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Welcome to our process. We live intentionally and document creatively. Let’s pay attention, not just to how we eat, but to the process we must go through to get there—then write about it afterwards.

Bienvenido a nuestro proceso. Vivimos intencionalmente y documentamos con creatividad. Prestemos atención, no solo a cómo comemos, sino también al proceso que seguimos para lograrlo. Después escribamos sobre esto.

Materials/Materiales: 

  • Fruit you can peel / Frutas que se puedan pelar
  • Something to write on/with / Algo para escribir
  • Time set aside to be present with the activity / Tiempo aparte para estar presente en la actividad

Instructions:

1. Pick a fruit you would eat that you can also peel with your hands

Handwritten script that reads

2. Peel your fruit while paying close attention to how you do it.

Handwritten script that reads

3. Take five intentional bites.

Handwritten script that reads

Creative Documentation:

Now write. Use any thoughts or feelings you had during the experience of peeling and eating. What if the process was more than just about food? What is peeling a metaphor for in your life?

Bonus Challenge: Find another way to document the process

  • Take a photo
  • Make a drawing
  • Turn your peel into a superhero
  • Record yourself
     

Instrucciones:

1. Elige una fruta que te gustaría comer y que también puedas pelar con las manos.

Handwritten script in Spanish that reads

2. Pela la fruta prestando mucha atención a cómo lo haces.

Handwritten script in Spanish that reads

3. Come cinco bocados con intención.

Handwritten script in Spanish that reads

Documentación creativa:

Ahora escribe. Anota los pensamientos o las emociones que surgieron durante la experiencia de pelar y comer. ¿Acaso el proceso tuvo que ver con algo más que la comida? ¿En qué sentido pelar la fruta es una metáfora de tu vida?

Desafío adicional: Busca otra manera de documentar el proceso

  • Saca una fotografía
  • Haz un dibujo
  • Convierte la cáscara en un superhéroe
  • Graba un video o un mensaje de voz
     

A Puerto Rican and a Cambodian walk into a kitchen. The kitchen is your heart. The food is made with food. The food is sometimes poems. Either way you are fed. Adobo-FishSauce (Anthony Febo, Ricky Orng) began as an artist project fusing live cooking and spoken word poetry performances as a means to invite the audience into an enhanced storytelling experience. Now as they develop new projects, they continue to explore new recipes for collaboration.

Un puertorriqueño y un camboyano entran a una cocina. La cocina es tu corazón. Los alimentos se preparan con alimentos. A veces, los alimentos son poemas. Ambos te alimentan. Adobo-Fish-Sauce (Anthony Febo, Ricky Orng) comenzó como un proyecto artístico que fusiona la cocina en vivo con la palabra hablada de los recitales de poesía como un medio para invitar a la audiencia a una mejor experiencia narrativa. Ahora, a medida que ellos desarrollan proyectos nuevos, siguen explorando novedosas recetas en conjunto.


Look out for @adobofishsauce on IG and join us for #goneslinging — an intentional walk and talk. Share your artwork with us at #peelingpoems Find more about AFS at adobofishsauce.com.

Busca @adobofishsauce en IG y participa con nosotros en #goneslinging, una caminata y una charla con intención. Comparte tu obra de arte con nosotros en #peelingpoems. Obtén más información sobre AFS en adobofishsauce.com.

Major exhibition includes works by Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Kader Attia, Firelei Báez, Louise Bourgeois, Nan Goldin, Simone Leigh, Doris Salcedo, and many others

 

(Boston, MA—November 2, 2020) The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) presents i’m yours: Encounters with Art in Our Times, a major collection presentation that features new acquisitions and iconic artworks from the ICA’s collection including works by Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Kader Attia, Firelei Báez, Louise Bourgeois, Nan Goldin, Simone Leigh, Doris Salcedo, and many others. The exhibition opens to members on Thursday, November 19 at 10 AM and at ICA Free Thursday Night on November 19 for the public. Advance timed tickets required at icaboston.org/tickets. On view through May 23, 2021, i’m yours: Encounters with Art in Our Times is collaboratively organized by Jeffrey De Blois, Assistant Curator and Publications Manager; Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Curator; Anni Pullagura, Curatorial Assistant; and Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator.

