Firelei Báez, Untitled (Les tables de geographie reduites en un jeu de cartes), 2022. Oil and acrylic on archival printed canvas. 82 3/8 × 105 3/4 inches (209.2 × 268.4 cm). Collection of Deborah Beckmann and Jacob Kotzubei. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Jackie Furtado. © Firelei Báez
Firelei Báez, A Drexcyen chronocommons (To win the war you fought it sideways), 2019. Installation view, Firelei Báez: A Drexcyen chronocommons (To win the war you fought it sideways), James Cohan, New York, 2019. The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle. © Firelei Báez
Firelei Báez, Man Without a Country (aka anthropophagist wading in the Artibonite River), 2014–15. Gouache, ink, and chine-collé on 225 deaccessioned book pages, 106 1/4 × 252 inches (270 × 640 cm). Gift of Fotene Demoulas and Tom Coté. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. © Firelei Báez
(Boston, MA—Sept. 15, 2023) In April 2024, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) presents Firelei Báez, the first museum survey dedicated to the richly layered work of Firelei Báez (b. 1981, Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic). The exhibition will feature approximately 40 works—paintings, installations, and works on paper spanning nearly two decades of the artist’s practice—and showcase Báez’s profoundly moving body of work, which explores the complicated and often incomplete historical narratives that surround the Atlantic basin. The artist will premiere new works in the exhibition, which is slated to tour throughout North America to the Vancouver Art Gallery (Fall 2024) and Des Moines Art Center (Spring 2025). The exhibition will be accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue co-published by the ICA and DelMonico Books. On view from April 4 to Sept. 2, 2024, Firelei Báez is organized by Eva Respini, Deputy Director and Director of Curatorial Programs, Vancouver Art Gallery (former Barbara Lee Chief Curator at the ICA), with Tessa Bachi Haas, ICA Curatorial Assistant.
“Firelei Báez is part of a vital movement in contemporary art that embraces the role of art in understanding gaps in the historical record,” said Jill Medvedow, ICA Ellen Matilda Poss Director. “She delves into the historical narratives and fluid identities of the Atlantic basin in a way that invites audiences to reimagine and reassess. Firelei’s stunning, immersive installation at the ICA Watershed in 2021 left an indelible impression on all who saw it. This comprehensive survey will examine two decades of the artist’s practice, offering audiences a deeper and richer encounter with the work of this important artist.”
“This survey highlights Báez’s investment in the medium of painting and its capacity for storytelling and mythmaking, featuring complex and layered uses of pattern, decoration, and saturated color, often overlaid on maps made during colonial rule in the Americas,” said Respini. “Her work is about looking at history through multiple lenses – she shifts perspectives and creates layers of complexity where history has only provided a single perspective.”
Drawing on disciplines of anthropology, geography, folklore, fantasy, science fiction, and social history, Báez presents works that engage with Caribbean, African, and Latin American diasporas and histories. Her large-scale map paintings, featuring colonial maps, charts, and architectural plans immerse audiences in sweeping narratives that bring together myth and history. In Man Without a Country (aka anthropophagist wading in the Artibonite River) (2014-2015), Báez uses 225 pages sourced from late nineteenth-century texts on the history of Hispaniola—the Caribbean island that is divided between the Dominican Republic and Haiti—as supports for her drawings depicting chimeric organisms, femme figurations, and decorative embellishments. The markings intervene across the text, fusing folkloric motifs with academic writing to offer new ways of reading history and culture. Báez installs each page individually to form this wall-size installation, suggestive of island geographies and bodies of water, which viewers navigate according to their own trajectories, resisting singular narratives in favor of multiple readings.
