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Visitors of all ages can experiment and create art about Boston Harbor in this immersive laboratory

The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) has invited artist Evelyn Rydz to create an interactive art installation in the museum’s Bank of America Art Lab, opening October 7. Titled Salty > Sour Seas, Rydz’s new project turns the Bank of America Art Lab into an art studio and scientific laboratory where visitors can investigate, experiment, and create work while considering the museum’s unique site on Boston Harbor. Rydz conceived of Salty > Sour Seas to raise awareness about the effects of carbon dioxide on microscopic phytoplankton that live in the earth’s changing oceans and seas. These small but mighty organisms create about half the planet’s oxygen and help feed many animals. Human activities, however, are affecting phytoplankton and the oceanic ecosystem by warming water temperatures and increasing levels of acidification. Using pH test paper, participants can test various liquid acidity levels—including that of Boston Harbor—and see acidity as a changing visual element within their process of investigating and art making.

Salty > Sour Seas will be open on Saturdays and Sundays from 12-4pm, from October 7 through March 11.  The activity is free for all visitors with museum admission.

Meet the Artist on Saturday, October 7 and Saturday, March 10 from 2-4pm
On these dates, visitors can join Rydz for a sour phytoplankton popsicle tasting. The tastings will allow visitors to explore the unexpected sourness of taste and the unwanted souring of seas, creating a common point for questions and conversation on ideas of ocean acidification and the future of ocean ecosystems. The phytoplankton popsicles will be colored with microalgae to create a blue-green color, flavored with lime juice for acidity, and dipped in Atlantic sea salt for a salty surface. More information at icaboston.org

Also On View
Salty > Sour Seas will be open during the ICA’s exhibition Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 21st-Century Naturalist (October 4-December 31). Dion has forged a distinct, interdisciplinary practice by exploring and appropriating scientific methodologies to question how we collect, interpret, and display nature. This monumental exhibition spans 30 years of the artist’s work and brings together several hundred objects—including live birds, books, curiosity cabinets, plant and animal specimens, vintage photos, and much more—for a rare look at the unique course of the artist’s practice.

About the Artist
Over the last decade, Boston-based artist Evelyn Rydz has focused her work on contemporary coastlines and ways our everyday lives impact are impacted by changing oceans. Exploring perceptions of scale, her work draws connections between everyday actions and lasting impacts, fleeting and geologic time, unstable and fixed conditions. The artist’s work has been exhibited the Palmer Art Museum, Penn State University (forthcoming); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Tufts University Art Gallery; a Smithsonian Traveling Exhibition at the Anchorage Museum, Alaska, USC Fisher Museum, L.A., and CDC Museum, Atlanta; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park; Maseeh Hall, MIT, Cambridge; Julie Saul Gallery, NY; El Parque Cultural del Caribe, Barranquilla, Colombia; and Brattleboro Museum, Vermont. Rydz has led community art projects as visiting artist at the MFA, Boston; the ICA, Boston; and MOCA, North Miami. She is currently an Associate Professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

About the ICA
An influential forum for multi-disciplinary arts, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston has been at the leading edge of art in Boston for 80 years. Like its iconic building on Boston’s waterfront, the ICA offers new ways of engaging with the world around us. Its exhibitions and programs provide access to contemporary art, artists, and the creative process, inviting audiences of all ages and backgrounds to participate in the excitement of new art and ideas. The ICA, located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, is open Tuesday and Wednesday, 10 AM–5 PM; Thursday and Friday, 10 AM–9 PM (1st Friday of every month, 10 AM–5 PM); and Saturday and Sunday, 10 AM–5 PM.  Admission is $15 adults, $13 seniors and $10 students, and free for members and children 17 and under. Free admission for families at ICA Play Dates (2 adults + children 12 and under) on last Saturday of the month. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at www.icaboston.org. Follow the ICA at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Exhibition surveys over four decades of Nixon’s prolific career, featuring The Brown Sisters series shown with other works from same year.