“After the events of this year, we recognize now more than ever the power of the arts to uplift us as we reckon with all the uncertainties and complexity of our world,” said Jill Medvedow, the ICA’s Ellen Matilda Poss Director.

“i’m yours features new works to the ICA’s collection that have never been on view here, including a life-size sculpture by Simone Leigh, an installation of over 225 drawings by Firelei Báez, and portraits by photographer Zanele Muholi. Visitors will also be able to see iconic favorites from the collection like Tara Donovan’s cube of straight pins and Cornelia Parker’s hanging sculpture of charred pieces of wood,” shared the curators.

For this exhibition, the curators have taken an experimental approach, creating a series of discrete scenes within a dramatic architectural space featuring theatrical lighting and bold color. These scenes address topics that are relevant during these times of isolation, including ideas of home and history, social and material transformation, and frames of identity.

Exhibition highlights

The exhibition opens with three singular artworks: Simone Leigh’s stunning life-sized sculpture Cupboard IX; Louise Bourgeois’s theatrical Cell (Hands and Mirror) where, finely carved marble arms are reflected through mirrors installed in an evocative structure; and Green Heart by feminist painter Joan Semmel, whose work has engaged with charged eroticism and frank, corporeal self-portraiture. The works gathered feature the human figure either in its totality or in part, and evoke touch in poetic ways—whether in Leigh’s outstretched arms, the conjoined hands in Bourgeois’s sculpture, or the full-bodied embrace in Semmel’s painting.

Bridging myth and media, the works in the second scene share narratives of land, history, and the body. Firelei Báez’s monumental Man Without a Country (aka anthropophagist wading in the Artibonite River) includes 225 hand-drawn illustrations over repurposed historical texts written about Hispaniola, the Caribbean island of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Wangechi Mutu’s precarious Blackthrone VIII fuses ordinary materials together in a towering sculpture. Nalini Malani’s video sketch Penelope animates a classical myth. Caitlin Keogh’s painting Blank Melody, Old Wall gathers disembodied feminine motifs floating against a vibrantly designed background. Together, these four works offer artistic musings on the creative balance found in open-ended renewal.

Some of the ICA’s beloved artworks are presented as a means to meditate on the aftermath of loss and the possibility for creative production from what remains. Cornelia Parker’s Hanging Fire (Suspected Arson) strings the charred wooden pieces of a destroyed building to form a suspended sculpture. Doris Salcedo’s Atrabiliarios features the shoes of women who had “disappeared” (presumed abducted and killed) during the Colombian conflict (1967–present). Marlene Dumas’s large-scale paintings in The Messengers bring together three renderings of skeletons with a portrait of her own daughter. Nan Goldin’s photograph, Chrissy with her 100-year-old Grandmother, Provincetown, captures a momentary connection between two women at different points in their lives. Together, these works attest to the forces of loss, death, and destruction, as well as those of tenderness and care, that form our human condition. 

Notions of home are central to the works in next grouping, including rethinking familiar domestic objects. Family ties and relationships play a large part in artists’ reflections on home. Boston-area artist Rania Matar’s Orly and Ruth, a photograph of two Boston-area sisters taken during the COVID-19 pandemic, offers a glimpse into lives in isolation. Toyin Odutola’s Heir Apparent imagines the lives of two fictional Nigerian families joined by marriage, while Nan Goldin captures intimate moments with the families we choose to make. The relationship of home to gender identity also undergirds many of the works gathered here, such as Cindy Sherman’s staged Untitled Film Still #3, a send-up of conventional gender roles.

The next grouping features three artworks that reveal dense layers of meaning ingrained in familiar, everyday materials. Tara Donovan’s Untitled (Pins) is a cube made from thousands of metal dressmaker’s pins that recalls the “unitary forms” of so many highly finished minimalist sculptures. A structure of stacked white sugar cubes on a silver platter dissolves under poured motor oil in Kader Attia’s video Oil and Sugar #2. Sugar and oil are laden with complicated relationships to history, politics, and the environment, even as both are seemingly ubiquitous in everyday life. Equally as complex in its range of associations, the American flag at the center of Cady Noland’s sculptural assemblage Objectification Process is still sealed in plastic packaging. The inert flag positioned on an orthopedic walker suggests a powerful critique of American symbols of national unity and pageantry.