Báez employs a similar reframing of recorded histories in her drawings. In Can I Pass? Introducing the Paper Bag to the Fan Test for the Month of July (2011), she creates a series of 31 self-portraits displayed like a calendar for the month of July. The self-portraits detail only the artist’s eyes and silhouette as she poses with different hair styles for each day of the calendar month. All of the portraits are made to match the artist’s shifting skin tone as it darkens and lightens with changing seasons. This exercise is reminiscent of the social practice of using the Brown Paper Bag Test to admit or deny entry to social functions based on one’s skin color in the 20th century United States.
Bringing the powerful quality of her paintings into three dimensions with her sculptural installations, Báez creates generative spaces with painted architectural forms that invite new possibilities and ideas to be explored. A Drexcyen Chronocommons (To win the war you fought it sideways) (2019) is an immersive installation that invites audiences to reexamine historical narratives, echoing some of the same characteristics of her 2021 commission for the ICA Watershed. Báez envelops the space in a hand-perforated blue tarp, casting spots of light onto surfaces painted with symbols reflective of the Black diaspora, constructing a place where the past, present, and future intertwine.
Publication
The exhibition will be accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue featuring works in the exhibition, works from throughout Báez’s career, and essays from Leticia Alvarado, Katherine Brinson, Jessica Bell Brown, Julie Crooks, Daniella Rose King, Eva Respini, Hallie Ringle, and Katy Siegel.
About the ICA
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, Instagram, and TikTok.
Media Contact
Theresa Romualdez, press@icaboston.org
Credits
This exhibition is organized by Eva Respini, Deputy Director and Director of Curatorial Programs, Vancouver Art Gallery (former Barbara Lee Chief Curator, ICA/Boston), with Tessa Bachi Haas, Curatorial Assistant, ICA/Boston
Major support for Firelei Báez is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, David and Jocelyne DeNunzio, Mathieu O. Gaulin, Lise and Jeffrey Wilks, and the ICA’s Avant Guardian Society.
Didier William, Cursed Grounds: Cursed Borders, 2021. Acrylic, oil, ink, and wood carving on panel. 60 × 106 inches (152.4 × 269.3 cm). Private collection. Courtesy of James Fuentes Gallery. © Didier William
Suchitra Mattai, An Ocean Cradle, 2022. Vintage saris, fabric, and ghungroo bells. 10 × 15 feet (3 × 4.6 m). Courtesy of the artist and Kavi Gupta. Photo by Wes Magyar. © Suchitra Mattai
Jeannette Ehlers, Black Bullets (still), 2012. Video (black-and-white, sound; 4:33 minutes). Sound: Trevor Mathison; Technical Assistance: Markus von Platen; Camera: Jette Ellgaard & Jeannette Ehlers. Private collection. Courtesy the artist. © Jeannette Ehlers
Christopher Cozier, Gas Men (still), 2014. Two-channel HD video (color, sound; 2:07 minutes). Display dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist. © Christopher Cozier
(Boston, MA—Sept. 12, 2023) This October, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today. This major group exhibition is an innovative rethinking of “Caribbean art,” focusing on art of the Caribbean diaspora and featuring an intergenerational group of 28 artists who live and work across the globe. Challenging conventional ideas about the region, Forecast Form reveals the Caribbean as a place defined not by geography, language, or ethnicity, but by constant exchange, displacement, and movement. The exhibition is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The ICA’s presentation of Forecast Form is coordinated by Jeffrey De Blois, Associate Curator and Publications Manager, and will be on view from October 5, 2023, through February 25, 2024.
“Forecast Form is a far-reaching, stimulating exhibition of art from the Caribbean and its diaspora. With works by 28 artists from around the world, it is full of new ideas: formal, conceptual and experiential. We’re very excited to share this with audiences from, connected to or new to Caribbean contemporary art,” said Jill Medvedow, the ICA’s Ellen Matilda Poss Director.
“The concept of diaspora—the movement or displacement of people through migration from one location to another—provides a powerful framework for understanding “Caribbean art” in the context of Forecast Form and beyond,” said De Blois. “This concept allows for the artworks in the exhibition to be framed through ideas of movement and transformation, exceeding the limitations of geographic boundaries.”