 

This December, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens Nicholas Nixon: Persistence of Vision, a survey of the Boston-based artist’s prolific career. Including 113 works, the exhibition is organized around Nixon’s remarkable ongoing project The Brown Sisters, a series of group portraits of his wife and her three sisters taken annually since 1975. The Brown Sisters will be presented in its entirety—including a new portrait from 2017 making its U.S. debut—and each portrait will be paired with other photographs made by Nixon in the same year, drawn from various bodies of work. Together these pictures allow viewers to both take in the visual sweep of passing time through The Brown Sisters series, and delve more deeply into each year through close looking. Accompanying the exhibition is an extensive audio guide narrated by the artist, giving audiences insights into the various bodies of work completed by Nixon over the last four decades. The exhibition is organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Jessica Hong, Curatorial Associate, and will be on view from December 13, 2017 through April 22, 2018. 

“In his numerous series, Nixon gets to know his subjects while photographing them, making the role of time, inherent to the medium of photography, an integral part of the content and process of his work,” says Respini. “Amidst today’s increasingly frenetic pace of life and digitally mediated social relations, Nixon’s pictures invite us to slow down, look, and reflect on the nature of human relationships.” 

Other works in the exhibition include, among others, additional family photographs; self-portraits; images from his hallmark series of people with AIDS or near death; studies of students at schools such as the Perkins School for the Blind outside of Boston or his son’s elementary school in Cambridge, MA; and Boston cityscapes.

Working exclusively on film, Nixon uses a large format 8×10 inch camera, affording his pictures an unparalleled clarity of detail and description.  He often photographs his subjects at close range, encouraging a sense of intimacy in the act of photographing and looking. Organized in collaboration with the artist, the selected photographs demonstrate the breadth of Nixon’s practice and dedication to revealing the incredible moments in the everyday. Together with The Brown Sisters, these compelling pictures are a testament to Nixon’s persistence of vision.
 
About the artist
Based in Boston since the 1970s, Nicholas Nixon was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1947. The artist earned a B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1969 and an M.F.A. from the University of New Mexico in 1975. He has been awarded three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and two Guggenheim Fellowships. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) (2014/2006), the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2010), the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (2006), the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (2005), and the Cincinnati Art Museum (2005). His work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the MoMA in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, among many others. The ICA presented exhibitions of Nixon’s work in 1982, Nicholas Nixon’s New Contact Prints, and in 1983, Nicholas Nixon: Photographs From One Year, and has also collected his work.

About the ICA
An influential forum for multi-disciplinary arts, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston has been at the leading edge of art in Boston for 80 years. Like its iconic building on Boston’s waterfront, the ICA offers new ways of engaging with the world around us. Its exhibitions and programs provide access to contemporary art, artists, and the creative process, inviting audiences of all ages and backgrounds to participate in the excitement of new art and ideas. The ICA, located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, is open Tuesday and Wednesday, 10 AM–5 PM; Thursday and Friday, 10 AM–9 PM (1st Friday of every month, 10 AM–5 PM); and Saturday and Sunday, 10 AM–5 PM.  Admission is $15 adults, $13 seniors and $10 students, and free for members and children 17 and under. Free admission for families at ICA Play Dates (2 adults + children 12 and under) on last Saturday of the month. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at www.icaboston.org. Follow the ICA at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

This month, after 34 years, the Barbara Krakow Gallery formally became the Krakow Witkin Gallery, remaining in its longstanding location on the 5th floor of 10 Newbury Street in Back Bay. The name change recognizes the close partnership of Barbara Krakow and Andrew Witkin, who have worked together for 18 years, and as partners for the past 14, as well as signaling Witkin’s leadership for the future. Together, this dynamic team has created an exhibition program focused on conceptual and minimal art of the late 20th and 21st centuries; published catalogue raisonneés of the prints of Sol Lewitt, Kiki Smith, Donald Sultan, and Elizabeth Murray, as well as forthcoming publications on Mel Bochner and Liliana Porter, and have used their expertise and patience to build relationships and collections across Boston.