The next scene features nearly thirty portraits of front-facing subjects, many of whom lock eyes with the viewer. Challenging familiar forms of museum display and the genre of portraiture, this grouping stages an encounter in which the viewer is both seeing and being seen—and questions the power dynamics assumed in such relations. Some works, like Zanele Muholi’s suite of photographs and Collier Schorr’s candid portrait, expand ideas of visual agency and self-representation. Others interrogate conventions such as identification photography: Thomas Ruff’s dramatic shift in scale and Rineke Dijkstra’s double portrait both trouble the notion that portraits reveal vital aspects about identity. Brought into dialogue with one another, these portraits explore both furtive possibilities and persistent questions related to the power of seeing and being seen. 

Offering a glimpse into the long history of performance art and social critique, the final scene brings together two artists who took to public space to stage unsanctioned and layered portrayals of class, race, and gender. Between 1980 and 1983, Lorraine O’Grady performed as a fictional 1950s beauty queen named Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, or Miss Black Middle-Class. Arriving uninvited to gallery and museum openings throughout New York, O’Grady’s glamorous and unforgettable alter ego disrupted these private events to expose the racism and sexism rampant in the art field. Similar in its critique of class and privilege, Nari Ward’s 1996 performance involved the artist, dressed in a crisp suit, pushing his sculpture Savior down 125th Street in Harlem, New York. Recalling a traveling salesman, religious figure, and itinerant person, Ward’s performance puts forward his towering sculpture—carefully constructed from discarded objects—as a kind of talisman against a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. 

Artist list

Njideka Akunyili Crosby (b. 1983 in Enugu, Nigeria)
Kader Attia (b. 1970 in Dugny, France)
Firelei Báez (b. 1981 in Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic)
Louise Bourgeois (b. 1911 in Paris; d. 2010 in New York)
Rineke Dijkstra (b. 1959 in Sittard, the Netherlands)
Tara Donovan (b. 1969 in Queens, NY)
Marlene Dumas (b. 1953 in Cape Town, South Africa)
Shepard Fairey (b. 1970 in Charleston, SC)
LaToya Ruby Frazier (b. 1982 in Braddock, PA)
Nan Goldin (b. 1953 in Washington, D.C.)
Mona Hatoum (b. 1952 in Beirut, Lebanon)
Chantal Joffe RA (b. 1969 in St. Albans, VT)
Caitlin Keogh (b. 1982 in Anchorage, AK)
Deana Lawson (b. 1979 in Rochester, NY)
Simone Leigh (b. 1967 in Chicago, IL)
Nalini Malani (b. 1946 in Karachi, Pakistan)
Rania Matar (b. 1964 in Beirut, Lebanon)
Paul Mpagi Sepuya (b. 1982 in San Bernardino, CA)
Zanele Muholi (b. 1972 in Umlazi, South Africa)
Wangechi Mutu (b. 1972 in Nairobi, Kenya)
Alice Neel (b. 1900 in Merion Square, PA; d. 1984 in New York)
Cady Noland (b. 1956 in Washington, D.C.)
Lorraine O’Grady (b. 1934 in Boston, MA) 
Toyin Ojih Odutola (b. 1985 in Ife, Nigeria)
Catherine Opie (b. 1961 in Sandusky, OH)
Cornelia Parker OBE, RA (b. 1956 in Chesire, England)
Thomas Ruff (b. 1958 in Zell am Harmersbach, West Germany)
Doris Salcedo (b. 1958 in Bogotá, Colombia)
Collier Schorr (b. 1963 in New York)
Joan Semmel (b. 1932 in New York)
Cindy Sherman (b. 1954 in Glen Ridge, NJ)
Diane Simpson (b. 1935 in Joliet, IL)
Henry Taylor (b. 1958 in Ventura, CA)
Gail Thacker (b. 1959 in Providence, RI)
Nari Ward (b. 1963 in St. Andrew, Jamaica) 

Exhibition-related fall programming

The Artist’s Voice: Zanele Muholi
Thu, Nov 19, 5:30 PM
Digital + Free

Influential South African artist and activist Zanele Muholi discusses their work, including the ongoing portraiture series Faces and Phases, select works from which are on view in i’m yours: Encounters with Art in Our Time, in conversation with Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator.