Forecast Form takes the 1990s, when debates around identity and difference featured front and center, as a cultural backdrop. This decade—a period of profound social, political, and economic transformation globally—also had a major effect on art from the Caribbean, and in the cultural sector gave rise to a Pan-Caribbean art exhibition model that attempted to represent the region’s complex colonial histories through art. In contrast, Forecast Form focuses on the affinities shared between works made by artists who have ties to the region yet hold diverse personal identities, geographies, and histories. Using the weather’s constant movement as a metaphor for analyzing artistic practices, this expansive exhibition reveals new modes of thinking about identity and place. Through a deeply innovative exploration of form, Forecast Form positions the region as a place where the past, the present, and the future meet.
The ICA’s presentation of Forecast Form debuts a new work by Teresita Fernández, Manigua(Mirror) (2023). The word manigua is often used to describe a dense forest or swamp; a chaotic entanglement or an impenetrable place. Inspired by this definition and Wilfredo Lam’s painting, The Jungle (1943), Fernández’s manigua is a space of refuge. Through evocative materials such as charcoal and black sand, and wielding the symbolic power of the palm tree, Manigua(Mirror) conjures an image of a Caribbean landscape as a site of resistance.
Other works in the exhibition include:
This comprehensive group exhibition features 28 artists from across the diaspora: Candida Alvarez, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker, Christopher Cozier, Julien Creuzet, Maksaens Denis, Peter Doig, Jeannette Ehlers, Alia Farid, Teresita Fernández, Rafael Ferrer, Denzil Forrester, Joscelyn Gardner, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Deborah Jack, Engel Leonardo, Daniel Lind-Ramos, Suchitra Mattai, Ana Mendieta, Lorraine O’Grady, Ebony G. Patterson, Keith Piper, Freddy Rodríguez, Zilia Sánchez, Adán Vallecillo, Cosmo Whyte, and Didier William.
The exhibition is accompanied by a substantial 288-page catalogue featuring groundbreaking scholarship as well as extensive plate sections reproducing exhibition artworks.
About the ICA
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, Instagram, and TikTok.
Media Contact
Theresa Romualdez, press@icaboston.org
Credits
Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today was organized by Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
Major support for Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today was provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
The exhibition is curated by Carla Acevedo-Yates, Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator, with Iris Colburn, Curatorial Assistant, Isabel Casso, former Susman Curatorial Fellow, and Nolan Jimbo, Susman Curatorial Fellow.
The ICA/Boston presentation is coordinated by Jeffrey De Blois, Associate Curator and Publications Manager.
With warmest thanks, we gratefully acknowledge the generosity of the ICA’s Avant Guardian Society in making this exhibition possible.
Photo by Jonathan Javier Dorado
(Boston, MA—AUGUST 22, 2023)—The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) announces the appointment of Erika Umali as the museum’s first Curator of Collections. In this newly created role, supported by the Leadership in Arts Museums initiative, Umali will lead strategy, acquisitions and exhibitions for the ICA’s collection, as well as expanding access and visibility for the collection through public exhibitions and programming, publishing initiatives, and digital platforms. The ICA’s collection, begun in 2006, has strong representation of women artists and artists of color, and reflects the exhibition program at the museum.
“We are thrilled to welcome Erika to our curatorial team, to learn from her, and to work together to make the collection an integral, driving programmatic force at the ICA,” said Ruth Erickson, Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs. “The role of Curator of Collections will expand our capacity and support our commitment to reflect strong, diverse voices and perspectives in our collection and in all aspects of our work.”
“I am elated to join the ICA’s curatorial team at such a transformational moment in the development of the collection,” added Umali. “I look forward to collaborating with the brilliant team here to support their ambitious and thought-provoking programming, and to contribute towards building a leading collection of contemporary art that fully reflects the diverse narratives and histories of the world around us.”
