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All Are Welcome for ICA 10 – Commemorating 10 Years in 10 Days with Activities, Performances, Programs, and Free Community Day

2016 is a milestone year for the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA), one of the oldest museums in the United States dedicated solely to contemporary art. It’s the 80th anniversary of its founding in 1936, and on December 10 the ICA will mark 10 years on Boston’s waterfront in its iconic Diller Scofidio + Renfro-designed building. A 10-day celebration, ICA 10, will kick off on Thursday, December 1 with $10 admission and special programming for 9 days, culminating in a Free Community Day on Saturday, December 10 (more details are below or at www.icaboston.org/ica-10).

“When we opened the doors of the new ICA 10 years ago, we knew we were at the beginning of an amazing chapter in our story, as well as in the evolution of the Seaport District,” said Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director of the ICA. “Public access to the arts and all that art museums offer—inspiration, education, history, economic vitality, and community—are more urgent now than ever for building vibrant cities, celebrating diversity, and strengthening social cohesion and democracy. We’re celebrating this moment with 10 days of activity and engagement with art and artists, everyone is welcome, and we want to see and hear from our members, visitors, partners, and friends.”

PIONEER + CULTURAL ANCHOR

Founded in 1936 as the Boston Museum of Modern Art—a sister institution to New York’s MoMA—the ICA was conceived as a laboratory where innovative approaches to art could be championed. The museum eventually parted ways with MoMA and changed its name to the Institute of Contemporary Art in 1948. As the ICA’s reputation grew around the nation, it paved the way for other institutes and museums of contemporary art as well as artists’ spaces and alternative venues.

Throughout its history the ICA has been at the forefront internationally in identifying and supporting the most influential artists of its time and bringing them to public attention. More recently, the ICA has been pivotal in establishing the careers of artists and performers including Vanessa Beecroft, Shepard Fairey, Trajal Harrell, Faye Driscoll, Cildo Meireles, Cornelia Parker, Cindy Sherman, Bill Viola, Kara Walker, and Rachel Whiteread.

In 2006 the ICA was the first art museum built in Boston in more than 100 years and a pioneer in the transformation of Boston’s waterfront. Since that time, the museum has become a cultural anchor in the Seaport District and enjoyed a significant number of milestones including:

  • Establishing a permanent collection of 20th- and 21st-century artists—notable for Barbara Lee’s gift of the Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women;
  • Hosting a dynamic schedule of nationally-acclaimed exhibitions, performances, and artist talks;
  • Creating a national model for teen arts education, investing in urban adolescents as future leaders, artists, and electorate. With more than 7,000 teens participating in ICA teen education programs annually, this initiative was recognized with a National Arts and Humanities Youth Program award from the White House in 2012; and
  • Welcoming more than 2 million visitors to the waterfront over the past decade.
ICA 10 DETAILS

The festivities will kick off on Thursday, December 1 with $10 admission for 9 days, culminating with a Free Community Day on Saturday, December 10. Throughout the 10-day celebration, visitors will enjoy the galleries and exhibitions, art-making activities, performances, staff-led spotlight tours, and even become part of visual art on view in the museum. In addition, in conjunction with its sponsorship of ICA Teen Programs, UNIQLO will present a few special surprises and giveaways at the Free Community Day.

For the complete schedule of events, visit www.icaboston.org/ica-10. Celebration highlights include:

All Weekdays

  • $10 admission and ICA staff-led spotlight talks (1:30 PM)

Thursday, December 1 (Free admission 5–9 PM)

  • Island Creek Oyster Bar (ICOB)/Row 34 Chef Jeremy Sewall book signing for Oysters: A Celebration in the Raw and The New England Kitchen (6–8 PM)
  • Island Creek Oyster pop-up raw bar and free shucking demonstrations (6–9 PM)

Friday, December 2

  • Turn back the clock for holiday fun at First Fridays: “Snowball ’06” ($10/free for members, 5–10 PM)