The Artist’s Voice: Rania Matar
Thu, Dec 3, 6:30 PM
Digital + Free

Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Curator, chats with Rania Matar about the artist’s Across Windows series of portraits taken in and around Boston during COVID-19. Hear more about Matar’s process for making art during an ongoing pandemic, an example of which is included in i’m yours: Encounters with Art in Our Times.

Virtual Celebration: i’m yours: Encounters with Art in Our Times
Wed, Dec 9, 7 PM
The event is a premiere benefit for ICA Members +

Celebrate the opening of i’m yours: Encounters with Art in Our Times, a new major exhibition reveling in the power of experiencing art in person. Hear from all four curators in conversation about the exhibition and their experience curating in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic and social unrest. Get premiere access by becoming an ICA member.

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 at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.


Support for i’m yours: Encounters with Art in Our Times is provided by First Republic Bank.

First Republic Bank

Additional support is generously provided by Lori and Dennis Baldwin and The Paul and Phyllis Fireman Charitable Foundation; Ed Berman and Kate McDonough; Clark and Susana Bernard; Kate and Chuck Brizius; Paul and Katie Buttenwieser; Stephanie and John Connaughton; Karen and Brian Conway; Steve Corkin and Dan Maddalena; Jean-François and Nathalie Ducrest; Bridgitt and Bruce Evans; the Ewald Family Foundation; James and Audrey Foster; Hilary and Geoffrey Grove; Vivien and Alan Hassenfeld and the Hassenfeld Family Foundation; Jodi and Hal Hess; Marina Kalb and David Feinberg; Barbara Lee; Tristin and Martin Mannion; Aedie and John McEvoy; Ted Pappendick and Erica Gervais Pappendick; The Red Elm Tree Charitable Foundation; Charles and Fran Rodgers; Mark and Marie Schwartz; Kambiz and Nazgol Shahbazi; Kim Sinatra; Charlotte and Herbert S. Wagner III; and anonymous donors.

The Artist’s Voice: Zanele Muholi is made possible, in part, by the Bridgitt and Bruce Evans Public Program Fund.

The Artist’s Voice: Rania Matar is made possible, in part, by The Ronni Casty Lecture Fund and the Bridgitt and Bruce Evans Public Program Fund.

 

(Boston, MA—October 23, 2020) The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) presents the U.S. museum premiere of William Kentridge’s KABOOM! (2018), a recent acquisition and room-filling multimedia installation that addresses the history of African porters drafted into service for German, British, and French colonial powers during World War I. KABOOM! is a seventeen-minute, three-channel video set to a rousing orchestral score of both African and European musical traditions co-composed by Philip Miller and Thuthuka Sibisi. The exhibition opens to members on Wednesday, November 18 and at ICA Free Thursday Night on November 19 for the public. Advance timed tickets required at icaboston.org/tickets. On view through May 23, 2021, KABOOM! is organized by Jeffrey De Blois, Assistant Curator and Publications Manager, with Anni Pullagura, Curatorial Assistant.

“For over fifty years, William Kentridge has created gripping and profound works that address the human condition and the history of social injustice in South Africa, specifically the prolonged effects of colonialism and the apartheid system. Using a variety of mediums from drawing, animation, film, and performance, he transforms painful histories into powerful stories that evoke the trauma and endurance of colonial legacies. The themes of Kentridge’s significant work KABOOM! are particularly resonant during this time of global pain and reckoning,” said Jill Medvedow, the ICA’s Ellen Matilda Poss Director. “Presenting this work, newly acquired for the ICA Collection, deepens our commitment to share the art of William Kentridge with Boston audiences.”