Since the ICA began a permanent collection in 2006, the museum has built a forward-thinking, 20th and 21st-century collection, distinguished by its representation of women artists and commitment to diversity. The collection has greatly expanded in recent years, with the addition of major acquisitions by Yayoi Kusama, John Akomfrah, Firelei Báez, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, and Barbara Kruger, among many others. The full collection is available here.
Umali comes to the ICA from the Brooklyn Museum, where she served as the inaugural Assistant Curator of the Collection and oversaw thousands of acquisitions. Alongside this, she also organized several exhibitions including Jeffrey Gibson: When Fire Is Applied to a Stone It Cracks, Brooklyn Abstraction: Four Artists, Four Walls, featuring installations by Maya Hayuk, José Parlá, Kennedy Yanko, and the late Leon Polk Smith, and Art Breaks, a collaboration between MTV and the Brooklyn Museum. Prior to her role as Assistant Curator of the Collection, Umali served as the Brooklyn Museum’s Mellon Curatorial Fellow.
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. Follow the ICA on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
The Curator of Collections position is supported by Leadership in Arts Museums, an initiative to create more racial equity in arts museum leadership led by the Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Pilot House Philanthropy and Alice L. Walton Foundation.
Leadership in Arts Museums is a $11+ million initiative over the next five years to invest in a variety of efforts to create more racial equity in art museum leadership. A partnership between the Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Pilot House Philanthropy and Alice L. Walton Foundation, the initiative provides funding to museums to increase leadership roles such as curators, conservators, collections managers, community engagement staff, and educators in a manner designed to advance the goal of racial equity.
Photo by Mel Taing
(Boston, MA—JULY 18, 2023) – The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) announces the promotion of Anni A. Pullagura to Assistant Curator. In her new position, Pullagura will have an expanded role in the ICA’s curatorial and exhibition program, deepen her involvement with the ICA’s educational initiatives, and oversee curatorial internships. Among her significant projects at the museum, Pullagura assisted in the organization of Simone Leigh: Sovereignty, the ICA’s commission for the 59th Venice Biennale as well as the nationally touring survey exhibition Simone Leigh and its accompanying publication. Pullagura has also organized the forthcoming 2023 James and Audrey Foster Prize exhibition opening Aug. 24, 2023, and is contributing towards the first U.S. museum survey of Charles Atlas, opening in 2024.
“Since first joining as a curatorial fellow, Anni has been an indispensable part of the ICA’s curatorial department distinguishing herself with deep intelligence and equanimity,” said Ruth Erickson, recently appointed Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs. “In her time at the ICA, Pullagura has made many important contributions to the museum’s curatorial program and permanent collection, while developing a thoughtful body of scholarship on American art, empathy, and museums.”
Pullagura became Curatorial Assistant in 2020, after joining the ICA as a Curatorial Fellow in 2018. At the ICA, she has organized Jordan Nassar; Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca: Swinguerra; The Worlds We Make; and i’m yours: Encounters with Art in Our Time. She has also supported the management of the permanent collection and assisted in the organization of Deana Lawson; A Place for Me: Figurative Painting Now; Revival: Materials and Monumental Forms; William Forsythe: Choreographic Objects; and When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art.
In 2022, Pullagura received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Brown University, and is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including the Center for Curatorial Leadership/Mellon Foundation Seminar in Curatorial Practice Fellowship and the Professional Alliance for Curators of Color Fellowship from the Association of Art Museum Curators. She currently serves on the Art of the Americas Advisory Think Tank at Harvard Art Museums. In addition to presenting regularly at the American Studies Association, Black Portraiture[s], and the College Art Association, among others, her writing has appeared in Art Journal; The Journal of American History; and Journal of Visual Culture, as well as in numerous exhibition catalogues. Prior to the ICA, Pullagura held positions at the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University, Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, High Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
About the ICA
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. Follow the ICA on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
Diana Thater, Delphine, 1999. Installation view, Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2015–16. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York/London/Hong Kong. Photo by Fredrik Nilsen. © Diana Thater
Summer 2018 at the Watershed
Inaugurating the new ICA Watershed in East Boston is an exhibition of works by artist Diana Thater (b. 1962, San Francisco) that create immersive experiences through light and moving image projections.
