Simone Leigh, Jug, 2022. Stoneware. 62 1/2 × 40 3/4 × 45 3/4 inches (158 × 103.5 × 116.2 cm). Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. Acquired through the generosity of Susana and Clark Bernard, Adelle Chang and Eddie Yoon, the Miller-Coblentz Family, Grace Colby, Fotene Demoulas and Tom Coté, Mathieu O. Gaulin, Jessica Knez and Nicolas Dulac, Christine and John Maraganore, and the Acquisitions Circle. Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery. Photo by Timothy Schenck. © Simone Leigh
Simone Leigh, Cupboard IX, 2019. Stoneware, raffia, and steel armature, 78 × 60 × 80 inches. Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston.
Simone Leigh, Last Garment, 2022. Bronze, 54 × 58 × 27 inches. Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery. Photo by Timothy Schenck. © Simone Leigh
Simone Leigh, Martinique, 2022. Stoneware, 60 3/4 × 41 1/4 × 39 3/4 inches. Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery. Photo by Timothy Schenck.
(Boston, MA, March 15, 2023)—The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) welcomes home Simone Leigh’s work created for the Venice Biennale, kicking off a national tour that begins at the ICA on April 6 and runs through September 4, 2023. Leigh represented the United States at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, in a project commissioned by the ICA. 29 works will be presented in Simone Leigh, including 9 works exhibited at the U.S. Pavilion. The exhibition also features key early works that speak to the artist’s consistent interest in the forms and materials of Black feminist thought, and recent ceramics, bronzes, and videos.
Following its debut at the ICA, the exhibition will then move to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. from November 2023 through March 2024. The tour will conclude in a joint presentation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and California African American Museum (CAAM), on view June 2024 through January 2025 in Los Angeles. Simone Leigh is organized by Eva Respini, ICA Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs and Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Anni A. Pullagura, Curatorial Assistant.
“Simone Leigh’s complex and profoundly moving work honors the agency and ideas of Black women, giving visibility to overlooked narratives and histories,” said Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director of the ICA. “We are thrilled to bring Simone Leigh’s art from Venice back to the U.S. as part of this landmark exhibition, so that audiences across the country have the opportunity to experience the work of this consequential and influential artist.”
“It is with pleasure that we expand this presentation to go beyond the works from Venice, including many recent works on view for the first time,” said Eva Respini, who was the Co-Commissioner of the U.S. Pavilion and Curator of the exhibition. “This exhibition reveals and celebrates an artist working at the height of her artistic powers.”
Featuring interrelated sculptures in ceramic, bronze, and raffia, the first galleries of the exhibition will display recent and new works made largely within the past five years. The exhibition culminates with Leigh’s historic Venice exhibition, presented at the ICA in a sequence that evokes the layout of the U.S. Pavilion, providing American audiences the opportunity to experience this historic installation. The exhibition concludes with Last Garment (2022), a bronze based on a 19th-century souvenir photograph of a Jamaican laundress that explores histories of labor, specifically the anonymous labor of Black women. The ICA presentation will feature a new, larger reflecting pool for Last Garment, breathtakingly situated with a sightline of Boston Harbor.
One of the most important artists working today, Leigh creates sculpture, video, installation, and social practice works that situate questions of Black femme, or female-identified, subjectivity at the center of contemporary art discourse. Leigh’s art addresses a wide swath of historical periods, geographies, and traditions, with specific references to vernacular and hand-made processes from across the African diaspora, as well as forms traditionally associated with African art and ritual, all while mining historical gaps, inaccuracies, and fallacies in material and visual culture. Saidiya Hartman’s conception of “critical fabulation”—a strategy that invites historians, artists, and critics to creatively fill the gaps of history—provides a resonant framework for approaching Leigh’s work.
The exhibition features works at both intimate and large scale. A selection of Leigh’s table-top ceramic busts point to her fluency in the medium of ceramics, including references to the Black American folk art tradition of stoneware face vessels; these citations are also rehearsed in larger ceramic works, which draw on the vernacular traditions of the American South, Caribbean, and African continent, and challenge traditional hierarchies of art and labor. Domestic vessels such as bowls and jugs, cowrie shells, and busts are recurring motifs, and her readdress of these forms over time and in various materials underscores the remarkable consistency of Leigh’s vision.
In recent large-scale ceramic sculptures, Leigh merges the human body with traditional domestic containers, conjuring black woman’s labor and knowledge production. The intersection of architecture with the body is also central to her sculpture, such as the work Cupboard IX (2019), seen in the steel cage-like structures that the artist leaves bare or covered with raffia, evoking the womb, skirts, and sub-Saharan dwellings, often built by women and used as gathering spaces.