Projected onto a scale model of the stage used in Kentridge’s theatrical production The Head & the Load (2018), which premiered at Tate London and later at New York’s Park Avenue Armory, KABOOM! employs collage as a narrative medium, “bringing different fragments together to find a provisional history,” as the artist explains. Embodying the theatrical intensity of The Head & the Load at gallery scale, silhouettes of porters march across cut-up fragments of colonial maps alongside the writings of Reverend John Chilembwe, philosopher Frantz Fanon, and artist Tristin Tzara, among others. Its title comes from the Ghanaian proverb, “the head and the load are the troubles of the neck,” which here recalls both the physical weight of goods, services, and weapons that porters—men, women, and children—carried for colonial soldiers, as well as their place in a global war that violently remade the continent’s borders towards the end of what would become known as the imperialist Scramble for Africa. A way of speaking back to the incomplete story of colonialism, KABOOM! envelops the gallery in a visual landscape that traverses memory and narrative, revealing our understanding of history to be a fragmented relationship to the past.

About the artist

William Kentridge (b. 1955 in Johannesburg, South Africa) is a multi-disciplinary artist best known for wide-ranging works that examine the paradoxes of settler colonialism and apartheid in South Africa. His multidisciplinary practice weaves together drawing, print, animation, and more, to recompose our understandings of the past, emphasizing, as he says, “what we’ve chosen not to remember.” One of the most significant artists of our time, Kentridge has exhibited widely internationally, including recent solo exhibitions at Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH; Reina Sofia, Madrid; Whitechapel Gallery, London; SF MoMA, San Francisco; and National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, among many others. His work has been included in group exhibitions, and he has participated in several international exhibitions of contemporary art, including the Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates; the Venice Biennale; Gwangju Biennial, Korea; Liverpool Biennial, UK; Documenta; and the Moscow Biennial, among others. Educated at the University Witwatersrand and the Johannesburg Art Foundation, Kentridge is the recipient of numerous awards, including honorary doctorates from University of Pretoria, South Africa, and Royal College of Art London. With this presentation of KABOOM!, Kentridge returns to the ICA in the first solo presentation since his 2014 exhibition Kentridge’s The Refusal of Time.

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 at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.


KABOOM! was acquired through the generosity of Amy and David Abrams, James and Audrey Foster, Charlotte Wagner and Herbert S. Wagner III, Jeanne L. Wasserman Art Acquisition Fund, and Fotene and Tom Coté Art Acquisition Fund.

Evgenya first saw me when I was a teenager, 14 or 15. She was about 18 and still is. Her double gaze found me many times in those first months I visited the gallery, in groups and alone, under the purview of various volitions, and by the fortune of my deepening familiarity with the museum.  In time, the room became organized around her.   

There are two Evgenyas present. At first, I was not sure.  

Evgenya on the left reminded me of someone I knew, and I was sympathetic to her physical presentation. I wore dark clothes and my hair fell over my eyes; these made up the compass by which I navigated my young world, and thus Evgenya was someone that I could know, and would have wanted to. Her tensed brow and just turned neck had a secretive trepidation which I felt empathized with me.  

Evgenya on the right and I did not know each other. Her role is clear from her clothes – gently worn, rusty, olive fatigues – in a way that was both alien and parallel to a young person in an art program, who thought they may become an artist. Yet I envied her relaxed, hidden arms and her calm, confrontational face.  

There are two Evgenyas present, and I learned to see each in the glass of the other.  

Rineke Dijkstra’s camera takes its place on either side of a decisive event – the start of compulsory military service.  I feel for Evgenya a hovering respect and a delicate protectiveness. Something of a violence seems to have already taken place, and not one implied by political context. She changes between the photographs, so my instinct is to parse out this difference. Evgenya also stays the same; she may indeed have become herself. In the photographs, Evgenya is emergently revealed to herself and separated from herself; though it reminds me of lepidoptery – skewered butterflies preserved in cabinets – it is not photography that does this.  