Saturday, December 3

  • Choreographer Heidi Latsky returns with body positive “movement installation” ON DISPLAY, in recognition of International Day of Persons with Disabilities (12–1:30 PM and 3–4:30 PM)
  • Artmaking in the Bank of America Art Lab (2–4 PM)

Sunday, December 4

  • Teen Takeover: Teen Arts Council pop-up talks; a drop-in collective audio project; and The Current, a new program where teens discuss social issues through the lens of contemporary art (10 AM–4 PM)

Monday, December 5 (ICA is closed)

  • Go Digital: ICA followers can vote online for their favorite ICA event of the past 10 years and be registered for a chance to receive a private tour of First Light: A Decade of Collecting at the ICA

Thursday, December 8 (Free admission 5–9 PM)

  • Behind the Scenes: The Artist’s Museum tour with Mannion Family Senior Curator Dan Byers (6 PM)
  • Trunk show featuring three Boston-based studios/artists: Pilgrim Waters, Porcelain and Stone, and Keith Maddy (6–9 PM)

Friday, December 9

  • Gillian Wearing site-specific mural opens on the Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall in the ICA’s State Street Corporation Lobby; plus Spotlight talks (7 and 8 PM)
  • Films in the Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater (5:30–8 PM)

Saturday, December 10: FREE COMMUNITY DAY

  • Artmaking in the Bank of America Art Lab: visitors can see themselves projected around the building as part of a special site-specific installation by Boston-based artist Susannah Lawrence (10 AM–4 PM)
  • Talks + Tours: Visitors can go behind the scenes to learn more about the building on its 10th birthday;
  • Performances:
    11:30 AM: Branches Steel Orchestra – Dorchester’s Branches Steel Orchestra brings the traditional calypso music of Trinidad and the West Indies, as well as modern classics of pop, R&B, spirituals, jazz, soca, and reggae;
    1:30 PM: Dances from Everyday Cabaret – Some of the region’s best performers come together in this entertaining revue showcasing a variety of popular styles. With Peter DiMuro, Artistic Director of Public Displays of Motion & Executive Director of the Dance Complex, as emcee and guide;
    3:30 PM: Music from the African Diaspora – Berklee College of Music and Boston Conservatory students from Africa, Brazil, and the U.S. share an intoxicating music mix;
  • The Object Project: Guests can become part of a podcast, looking at idiosyncratic relationships to possessions and collecting, by talking about a beloved object (12–4 PM);
  • Hearts for Art: Visitors can show some love for works in the ICA collection;
  • Free hot chocolate, coffee, and ICA cookies (10 AM–noon, while supplies last); and
  • Giveaways, Japanese calligraphy, and more, courtesy of UNIQLO (sponsor of ICA Teen Programs).
EXHIBITIONS

Two special exhibitions will be on view during the celebration, including:

First Light: A Decade of Collecting at the ICA (through January 16, 2017) – Coinciding with the tenth anniversary of the ICA/Boston’s move to its iconic waterfront building, this exhibition celebrates the museum’s first decade of collecting, is drawn entirely from the ICA’s collection, and features significant new acquisitions. Conceived as a series of interrelated and rotating stand-alone exhibitions, First Light highlights major singular works from the collection, including a monumental cut-paper silhouette tableau by Kara Walker, work from the Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women, groupings of work by artists such as Louise Bourgeois and Nan Goldin, and thematic and art-historical groupings featuring the work of artists as diverse as Paul Chan, Sharon Hayes, Sherrie Levine, and Cornelia Parker. A new multi-media web platform with artist interviews and commentary from current and former curators was created to mark the occasion.

The Artist’s Museum (November 16, 2016–March 26, 2017) – This exhibition departs from the impulse to collect and connect, bringing together photography, film, video, installation, sculpture, and sound works that use artworks, images, and history as material for new works. These multilayered projects reimagine the lives of other artworks, demonstrating how social history, personal connections, and ideology shape our relationships to objects, images, and the cultures they produce. Among the artists featured in The Artist’s Museum are: Rosa Barba, Carol Bove, Anna Craycroft, Christian Marclay, Xaviera Simmons, Rosemarie Trockel, and Sara VanDerBeek. Engaging the realms of dance, music, popular culture, natural history, image archives, and design–as well as art history–the twelve artists address a constellation of issues such as gender, sexuality, technology, and digital culture, charting forms and themes across cultures and through time.