In 2018, the artist began casting her sculptural works in bronze, creating statuary for both gallery presentations and public art commissions. Her bronzes combine figuration with domestic or architectural elements, such as in the 2019 sculpture Jug, featuring the head and torso of a woman’s body atop a large-scale vessel. Through their material choices, these bronzes embody a state of permanence and grandeur; with their overtly Black feminist and aesthetic references, Leigh’s bronzes also insist on the centrality—indeed, the necessity—of considering the agency of Black women as subjects in the cultural sphere. The exhibition will feature Leigh’s monumental 24-foot-tall bronze Satellite (2022), sited at the entrance of the ICA, broadcasting ideas around self-determination that are endemic to the work.
Leigh’s videos, often created in collaboration with other artists, draw from historical and fictional representations of Black women and femmes. Conspiracy (2022), made with filmmaker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, focuses on the performativity of making and the studio as a site of labor and care. In the video my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell (2011), Leigh and artist Chitra Ganesh reimagine the reclining female nude, a common subject in European art. Another 2011 collaboration between Leigh and artist Liz Magic Laser, titled Breakdown, features mezzo-soprano Alicia Hall Moran singing a script the two artists compiled from fictional scenes of individuals experiencing nervous breakdowns, offering a stunning meditation on psychology, race, and gender.
A major scholarly monograph is forthcoming, including images of works in the exhibition, installation views from Leigh’s Venice presentation, and images of works from throughout her career, accompanies the exhibition. Serving as the first comprehensive scholarly publication on Leigh’s practice, the publication includes newly commissioned essays by over fifteen leading scholars, historians, and writers; a conversation between Simone Leigh, Lorraine O’Grady, and Malik Gaines; and an introduction by Eva Respini. The catalogue is designed by Nontsikelelo Mutiti, and co-published by the ICA and DelMonico Books. The monograph will be available summer 2023.
Contributors to the publication include:
Vanessa Agard-Jones
Rizvana Bradley
Dionne Brand
Denise Ferreira da Silva
Malik Gaines
Saidiya V. Hartman
Daniella Rose King
Jessica Lynne
Nomaduma Masilela
Katherine McKittrick
Uri McMillan
Sequoia Miller
Steven Nelson
Tavia Nyong’o
Lorraine O’Grady
Rianna Jade Parker
Yasmina Price
Anni A. Pullagura
Eva Respini
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts
Christina Sharpe
Hortense J. Spillers
The publication is available for pre-order from the ICA Store; please click here to place your order.
The U.S. Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia was co-commissioned by Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director, and Eva Respini, Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs and Barbara Lee Chief Curator, at the ICA.
Simone Leigh is organized by Eva Respini, Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs and Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Anni A. Pullagura, Curatorial Assistant.
With warmest thanks, the ICA/Boston gratefully acknowledges the following philanthropic partners for their magnificent support.
Major support is provided by the Ford Foundation and the Mellon Foundation.
Lead corporate support is provided by eu2be.
Generous support is provided by Bloomberg Philanthropies, Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser, Girlfriend Fund, and Wagner Foundation
Leadership gifts are provided by Amy and David Abrams, Stephanie Formica Connaughton and John Connaughton, Bridgitt and Bruce Evans, James and Audrey Foster, Agnes Gund, Jodi and Hal Hess, Hostetler/Wrigley Foundation, Barbara and Amos Hostetter, Brigette Lau Collection, Henry Luce Foundation, Kristen and Kent Lucken, Tristin and Martin Mannion, Ted Pappendick and Erica Gervais Pappendick, Gina and Stuart Peterson, Helen and Charles Schwab, and the Terra Foundation for American Art
Essential support is also provided by Suzanne Deal Booth, Kate and Chuck Brizius, Richard Chang, Karen and Brian Conway, Steven Corkin and Dan Maddalena, Federico Martin Castro Debernardi, Jennifer Epstein and Bill Keravuori, Esta Gordon Epstein and Robert Epstein, Negin and Oliver Ewald, Alison and John Ferring, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Glenn and Amanda Fuhrman, Vivien and Alan Hassenfeld and the Hassenfeld Family Foundation, Peggy J. Koenig and Family, The Holly Peterson Foundation, David and Leslie Puth, Cindy and Howard Rachofsky, Leslie Riedel and Scott Friend, Mark and Marie Schwartz, Kim Sinatra, Tobias and Kristin Welo, Lise and Jeffrey Wilks, Kelly Williams and Andrew Forsyth, Nicole Zatlyn and Jason Weiner, Jill and Nick Woodman, Marilyn Lyng and Dan O’Connell, Komal Shah and Gaurav Garg Foundation, Kate and Ajay Agarwal, Eunhak Bae and Robert Kwak, Jeremiah Schneider Joseph, Barbara H. Lloyd, Cynthia and John Reed, and anonymous donors
Venetia Dale, Piecing Together: 50 Years (detail), 2021. Collected and stitched together unfinished hooked rugs. 65 × 79 inches (165.1 × 200.7 cm). Courtesy the artist. Photo by Adam Krauth Photography.