Most of my recent sojourns to the fourth floor have been with groups of teens participating in out-of-school programs. In past years we have been able to encounter Almerisa, also photographed by Dijkstra. More than once, gathering my group at the end of the last hour, I have sighted a teen lingering in her estimation, still absorbing her multiplicity. I think this kind of work, which follows on the heels of yet also keeps ahead of life, has an especial effect on young people, who are in the midst of such rapid outward change themselves – surely committed to the still image in even more frequent intervals than we see of Almerisa.  

I’m excited for Evgenya to return this fall. I look forward to encountering her abiding change, which I expect to see with new eyes. And when I am in her view, her gaze will ask me, and ask me to ask myself, how have I changed? My hair and dress are different from when I was younger, reflecting altered station, altered world – but I hope that I have developed the soft, sure eyes which I have admired of her for so many years, with which to see others and myself. 

 

Montgomery Alcott is the Teen New Media Program Assistant at the ICA. He cooks and reads.  

Friday Art Notes are personal reflections on works of art shown or in the permanent collection of the ICA, written by ICA staff, volunteers, and supporters. Read more

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We find ourselves in an uncertain world. A world that has changed suddenly. Now often we find ourselves reflecting on times past and dreaming about the days to come.

Make a memory mobile to remember and to hope. Write, draw, and decorate these memory tags. Display the memory mobile in your home to remind yourself of joyful times that have gone by and will return.


Nos encontramos en un mundo incierto. Un mundo que cambió repentinamente. Ahora nos encontrarnos a menudo reflexionando sobre los momentos del pasado y soñando sobre los días que vendrán.

Crea un móvil de recuerdos para recordar y tener esperanza. Escribe, dibuja y decora estos carteles de recuerdos. Decora tu móvil de recuerdos en tu casa para recordar los momentos de dicha que han pasado y que regresarán.

Materials / Materiales:

  • 4 red tags / 4 carteles rojos
  • 1 yellow tag / 1 cartel amarillo
  • 1 white pen / 1 marcador blanco
  • 1 bell / 1 cascabel
  • 5 short pieces of string, 1 long piece of string / 5 trozos cortos de cuerda y 1 trozo largo de cuerda
  • 1 wooden dowel / 1 pasador de madera

Instructions:

  1. Individually or as a group, recall events of the past and what you hope for in the future.
    For example:
    I remember having mangoes on long summer afternoons in India.
    I hope to see my family there soon.
  2. Share your memories and hopes on your set of tags through words, drawings, photos.
  3. Tie the bell onto a short string, along with the yellow tag. Next hang each tag from the dowel with the remaining short strings.
  4. Tie the long string to each end of the dowel for hanging on your wall.
  5. Hang your mobile on a wall in your home from a nail or thumbtack.
  6. Take the time to slow down, reflect, and dream. Enjoy the activity. Continue to add to your tags with found materials around your home or neighborhood like nature objects or recycled materials.

Instrucciones:

  1. Ya sea de manera individual o en grupo, recuerda los sucesos del pasado y tus esperanzas para el futuro.
    Por ejemplo:
    Recuerdo comer mangos durante las largas tardes de verano en la India.
    Espero regresar allí pronto para ver a mi familia.
  2. Comparte tus recuerdos y esperanzas en el conjunto de carteles con palabras, dibujos, fotografías.
  3. Ata el cascabel a una cuerda corta, junto al cartel amarillo. Luego cuelga cada cartel en el pasador con el resto de las cuerdas cortas.
  4. Ata la cuerda larga a cada extremo del pasador para colgarlo en la pared.
  5. Cuelga el móvil en una pared de tu casa con un clavo o una tachuela.
  6. Tómate el tiempo para detenerte un poco, reflexionar y soñar. Disfruta la ac — tividad. Continúa agregando carteles con materiales que encuentres en tu casa o vecindario, como objetos de la naturaleza o materiales reciclados.
     

Krina Patel is a Boston-based artist and educator who shares stories and memories through images and texts. Krina engages with visual processes, creating images using a range of media from pencils and brushes to digital pens and laser tools. Her creative process is collaborative as she invites viewers to participate directly and/or indirectly in creating and re-creating the art works.