The ICA invites its social media followers to use #ICA10 to share their thoughts, experiences, and photos on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Gillian Wearing (b. 1963, Birmingham, UK) has created Rock ‘n’ Roll 70 (2015/2016), a monumental, site-specific photographic mural for the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston’s Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall. On view from December 9, 2016 through January 1, 2018, this new work is the first presentation in Boston of the celebrated artist’s work and was organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Jessica Hong, Curatorial Assistant.

Best known for her photographic and video works that intimately capture aspects of our familial and personal histories, Wearing began her career photographing strangers she encountered on London’s streets and continues to explore the nuances of identity, the intersections of public and private, and the performativity of self. Over her career, Wearing has also mined her own life and history, having meticulously sculpted masks of her loved ones and donned them to create eerie self-portraits as her brother, mother, or her own self at an earlier age.

For Rock ‘n’ Roll 70, Wearing asked individuals working with age-progressing technology to digitally enhance self-portraits created at age 50 (her current age) to see what she might look like at age 70. Printed as wallpaper, these aged portraits show the diversity of possibilities of the artist’s future self. They differ slightly or drastically from each other, revealing the limitations of what we believe to be pioneering technology, exploring how identity can be represented, and further emphasizing the uncertainty of what lies ahead.

On top of the wallpaper hangs a framed triptych of photographic portraits, consisting of Wearing at her current age, an enhanced portrait, and a blank space, as the artist intends to make a self-portrait when she turns 70 to complete the triptych. In a world oversaturated by images, particularly “selfies,” Wearing explores the complexities of identity mediated through technology, which is a topic that’s more urgent than ever.

The ICA’s Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall is dedicated to site-specific works by leading contemporary artists, commissioned annually. Located along the eastern interior wall of the museum’s glass-enclosed lobby, the most public space in the museum, the Art Wall is the visitor’s first encounter with art upon entering the building. Wearing’s photographic mural highlights the diverse range of possibilities for the Art Wall, a fitting site for this installation as it further collapses the public and private spheres. Rock ‘n’ Roll 70 will explore the lobby as a psychological space—the artist’s portraits are confrontational and alluring, discomfiting and thought-provoking.

Based in London, Wearing gained critical attention after winning the acclaimed Turner Prize in 1997. She was nominated for the Vincent Award presented by the Gemeentemuseum/GEM in The Hague, Netherlands (2014) and for the Liberty Human Rights Awards for her public sculpture A Real Birmingham Family (2014). Since the early 1990s, Wearing has been working primarily in video and photography, utilizing the public as her subject matter to investigate what we as private individuals carry with us in the public sphere. With the Internet boom and social media explosion, the public and private realms have all but collapsed. This has become a dominant theme for many contemporary artists and a significant issue for the culture-at-large. Wearing describes her methodology as “editing life,” similar to how we present ourselves to our online public. However, unlike reality culture of our day, which is full of judgment and emotive responses, the artist photographs her subjects and herself with as little subjectivity as possible, contrasting with the type of online personas we wish to portray.

Support was provided, in part, by Jean-François and Nathalie Ducrest and Area9 Group. 

Exhibition explores collecting and appropriation as a creative impulse in works by twelve artists remixing objects, images, and art history.

Press are welcome to preview the exhibition on Tuesday, Nov 15 between 10 AM and 1 PM. Please contact Lisa Colli, lcolli@icaboston.org, if you need additional information, images, or would like to visit the exhibition on November 15.