Cicely Carew, Playing in the Dark. Salvation, 2022. Digital photo collage. Dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist.
Yu-Wen Wu, Let Love In, 2023. Gold ink, graphite, ink on dura-lar, inkjet print, 14 × 11 inches (35.6 × 28 cm). Courtesy the artist.
(Boston, MA—March 29, 2023) Cicely Carew, Venetia Dale, and Yu-Wen Wu have been named the recipients of the 2023 James and Audrey Foster Prize Exhibition, the museum announced today. Their exhibition at the ICA, on view August 24–January 2, will encompass a wide range of media—from sculpture and installation to time-based media and works on paper—examining how each of the Boston-area artists uniquely engages with the theme of states of change, the passage of time, and transformation. The 2023 James and Audrey Foster Prize Exhibition is organized by Anni A. Pullagura, curatorial assistant.
“Jim and Audrey Foster’s support of the exhibition and prize program have made it possible for the ICA to highlight some of the most exciting new art being made in Boston today, and we are ever thankful,” said Jill Medvedow, the Ellen Matilda Poss Director of the ICA. “This cross-generational trio of artists brings a spectrum of perspectives to this year’s exhibition, and we look forward to sharing their vision with all our audiences.”
“We are pleased to congratulate the 2023 Foster Prize artists. Their unique perspectives will bring a dynamic energy to the galleries,” the Fosters added. “Their work illustrates the creativity and diversity of Boston’s artistic community today.”
This year’s selection of artists for the James and Audrey Foster Prize Exhibition is informed by sustained and ongoing conversations with artists in Boston working through tenuous moments of social, political, and personal transition. The projects exhibited this year explore the idea of states of change, whether that refers to changes in personal or professional lives, the changing forces in our relational or ecological lives, or the very nature of materials undergoing transformation in the making of an artwork.
James and Audrey Foster endowed the prize and the exhibition to nurture and recognize exceptional Boston-area artists. First established in 1999, the James and Audrey Foster Prize (formerly the ICA Artist Prize) expanded its format when the museum opened its new facility in 2006.
Cicely Carew (b. 1982 in Los Angeles) wields the formal, material, and sculptural aspects of painting to evoke feelings of radical joy, hope, and liberation. Her works explore the fleeting magic of the present through vibrant color, rebellious mark-making, sweeping gestures, and references to the terrestrial and cosmic worlds. In addition to group exhibitions and commissions by Now + There at the Prudential Center in Boston, she has had solo exhibitions at the Fitchburg Art Museum, The Commons in Provincetown, Northeastern University, and Simmons University. She is the recipient of the 2021 St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award, an Artful Seeds Fellowship, and a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award. Her work is in the collections of Fidelity, Simmons University, Northeastern University, the Cambridge Arts Council, and the Federal Reserve of Boston. In addition to her studio practice, she is a wellness coach and educator as the 2021–22 Artist in Residence at Shady Hill School, teaching workshops for the New Art Center in Newton and screen printing for Lesley University. Carew earned a B.F.A. from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and a M.F.A. from Lesley University’s College of Art + Design, and resides with her son in Cambridge, MA.
Venetia Dale (b. 1981 in Winfield, IL) is an artist, mother, and educator living and working in Boston. Her sculptures—made of cast pewter, a malleable metal commonly found in historical kitchenware—and fiber artworks piece together fragments of mundane objects into new associations, drawing from food leftover from her children’s meals, to unfinished embroidery and hand-hooked rugs she sources online. She is interested in the material histories of embroidery and pewter in connection to the anonymous stewards who keep things clean, fixed, and loved. She re-contextualizes visible forms of care, growth, and change to evoke the intimacy and generative potential of domestic life. Dale has participated in group exhibitions at The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (forthcoming), National Museum of Women in the Arts, The Villa Terrace Museum, and the Racine Art Museum, among others. Her work has been shown at 92nd Street Y Tribeca Gallery, Proof Gallery, and SOIL Gallery. She was the 2019 Polly Starr Thayer Visiting Artist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Prior, she was a resident artist at the Kohler Factory in 2013 and at the Oregon College of Art and Craft in 2010. Dale exhibits nationally and her work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Metal Museum in Tennessee, and the John Michael Kohler Art Center in Wisconsin.