The installation will center on Thater’s artwork Delphine, reconfigured in response to the Watershed’s raw, industrial space and coastal location. In this monumental work, underwater film and video footage of swimming dolphins spills across the floor, ceiling, and walls, creating an immersive underwater environment. As viewers interact with Delphine, they become performers within the artwork, their own silhouettes moving and spinning alongside the dolphins’.
In addition to Delphine, the Watershed will feature a recent sculptural video installation, A Runaway World, focused on the lives and worlds of species on the verge of extinction and the illicit economies that threaten their survival. Produced in Kenya in 2016 and 2017, A Runaway World is staged within a unique architectural environment of free-standing screen structures designed by the artist.
Thater received a BA in Art History from New York University before receiving her MFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. She has had major solo exhibitions at leading institutions, including the Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul (2017); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2016); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2015); Kunsthaus Graz, Austria and Natural History Museum, London (2009). Her work was featured in the 56th Venice Biennale at The Azerbaijan Pavilion as well as several Whitney Biennials (1995, 1997, and 2006), and is represented in prominent museum collections worldwide, including The Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York) and Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam). Among her numerous notable awards, Thater has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2005) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1993). A prolific writer and educator, Thater lives and works in Los Angeles, where she teaches at the Art Center College of Design.
About the Watershed
On July 4, the ICA will expand its artistic programming across Boston Harbor to the Watershed, a new space for art in the Boston Harbor Shipyard and Marina. Award-winning firm Anmahian Winton Architects (AW) has been engaged to design the renovation of the facility, a former copper pipe factory, and restore the historic building for new use. The ICA will present artworks and public programs seasonally in the newly renovated 15,000-square-foot space while continuing year-round programming in its Diller Scofidio + Renfro-designed facility in Boston’s Seaport District. The Watershed will be a raw, industrial space for art unlike any other in Boston. In addition to a flexible space for exhibitions, programming, and workshops, the Watershed will house an orientation gallery introducing visitors to the historic shipyard complemented by a waterside plaza that will serve as a gathering place with stunning harbor views. The Watershed is located across Boston Harbor from the ICA in the Boston Shipyard and Marina in East Boston. The ICA will provide a boat to bring visitors between both locations. Admission to the Watershed will be free for all.
Tammy Nguyen, Ralph Waldo Emerson (detail), 2023. Watercolor, vinyl paint, ink, screen printing ink, pastel, and metal leaf on paper stretched over panel. 100 x 60 inches (254 x 152.4 cm). Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London. © Tammy Nguyen
(Boston, MA—JUNE 27, 2023) On August 24, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens Tammy Nguyen, the artist’s first solo museum presentation in the United States. Tammy Nguyen’s (b. 1984, San Francisco) gilded paintings are composite images that reconsider lesser-known histories against the backdrop of lush landscapes and varied symbols of violent conquest or soft power. For the ICA, the artist has created an interconnected body of 14 paintings, works on paper, and artist books. Inspired by East Asian landscape painting, these works are all related to the relationship between people and nature, landscape and wilderness, as articulated in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s influential 1836 essay Nature, written in Concord, Massachusetts. Nguyen maps how ideas Emerson penned nearly 200 years ago have echoed across time and space to influence U.S. policies abroad, with a focus on Vietnam. Organized by Jeffrey De Blois, ICA Associate Curator and Publications Manager, the exhibition is on view through January 28, 2024.
“Nguyen’s unique paintings are both portraits and landscapes, in which figure and ground are collapsed together, equating humans to nature as in Emerson’s essay. Her new body of work explores the lasting influence of Emerson, a figure associated closely with Massachusetts, on ideas about nature that are still prevalent today,” said De Blois.