This, then, is an opportune moment to recognize the transformation of contemporary art in Boston and the role played by Barbara Krakow in this evolution. She is Boston’s most celebrated art dealer, as renowned for her critical eye as she is for her role as a champion of and educator in contemporary art. Two generations of Bostonians have learned from her and her exhibitions. Many have built their collections on her advice and service, establishing significant holdings of contemporary art in Boston-area homes and institutions. Others have received the equivalent of an art history degree from her – walking with her through the small gallery space, studying individual works to focus and exercise the art of looking. Still others have come for advice and conversation, seated in her office on one of two Mies van der Rohe chairs, her feet up on a Frank Gehry footstool, surrounded by her extensive library of books and drawing on her extensive knowledge of Boston and the world of art and artists. A sampling of the artists to whom she is committed charts a survey of key moments in recent art history: Josef Albers, John Baldessari, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Daniel Buren, Robert Cottingham, Tara Donovan, Dan Flavin, William Kentridge, Annette Lemieux, Allan McCollum, Stephen Prina, Kay Rosen, Kate Shepard, Lorna Simpson, Shelburne Thurber, Suara Welitoff and many, many more.

In the 34 years since Krakow began her eponymous gallery, Boston has transformed from a contemporary art backwater into the lively city it is today. Krakow estimates that from a few contemporary art venues in 1983, greater Boston has now grown to boast 150 active in the area. Much attention has been paid to the influx of new museum directors, and we are all the beneficiaries of new leadership at the MFA, Gardner Museum, Harvard Art Museums, deCordova, and now Tufts and the Rose. Talented new curators, too, have enlivened Boston’s art scene. There are also new entrepreneurial endeavors, advocacy campaigns led by Mass Creative, and renewed energy in contemporary dance, with William Forsythe’s five-year residency at the Boston Ballet and Peter DiMuro’s revival at the Dance Complex, as well as new initiatives and spaces under design at the Huntington and the A.R.T. David Howse at Emerson brings performance-based work from around the world, and the BSO and Andris Nelsons champion new music in Boston and at Tanglewood. But the change is more than a list of names and places. Important contemporary collections have been created; art schools have grown, moved and merged; each of the city’s art museums has built and expanded; and committed philanthropists and strong Boards of Trustees, Advisors and Overseers have been built. Boston is beginning to be a place as committed to the future of art as it is to its past.

You are likely to see Barbara Krakow and Andrew Witkin at all our museums and performance venues, but Krakow’s influence is not restricted to Boston. Adam Sheffer, director of the prestigious Cheim & Read Gallery in New York and president of the Art Dealers Association of America, has known Barbara since he was a young man growing up in Wellesley, Massachusetts. As he puts it, “No one has brought the global art world to Boston and Boston to the global art world quite like Barbara. Together with Andrew, she has added immeasurably to Boston’s artistic legacy and, without question, to its future as a vital center for the art of our time.”

Much of Krakow’s reputation has been built on the strong relationships she has had with some of the most important artists of the late 20th century. Sol Lewitt, Fred Sandback, and Mel Bochner were close friends of Barbara and represented by the Gallery. Jenny Holzer, Julian Opie, and Liliana Porter are consistent presences on the gallery’s exhibition schedule. Equally important, Barbara’s clients and associates have benefitted from her deep and prolonged exploration of works of art, and her willingness and desire to talk to anyone with curiosity about the practice and philosophy of art.

As the Barbara Krakow Gallery enters its new iteration as the Krakow/Witkin Gallery, it is fitting to recognize Barbara’s contribution and the history of contemporary art that she has helped shaped in and for Boston. As the beneficiary of hours of advice, counsel, and friendship both personally and through Barbara’s work for the ICA as a longstanding member of our Advisory Council, I value the education on art that I have received. Even more important, I cherish the wisdom of her experience; the value she places on integrity, relationships, and hard work; and the deep and lasting commitment she has made to Boston. I can’t wait to see what she and Andrew will undertake together.