Yu-Wen Wu (born in Taipei, Taiwan) is a Boston-based interdisciplinary artist. Wu’s subjectivity as an immigrant is central to her artwork, which examines issues of displacement, arrival, assimilation, and the shape of identity in a new country. At the crossroads of art, science, politics, and social issues, her practice includes drawing, sculpture, site-specific video installations, community engaged practices, and public art. Wu recently exhibited Lantern Stories at Chin Park in Boston’s Chinatown, a widely acclaimed commission by the Greenway Conservancy in 2020 and reinstalled in 2022; a similar project commissioned for San Francisco Chinatown also opened permanently in 2022. Other large-scale commissioned works include The Poetry of Reason, a recent wall sculpture spanning two stories at the Joyce Cummings Center at Tufts University, and Terrain, a 38-foot-long sculptural drawing for the Chao Center at Harvard Business School. Wu’s recent exhibitions include DISPLACED: Contemporary Artists Confront the Global Refugee Crisis at SITE Santa Fe, NM in 2020; her solo exhibition Internal Navigations at Praise Shadows Art Gallery in 2021; and her presentation at Independent Art Fair 2022 recognized by New York Magazine art critic Jerry Saltz as one of “The Best New York Art Shows of 2022.” Wu is the recipient of the 2019 inaugural Prilla Smith Brackett Award and the 2021 Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship. Her work is included in several public and private collections, including Harvard Art Museums, the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Tufts University Art Galleries, the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, and the Weisman Art Museum.
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.
María Berrío, Cavalry, 2022. Collage with Japanese paper and watercolor paint on canvas, 72 x 90 inches (182.9 x 228.6 cm). Private Collection. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro. © María Berrío
(Boston, MA—December 20, 2022) On February 16, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens María Berrío: The Children’s Crusade—the first time this major new series of paintings have been shown together in a museum exhibition. Based in New York, María Berrío (born 1982 in Bogotá, Colombia) crafts her large-scale paintings through a unique and meticulous process of collaging torn pieces of Japanese paper on canvas. Using these thin layers of colorful paper like a palette of paint, she then applies watercolor to complete her riveting, magical scenes that speak to urgent real-world issues, including migration and the life experiences of women and children. Organized by Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Senior Curator, María Berrío: The Children’s Crusade will be on view through August 6.
“Pressed by contemporary social and political realities, María locates her sources of inspiration in poetry, folklore, and the realms of magic to imagine alternative views of present-day truths, especially those faced by migrants, women, and children,” said Erickson. “Her large-scale works reflect on cross-cultural connections and global migration, and we’re honored the ICA is presenting her work in Boston for the first time.”
Energized by the contact point between reality and magic, Berrío frames her series as fictional stories, with each painting serving as a scene from an unfolding and otherworldly tale, accompanied by a descriptive text. She blends draftsmanship and drawing with meticulous collage and painting, creating a distinctive visual language for her narrative, figurative art.
This important series of new paintings—many created especially for this exhibition—blend the history of the thirteenth-century Children’s Crusade with the current mass migrations of peoples across the Mediterranean and the U.S. border. While the actual events of the Children’s Crusade continue to be a subject of debate among historians, legends of miracles and tragedies have inspired an abundance of stories, songs, and artwork over centuries.
Speaking about the new series, the artist says: “The main focus and the main characters are children and their perceptions as seen through fantasy and magical realism. As the children embark on this arduous journey, they infuse the ordinary with the mythic, as their innocent and imagined interpretation of the world bumps against stark realities. The darker and more bleak aspects of these travels are depicted through the naivete, humanity, love, and wonder of a child’s eyes.”
Berrío draws inspiration from diverse sources to reflect on the contemporary realities facing migrants and unaccompanied minors today. For example: Ozymandias (2022) is based on the poem “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelly and shows a child (the artist’s son) lying on his back with eyes closed, tracing an arc in the sand; Under Thatch and Autumn Star (2022) is inspired by the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin and depicts three children in bed who are left behind, and the troubled sleep that would haunt them; and Calvary (2022) is of children riding a carousel, a poignant symbol of the often-endless journey children experience during migration. Other forthcoming works reimagine the child migrant through such figures as birds and human-animal hybrids and meditate on issues of flight, freedom, control, and protection.
“As a storyteller, creating the character knowing this character doesn’t exist anywhere else but in the picture makes for a better story. I find it so much more interesting to create characters not knowing who they are entirely,” said Berrío. “Throughout my career, I’ve acknowledged the responsibility of making these works and the importance of a story. For me, the end result is when there is a moment of silence when you connect to the artwork and when you can feel something.”