The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) presents The Artist’s Museum, an exhibition focused on the creative impulse to collect and connect, featuring work by twelve American and European artists, including a major new commission for the exhibition by Anna Craycroft, as well as by Rosa Barba, Christian Marclay, Rosemarie Trockel, Carol Bove, Rachel Harrison, Louise Lawler, Mark Leckey, Pierre Leguillon, Goshka Macuga, Xaviera Simmons, and Sara VanDerBeek. Occupying the West Gallery, The Artist’s Museum showcases artworks that combine appropriated images, pre-existing artworks, and collected artifacts to create unexpected relationships across cultures and history in installations, photography, film, and video. The exhibition is organized by Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator, with Jeffrey De Blois, Curatorial Assistant, the exhibition is on view from November 16, 2016 through March 26, 2017.

The desire to collect objects and images of personal significance and to make connections between them is a near-universal experience. Since the early 20th century, artists’ collections of artworks and artifacts have served as inspiration for and material in their work, helping them create highly individualized models of their worlds. The Artist’s Museum includes artworks that gather a wide variety of appropriated materials and images ranging from magazines and animated characters to postcards and curios. These artists are also influenced by the advent of search engines, the internet’s digital image and data saturation, and the networked culture that defines our digital age.

Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director at the ICA/Boston, said, “Seeing the world through artists’ eyes and the objects the artists collect offers a window into our shared and different values and views of history, and our individual and collective selves. In The Artist’s Museum, Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator, has created a dramatic platform for all our visitors to experience the unique worlds and perspectives of twelve extraordinary artists.” 

Byers said, “An ‘artist’s museum’ may not be a museum at all, but rather a conceptual approach to the creative organization of artworks and other objects to make sense of the world. The exhibition is about artists re-telling forgotten, hidden, or overlooked histories through cultural artifacts and images. Further, it reveals the secret lives of artworks and the personal relationships we all have with images and art. Each installation charts recurring forms and themes across cultures and history, subjecting artworks, images, and objects to new systems of relation and connectivity. They employ the language of museum display to engage many subjects, from dance, music, and design to gender, sexuality, and technology.”
 
An exhibition highlight is a major new ICA/Boston commission by Craycroft, The Earth is a Magnet (2016), the artist’s most ambitious work to date. Made up of more than 150 objects covering two small galleries, the work brings together the photography, biography, and inventions of Berenice Abbott—celebrated for both her street photography and her rigorously scientific images made at MIT—with video, sculpture, and photography by a peer group of younger artists. They include Fia Backström, Katherine Hubbard, Matt Keegan, Jill Magid, MPA, Lucy Raven, Mika Rottenberg, A. L. Steiner, and Erika Vogt. Other highlights include:

  • Shown for the first time in the U.S., Barba’s lush 35mm film The Hidden Conference: About the Discontinuous History of Things We See and Don’t See (2010), imagining a narrative in which the Neue Nationalgalerie’s paintings and sculptures in storage are protagonists;
  • Marclay’s sixteen-monitor video installation Shake Rattle and Roll (fluxmix) (2005), featuring the artist literally playing the Walker Art Center’s Fluxus collection;
  • Bove’s La Traversée Difficile (2008), marshalling René Magritte and Gerald Heard as inspirations for a mini-encyclopedic museum;
  • Harrison’s photographic series Voyage of the Beagle (2007), surveying human and animal forms across sculptural manifestations ranging from mannequins and signs to public art and taxidermy;
  • Leckey’s uncanny moving-image work Cinema in the Round (2008), develops unexpected connections between artworks, media technology, and popular culture, both real and virtual;
  • Shown in the U.S. for the first time, Leguillon’s The Great Escape (2012), presenting a collection of artworks and photographs of dancers with a light-show and soundtrack by Amy Winehouse; and
  • Trockel’s Living Means Not Good Enough (2002), a hybrid photograph-sculpture that displays an artist’s influences and anxieties, also being shown for the first time in the U.S.
     

The presentation of The Artist’s Museum will be enriched by gallery talks and artist talks (details to be announced soon).
 

Catalogue

The Artist’s Museum is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with texts by Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator, ICA/Boston; Claire Bishop, art historian, critic, author, and Professor in the Art History Department at CUNY Graduate Center, New York; Lynne Cooke, Senior Curator, Special Projects in Modern Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; and Ingrid Schaffner, Curator of the 2018 Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art. Designed by Chad Kloepfer, The Artist’s Museum catalogue also includes a historical compendium of influential 20th-century artworks and exhibitions that provide important precedent to the works in this exhibition. Available for $49.95 at the ICA Store or online at icastore.org.

