of legitimized narrative, exceeding the conventional and initiating dialogue. Characteristics of her work have been the gradual movement towards new media, international collaboration and expanding dimensions of the pictorial surface into the surrounding space as ephemeral wall drawing, installation, shadow play, multi projection works and theatre. Malani was awarded the prestigious Fukuoka Prize 2013 for Arts and Culture.