Krina Patel es una artista y educadora de Boston que comparte relatos y recuerdos a través de imágenes y textos. Krina se dedica a los proyectos visuales, creando imágenes con una variedad de materiales, de lápices y pinceles, a bolígrafos digitales y herramientas láser. Su proceso creativo es de colaboración, ya que invita a los espectadores a participar de manera directa y/o indirecta en la creación y la recreación de sus obras de arte.

ICA logo, USA flag, and State Department Seal

 

(Boston, MA—October 14, 2020) The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA), in cooperation with the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, is pleased to announce that Simone Leigh will represent the United States at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2022. Leigh’s unique sculptural work explores and elevates ideas about history, race, gender, labor, and monuments, creating and reclaiming powerful narratives of Black women. She will create a new series of sculptures for the U.S. Pavilion in Venice, Italy, on view April 23–November 27, 2022.

The 2022 U.S. Pavilion is co-commissioned by Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director, and Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator at the ICA. The museum is organizing Leigh’s first survey exhibition—which will include works from the forthcoming Biennale—and a major monograph to be presented in Boston in 2023.

“Over the course of two decades, Simone Leigh has created an indelible body of work that centers the experiences and histories of Black women and at such a crucial moment in history, I can think of no better artist to represent the United States,” said Medvedow. “The scale and magnificence of Leigh’s art demands visibility and power; it is probing, timely, and urgent. We are proud and honored to share this work with audiences from around the globe at the next Biennale in Venice.”

Leigh’s new body of work for the Biennale will include a monumental bronze sculpture for the U.S. Pavilion’s outdoor forecourt. The Pavilion’s five galleries will house interrelated works in ceramic, bronze, and raffia, populating the gallery space with figurative representations for the first time in many years. Central to the project is a partnership with the Atlanta University Center Art History + Curatorial Studies Collective, an innovative program based in the Department of Art & Visual Culture at Spelman College, which prepares future curators, art historians, and museum professionals. Nikki Greene, Assistant Professor of the Arts of Africa and the African Diaspora at Wellesley College and Paul Ha, Director of the MIT List Visual Arts Center are advisors to the project.

“Simone Leigh is one of the most gifted and respected artists working today. For the U.S. Pavilion, Leigh will create a series of new sculptures and installations that address what the artist calls an ‘incomplete archive’ of Black feminist thought, with works inspired by leading Black intellectuals. Her work insists on the centrality of Black female forms within the cultural sphere, and serves as a beacon in our moment,” said Respini.

Biographies 

Simone Leigh

Simone Leigh’s (b. 1967, Chicago, IL) works in sculpture, video, and installation—all are informed by her ongoing exploration of the experiences of Black femmes. Her work traverses across time, geography, and cultures, and her objects often employ materials and forms traditionally associated with African art and vernacular traditions across the African Diaspora.

Leigh’s monumental sculpture Brick House is currently installed on the High Line Plinth, New York. She received the prestigious Hugo Boss Prize in 2018 and has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2019); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); Studio Museum in Harlem in Marcus Garvey Park, New York (2016); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas (with Chitra Ganesh, 2016); New Museum, New York (2016); Creative Time and Weeksville Heritage Center, Brooklyn (2014); and The Kitchen, New York (2014). She has been included in group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2019); 10th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2018); New Museum, New York (2017); MoMA PS1 (2015); and Dak’Art 11th Biennale of Contemporary African Art, Dakar, Senegal (2014). Her work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; and the ICA/Boston, among others.

Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director, ICA/Boston
Co-Commissioner

Throughout her career, Medvedow has championed the intersection of contemporary art and civic life. At the ICA, she led the museum’s transformation from a small, non-collecting institution into a major presence in the contemporary art world and on Boston’s waterfront. She is responsible for building the first new art museum in Boston in nearly a century, beginning a focused permanent collection, launching a nationally recognized teen arts education program, providing artistic leadership to pioneering exhibitions and performances, and exponentially increasing the museum’s audiences and impact. In 2018, Medvedow led the significant expansion of the ICA with the opening of the Watershed, a reclaimed industrial space in East Boston for large-scale artistic commissions and community engagement.

Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, ICA/Boston
Co-Commissioner

For two decades, Respini has been curating groundbreaking and ambitious exhibitions and has consistently worked with a diverse roster of artists exploring themes around representation and history, political agency, and material culture. Respini curated the critically acclaimed thematic exhibitions When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art (2019) and Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today (2018); and organized ambitious solo presentations with artists such as Firelei Báez (2021); John Akomfrah (2019); Huma Bhabha (2019); and William Forsythe (2018). Her other notable exhibitions include the retrospectives of Cindy Sherman (2012) and Walid Raad (2015) at the Museum of Modern Art. Well respected in the art field, she teaches curatorial studies at Harvard University, and publishes widely. Respini is currently working with Leigh on her first museum survey exhibition, scheduled for 2023 at the ICA.

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 at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

About La Biennale di Venezia

Established in 1895, the International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia is considered the most prestigious contemporary art exhibition in the world, introducing hundreds of thousands of visitors to exciting new art every two years. The 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (April 23–November 27, 2022) is directed by Cecilia Alemani.

About the U.S. Pavilion

The United States Pavilion, a building in the neoclassical style in the Giardini della Biennale, Venice, opened on May 4, 1930. Since 1986, the U.S. Pavilion has been owned by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and managed by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, which works closely with the U.S. Department of State and exhibition curators to install and maintain all official U.S. exhibitions presented in the Pavilion. Every two years, museum curators from across the country detail their visions for the U.S. Pavilion in proposals that are reviewed by the National Endowment for the Arts’s Federal Advisory Committee on International Exhibitions (FACIE), a group comprising curators, museum directors, and artists, who then submit their recommendations to the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Past exhibitions can be viewed on the Peggy Guggenheim Collection’s website at guggenheim-venice.it.

About the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, U.S. Department of State

The U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) builds relations between the people of the United States and the people of other countries through academic, cultural, sports, professional, and private exchanges, as well as public-private partnerships and mentoring programs. These exchange programs improve foreign relations and strengthen the national security of the United States, support U.S. international leadership, and provide a broad range of domestic benefits by helping break down barriers that often divide us, like religion, politics, language and ethnicity, and geography. ECA programs build connections that engage and empower people and motivate them to become leaders and thinkers, to develop new skills, and to find connections that will create positive change in their communities. For more information, please visit exchanges.state.gov/us.

Media Contacts:

The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston
Colette Randall, crandall@icaboston.org, 617-478-3181
Margaux Leonard, mleonard@icaboston.org, 617-478-3176

Office of Public Affairs and Strategic Communications
The U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs 
202-632-6452
ECA-Press@state.gov

Additional images and portraits of the artist and co-commissioners are available upon request. 

The ICA is pleased to announce that it has been selected as the commissioner of the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2022, presenting the work of Simone Leigh in cooperation with the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.  

Over the past two decades, Simone Leigh has created an indelible body of work that centers the experiences and histories of Black women, elevating ideas about history, race, gender, labor, and monuments.  

For the U.S. Pavilion in Venice, which consists of five rooms, the artist will create a new series of sculptures in ceramic, bronze, and raffia, inspired by leading Black intellectuals. It is a tremendous honor to present her work to audiences from around the globe in Venice in 2022, and then to bring this work home to Boston to share with U.S. audiences when we open Simone Leigh’s first major survey exhibition at the ICA in 2023.     

The 2022 U.S. Pavilion is co-commissioned by Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director, and Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator at the ICA. Central to the project is a partnership with the Atlanta University Center Art History + Curatorial Studies Collective, an innovative program based in the Department of Art & Visual Culture at Spelman College, which prepares future curators, art historians, and museum professionals. We are strengthened by the participation of Nikki Greene, Assistant Professor of the Arts of Africa and the African Diaspora at Wellesley College, and Paul Ha, Director of the MIT List Visual Arts Center, who will serve as advisors to the project.  

The Venice Biennale takes place from April 23 to November 27, 2022. We look forward to sharing updates about this exciting project in the months to come. In the meantime, learn more about Simone Leigh, her work, and the Biennale.