Major support is provided by Barbara Horwich Lloyd, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
 
Additional support is generously provided by Steve Corkin and Dan Maddalena, Tristin and Martin Mannion, Ellen Poss, Charlotte and Herbert S. Wagner III, Anonymous, FACE Foundation/ Etant Donnés Contemporary Art, and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States.

FACE logo

 

From interpreting classical Greek plays to choreographing for David Bowie and David Byrne, iconoclast Annie-B Parson creates work like none other. 

If you don’t know Annie-B Parson, you should. In addition to 25 years co-directing the New York-based company Big Dance Theater with artistic and life partner Paul Lazar, the consummate innovator has choreographed David Byrne’s musical Here Lies Love and the David Bowie musical Lazarus; created movement for marching bands, choruses, and inanimate objects; and developed a unique blend of dance, literature, and theater that is as incisive as it is irresistible.

Parson sat down with the ICA in advance of Big Dance Theater’s presentation of their 25th-anniversary celebration Short Form to talk inspiration, process, not selling your audience short, and what makes her “art heart” weep.

Short Form is a program of five short pieces celebrating your 25th anniversary, but the works are new, yes? How did you choose this approach? 

The dances were, by and large, new work when they premiered at the Kitchen in January. However, the final piece on the program, Goats, was a favorite work that Paul Lazar and I made for another company years back and wanted to revisit. I revised it based on my experiences working in the theater since the original production, and tailored it for Big Dance. 

Why work short?

It occurred to me, after sitting through many, many shows in downtown dance, that they all run roughly about the same length, and I wanted to disrupt that aspect of form. And, I had been reading very short fiction that seemed rooted in both poetic forms and our contemporary attention span. I found the short form compelling—it has different operating principles—so, I challenged myself to create works that are granular, brief—a short story rather than a tome. I got really involved in all things short for a little while.

Was it more or less difficult than you expected? 

It’s very difficult. In fact, I don’t think I’ve mastered it, but I enjoyed this period! It felt I was drawing rather than painting; the scale is lithe and flexible. However, I think I more organically understand how to develop materials and ideas over an hour-to-two-hour piece. Duration, it turns out, is personal. 

There are few authors who are masters of both the long and short form. Chekhov always wrote short pieces—he never wrote a novel. His novellas are my favorite works of his. I think Balanchine also worked best at a certain scale. Of course he made long-form pieces; we know them well. But he was a master at making the 15-to-20-minute piece.

Duration, it turns out, is personal. 

Big Dance Theater is celebrating its 25th anniversary. How did you come to develop the company’s particular language straddling dance and theater back in 1991? 

I was a young choreographer who trained in dance, and then I was asked by a theater company to choreograph for them. I stepped into three roles with this group that were formative: co-director/sound designer/choreographer—all in one—this combination of generative roles became central to my young voice. At the time, I didn’t know much about theater, but I knew my Balanchine, Cunningham, Judson Church…honestly, I had never really been interested in plays. Dance people can be quite sequestered in their art. 

At that moment, Pina Bausch came to town—I think these were her first pieces at BAM in the early 1980s. It was fascinating to see how she affected the dance community, because she really shakes down from a different family tree than the tree we were falling from. We were more like the children of the Judson Church family tree, where we prized pedestrianism, the prosaic, and the anti-theatrical. Before Pina, NYC was inventing a virtuosity of structure. And there comes Pina, with her costumes and her gigantic sets and her sense of Theater with a capital “T”! Off came the ubiquitous drawstring pants and I swear, for a while I saw lots of evening gowns and high heels on the downtown stages.

It was a really interesting moment, and I was very affected by Pina Bausch, both structurally and theatrically, as I was just starting. I didn’t notice that I was blending things—I was just playing out my imagination. I didn’t really think that I was living on this cusp between dance and theater. I never really thought about it. But I was certainly borrowing theatrical elements: character, causation, relationship, and mixing them with dance structures, yet always avoiding the straight-up narrative form of story ballet, or plays that tell stories and suggest moralities.  