Nguyen’s new works are tied together by the line “what is a farm but a mute gospel?” from Nature, which intimates Emerson’s idea that God is reflected everywhere in nature. Dense layers of foliage combine plants and trees of the U.S. Northeast with the flora and fauna of tropical environments to create jungle-like landscapes where everything is interwoven. Emerson is one of the figures who recurs throughout the new works, along with Jesus, Demeter, and Ngô Đình Diệm.
Nguyen presents these seemingly disparate figures in parallel, connecting them using different seasons as experienced in the Northeast to create a new narrative around these known symbols. Jesus appears in the figure of the Christ of Vũng Tàu, a 105-foot statue in Vietnam on the top of Mount Nhỏ—both a legacy of colonialism and a path to salvation. Here, the Christ of Vũng Tàu suggests literally the Emersonian connection between God and landscape. Demeter features as the Ancient Greek goddess of harvest and agriculture, and, later, the patron saint of agriculture. Even after paganism was banned throughout the Roman Empire, farmers continued to pray to her as “Saint Demetra.” Ngô Đình Diệm was the first president of South Vietnam from 1955 until he was captured and assassinated during the 1963 South Vietnamese coup. Diệm opened the door to U.S. involvement in Vietnam as part of his nation-building projects, including land reform, a topic that Nguyen explores across her new body of work.
Nguyen’s vibrant paintings—whose symphonic space is made through overlaying painting, printing, drawing, metal leafing, and rubber stamping with custom-made tools—combine pictorial strategies of reflection and mirroring, drawn from Emerson’s philosophy of nature. In one large-scale painting, Nguyen mythologizes three figures involved in Vietnamese land reform programs whose passport photos she found in the National Archives of the United States. Their countenances are halved across the panels, portrayed against a panoramic landscape of mountains and overlaid with text drawn from documents found in archives. In another, a disc plow and illustrations of Vietnamese farmers found in the archives are juxtaposed with a depiction of the Battle of Lexington and Daniel Chester French’s The Minute Man (1874), a statue in Concord that depicts the revolutionary solider stepping away from his plow.
Emerson, Jesus, Demeter, and Diệm appear again in the artist’s four collage-based works on paper. The texture and specificity of these works are taken from documents, including propaganda, found in the National Archives related to land reform programs in Vietnam. Across these works, she also includes the words from Ca Dao, propagandistic folk songs promoting land reform that circulated the countryside.
Finally, four unique artist books—discrete objects unto themselves and the heart of Nguyen’s practice—are also tied to the four seasons and the recurring figures central to this body of work. The artist books are constructed to resemble the mountainous landscapes pictured throughout, tying together Emerson’s conception of landscape and how the Vietnamese landscape was conceived as part of land reform, especially through the lens of the U.S. involvement.
Artist Biography
Tammy Nguyen lives and works in Easton, Connecticut. Nguyen has a M.F.A. in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University, and a B.F.A. from Cooper Union. After finishing at Cooper Union, she received a Fulbright Scholarship to study lacquer painting in Vietnam, where she remained for three years. She is Assistant Professor of Art at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. She is the founder of independent publishing imprint Passenger Pigeon Press. Nguyen’s work has been included in numerous exhibitions, including Still Present!, 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Germany, and Greater New York 2021, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York. Nguyen’s artist books are in many notable collections, including Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT; Clark Art Institute Library, Williamstown, MA; Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art Library, New York; New York Public Library; Philadelphia Museum of Art Library, Philadelphia; and the Whitney Museum of American Art Library, New York. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts. Nguyen’s first novel, O, was published in 2022 with Ugly Duckling Presse.
About the ICA
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, Instagram, and TikTok.
Media Contact
Theresa Romualdez, press@icaboston.org
Credits
Organized by Jeffrey De Blois, Associate Curator and Publications Manager.