Gallery Talk: María Berrío
Sunday, March 5, 2 pm
Free with museum admission
Join the artist and curator for a conversation about María Berrío: The Children’s Crusade.
María Berrío was born in Bogotá, Colombia in 1982, and she completed her BFA at Parsons School of Design and her MFA at the School of Visual Arts, both New York, NY. The artist’s first survey María Berrío: Esperando mientras la noche florece (Waiting for the Night to Bloom) was on view at The Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach from January until May 2021 and was accompanied by the artist’s first monograph. Her work has also been featured in numerous recent group exhibitions, including Women Painting Women, The Modern, Fort Worth (2022); Born in Flames: Feminist Futures, Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY (2021); Labor: Motherhood & Art in 2020, University Art Museum at New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM (2020); Present Tense: Recent Gifts of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art (2019); and Prospect.4 Triennial, New Orleans (2017–2018). Berrío’s work is part of numerous permanent collections, including Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Dallas Museum of Art; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China, among others.
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, Twitter, and Instagram.
Ana Mendieta, Untitled, from the series Silueta Works in Mexico, 1973–77/1991. Pigmented inkjet print. 13 1/4 x 20 inches (33.7 x 50.8 cm). Gift of Barbara Lee, The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women. Courtesy the Galerie Lelong. © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC.
(Boston, MA—December 14, 2022) On January 31, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens Taylor Davis Selects: Invisible Ground of Sympathy, the first time an artist has been invited to organize an exhibition based on the ICA’s permanent collection. Davis—whose work in sculpture, painting, and collage explores the relationship between object and viewer—carries forward her artistic ideas into the exhibition, which will include works by Lynda Benglis, Mona Hatoum, Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe and many others. Organized by Davis in collaboration with Jeffrey De Blois, ICA Associate Curator and Publications Manager, the exhibition will be on view through January 7, 2024.
“In nearly two decades, the ICA has established a strong and significant collection ranging from the historically important work of figures such as Eva Hesse and Ana Mendieta to the explorations of leading artists at work today including Zanele Muholi and Senga Nengudi,” said Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director. “Taylor will bring her sculptor’s perspective to our collection and I am excited to experience works from the collection in new and meaningful ways.”
A long-time and critically acclaimed member of the Boston arts community, Davis has taught at Massachusetts College of Art and Design since 1999 and is on the faculty of Bard College. She is represented in the ICA’s collection with two works (Untitled, 2015; and Be Attentive, 2020) and is a member of the ICA’s Artist Advisory Council as well as a recipient of the 2001 ICA Artist Prize (forerunner of James and Audrey Foster Prize).
Davis has conceived of Invisible Ground of Sympathy as an open field in which constellations of artworks are assembled to activate their different emotional and psychological resonances. The exhibition’s title and thematic grounding are drawn from Chang Chung-yuan’s 1963 book Creativity and Taoism, in which sympathy is described as an unseen, but intuitive knowledge of the interfusion of all things.
Invisible Ground of Sympathy features key works from the ICA collection, such as Françoise Grossen’s Inchworm (1971), Senga Nengudi’s R.S.V.P. Reverie–“B” Suite (1977), and Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Still #48 (1979), alongside recently acquired works on view for the first time, including Liz Larner’s ii (calefaction subduction) (2019), Ron Nagle’s Boston Scrambler (2015), and James Welling’s Inlet (1998). Davis has also brought together a selection of works from outside the collection and a group of objects by her frequent collaborators. Highlights include a newly commissioned poem from Fanny Howe, a suite of drawings by Conny Purtill, and seating made for the exhibition by Oliver Strand and Brandon Ndife.
“There is a storied history of artist-curated exhibitions, and artists offer a fresh lens and perspective on a museum’s permanent collection,” said De Blois. “Considering themes of precarity, wonder, violence, and beauty, Davis presents a personal take on how we make sense of the present, especially when there is no language to describe an experience in the moment. This exhibition, which is so deeply informed by Taylor’s artistic concerns, demonstrates how museum collections are not static, but are continually reimagined to tell different stories.”
Davis received a Diploma of Fine Arts from School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, a B.S. in Education from Tufts University, and an M.F.A. from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. She has taught at Massachusetts College of Art and Design since 1999 and has been co-chair of sculpture at Bard College since 2003. Davis’s work has been widely exhibited, including the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; the 2004 Whitney Biennial and recent presentations at the Austin Museum of Art, Texas; ICA/Boston; The Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY; the Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT; and deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA. Davis’s work is in the collections of Harvard Art Museums; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.
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, Twitter, and Instagram.