I didn’t notice that I was blending things—I was just playing out my imagination.

Has the company’s tone or practice significantly changed over the 25 years?

It has. Some of that has to do with Paul [Lazar]: after I made the first couple large-scale pieces, he started to co-direct with me. He came from the theater tradition, and that perspective affected the work, of course. With Paul, we straddled the worlds of dance and theater more than ever, and sometimes even did plays. I wouldn’t have done a play on my own, but I was a dancer interested in literature—so it was exciting. Before he came in, I had made pieces that theatricalized and borrowed from literature (Flaubert, Pinter, the Greeks) but Paul brought in ideas around how to perform the self on stage, as well as how to technically approach text, and this changed the character of the work. 

In the past 25 years we have had the incredible good fortune to tangle with some extraordinary literature: Euripides, Chekhov, Anne Carson, Flaubert, Twain, Tanizaki, Sibyl Kempson, Mac Wellman—and “found” text is one of our favorite authors!

Yet dance remains the sacred object in the room. In Short Form, one of the things I wanted to do was return to making some pieces that are dance-based, simply. I hadn’t done that in a long, long time.

You’ve mentioned sensing audience discomfort with abstraction and non-narrative work. What can artists or presenting organizations like the ICA do to help audiences feel more comfortable with this kind of work? 

You’re asking the wrong person! I am really not supportive of hand-holding. Maybe the best thing we could do is warm up the audience with a vaudeville act—or karaoke! 

When the audience feels alert, their imaginations kick in, they wake up. Or, from a more intellectual perspective, presenting ideas around how to think about abstraction, and what abstraction is made up of, is helpful—not in terms of a particular work, like, “this is what the artist thinks they’re doing”—but concepts around abstraction and how it’s present in our world all the time. I’m looking at three lampshades right now, and you could say their relationship is non-narrative, so it’s abstract. Here, the subject matter is purely shape and light. What great content: shape and light! How can you look at abstract elements and see the world from the perspective of these elements?  But to explain work to audiences—no. That’s selling everyone short!

When I am moved by the art of the choreography I feel my art heart weeping.

A common response your work seems to be “I’ve never seen anything like it.” What feeds your creativity? 

Everything! Literature; stoop sales; overheard phone calls on the street; the structure of things; politics; taking a walk; how people behave toward each other, how they move and don’t move; even our conversation today. Really, as much as I can become aware of in any given moment and then synthesize it into what we are working on. When I am in the middle of creating a new work, my mind is a magpie and a scavenger, looking at everything as material.

Do you have a regular creative practice? 

I think choreography is like playing the violin: you have to practice constantly. I feel like I’m always working, but I don’t have a studio, so it’s not regulated.

Outside of Big Dance Theater, you’ve choreographed for David Byrne, St. Vincent, Nico Muhly, and the recent David Bowie musical Lazarus, among many other projects. How do you decide whether to take on a project? 

The music. If I can relate to the music from an artistic perspective, I am drawn to the project. If I personally understand and am compelled by it, have a take on it from a dance perspective that is my own, then I want to do the project. 

It must be different to choreograph for people you don’t know as opposed to your own company. 

Well, we share no common vocabulary or memory for sure! But I love how non-dancers dance, when they dance with intentionality. I’ve choreographed for symphony orchestras and marching bands, objects, masses of singers; I like limitations. Once I understand these limitations, I can then be generative. Exploit the negative! as Richard Foreman says. 

That sounds like how you work with your company—finding common ground. 

Well, in the context of Big Dance, I feel I’m pushing people hard in my group, and seeing how they respond; its exciting—like playing an intense tennis match. It’s gigantically rare and precious to be allowed the time and space to make dance, so the stakes must be high. I become disinterested when I look at work where people don’t ask very much of their performers. 

It’s so difficult to explain to a non-dance lover how a piece moves or inspires you. How would you describe what you prize or value or what inspires you in a dance or theater performance? 

I think it’s hard to iterate because it’s purely kinetic—you can’t logic it out; you need to go into a liminal space to experience dance. There’s even a great term for it: kinesthetic empathy. This is the physical experience of you in the audience feeling like your body is moving as the performer’s body is moving, that you soar as they leap; it’s a falling in love, in a way. Dance owns this physical empathy with the audience. But dance must also operate as an art form that has structures that are as brilliantly constructed as a great technician. When I am moved by the art of the choreography I feel my art heart weeping. This is the highest experience for me viewing dance—more than a great leap—a virtuosic structure; it has to do with the boning, the architecture in the material. And it takes just a few minutes when you’re in the audience to see what the dance maker’s contract is with the audience. Once the dancemaker lays out her stuff, it’s like, “Ok, I see what you’re up to, now let’s see what you do with it.” And you watch it unfold. I find that really suspenseful. 

Before you go, we have to talk about the party, complete with ping-pong and beer, during the intermission of Short Form.

I initially envisioned the party as a piece called Intermission. It’s a piece that’s a party and the audience are the performers, but they don’t know that. Its also a device, both to create community in the theater, and as a tool to wake up the audience. After the intermission party, the audience returns to their seats, they seem very aware, listening and watching harder, because they’ve moved and talked and played. It works!

 

David Henry, the ICA’s Bill T. Jones Director of Performing Arts, shares his picks for the best dance in Boston and beyond this fall.

There’s tons to look forward to this season, including performances by two of the most adventurous and creative female choreographers working today — who both happened to develop these works in residencies as part of our Summer Stages Dance at the ICA/Boston program.

First up is Maria Hassabi’s STAGED at the Kitchen in New York October 4–8. Maria and her company of four dancers were at the ICA for two weeks this past July focusing on the choreography, staging, and lighting for this work. I like to refer to Maria’s work as the slowest dance ever, as the dancers move, almost imperceptibly at times, from one form to another. But upon close looking, which her work demands, you realize that they are in constant movement—their breath, the spasms of muscles, their gaze. And with that close, careful looking, you fall into their trance. It is intimate. It is hypnotic. It is beautiful. And it will be coming to the ICA in March!

…their breath, the spasms of muscles, their gaze. And with that close, careful looking, you fall into their trance. It is intimate. It is hypnotic. It is beautiful.

Next is Faye Driscoll’s Thank You for Coming: Play at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, November 16–19. Faye and company were the Summer Stages Dance at the ICA/Boston artists in residence in 2015. It was here that they began work on this, the second part of Driscoll’s Thank You for Coming trilogy. (The first, Attendance, was staged here a year ago.) In her work, performers and audience members come together to explore the spaces between what we say and what we mean.

Also on my list, the French Institute Alliance Française puts on a festival in New York called Crossing the Line that is consistently amazing. This year is no exception, with shows by Rachid Ouramdane, Jérôme Bel, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Tim Etchells, and more. Sep 22–Nov 3

Because I have the great privilege of seeing some of the most creative contemporary choreographers from around the world, I always wish I had the capacity to present more. For this reason I am thrilled that New Movement Collaborative and Green Street Studios have come together with a new festival, “Lion’s Jaw.” Performances by 11 nationally recognized choreographers, including Miguel Gutierrez, The Body Cartography, Paul Matteson, K.J. Holmes, and Sara Shelton Mann, will present Boston a survey of what contemporary dance is now. Many of the artists will also be offering classes, workshops, and labs, giving the local dance community a chance to work closely with these innovative choreographers. Oct 7 + 8.

I hope I can get to BAM to see Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performing Group’s newest dance, Citizen in December. Reggie was a Summer Stages Dance resident artist in 2014 and presented Moses(es) during our 2014–15 season. He was already talking about this work then (it was the same year we had Claudia Rankin here to read from her book Citizen.) This brand new work is inspired by African-American figures throughout history who were conflicted and chose not to leave their home country in spite of pervasive racism. Five dancers perform in a series of provocative solos that overlap and intersect, asking: What does it mean to belong, and to not want to belong?

In addition to Driscoll and Wilson, BAM’s Next Wave Festival is also celebrating Stephin Merritt’s 50th birthday, Bill T. Jones is premiering a new work at the Joyce, and Lars Jan has a new work at New York Live Arts. All in all there will be too, too much. See you on the Northeast Corridor tracks! 

 

 

ICA staff share their recommendations for the best art, music, talks, film, participatory art projects, and pancakes to check out this fall.

The heftiest compendium of ICA staff recommendations yet.

CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS: Yoko Ono’s Community-Sourced Art Piece Arising, in conjunction with the exhibition One More Story… at the Reykjavik Art Museum
Oct 7, 2016–Feb 5, 2017

This October, the Reykjavik Art Museum opens Yoko Ono’s latest exhibition, One More Story… In association with the exhibition, Ono has issued a call-to-action for women all over the world, inviting them to submit their own stories of harm, trauma, and harassment, along with a photograph of their eyes. The contributions will become part of an onsite work, Arising. Submissions can be delivered in person, through the mail, or via email. The work resonates strongly with me because there hasn’t been any woman I have known that hasn’t experienced some kind of transgression based on their gender. I encourage all woman to participate and let their stories be seen and heard!  —Carly Bieterman, Box Office Manager

Martine Gutierrez: True Story at Boston University Art Galleries
October 14-December 11 (Artist Talk October 13 at 6:30 PM)

RISD graduate Martine Gutierrez’s hauntingly seductive imagery explores the construction of gender and self. Her solo show at Boston University’s art galleries, True Story, will present video and photographic works by the Brooklyn-based performance artist. I recently became a big fan of Gutierrez’s music and look forward to spending time with her visual works in the galleries. —Lenny Schnier, Education Department Assistant

ART: Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons at Samsøn Gallery
Through Oct 15

I am mostly familiar with Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons’s pieces comprising multi-paneled, large-scale Polaroids; so I am excited to see this series of works on paper at Samsøn that she made in conjunction with her participation at the 2013 Venice Biennale. Across many different mediums, Campos-Pons’s work conveys ideas related to history, race, gender, memory, and the formation of identity.  —Chris Hoodlet, Membership Manager

DESIGN: Bryony Roberts, Tailored, at Pinkcomma Gallery
Through Oct 21 

I just found out about the wonderful small exhibition space Pinkcomma, run out of the studios of architecture and design firm Over, Under, in the South End. They’ve got a great interactive sculpture exhibition by the designer Bryony Roberts on now, and I’ll look forward to following their programming in the future. The small space has a big mission in Boston: “The gallery aims to foster and recognize a more creative and experimental scene that has grown out of one of the world’s most significant capitals of architectural education. For all the city’s stodginess, Boston’s six architecture schools and their instructors have unleashed some of the most provocative figures on the world scene. Why hasn’t this culture permeated the city’s own architectural sense of itself?” —Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator

For those holding onto summer with its deep, shadowy greens, and floral flourishes, this show’s for you.

ART: Milton Avery’s Vermont at Bennington Museum
Through Nov 6

Get yourself to bucolic Bennington, Vermont, for some of the most beautiful works on paper you will ever see in person. Milton Avery’s watercolors are some of the most sensitive, inventive, weird, delicate, and descriptive marking-making I have seen in some time. Unlikely, poetic color choices animate passages of dry hatching, lush and wet multi-color strokes, and an all-over surface that both evokes the natural world it illustrates and creates a field of deeply pleasurable abstraction. For those holding onto summer with its deep, shadowy greens, and floral flourishes, this show’s for you.  —Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator

ART: Sarah Sze at Rose Art Museum
Through Dec 11

Sarah Sze, who choreographed a performance piece with Trajal Harrell in Fiber: Sculpture 1960–present and represented the United States in the 55th Venice Biennale, recently created an immersive, large-scale installation piece for the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. The kinetic work, called Timekeeper, tracks her inventive and chaotic method of keeping time–an exciting concept to steep oneself in and explore in the museum’s largest gallery space. Catch a talk by the artist on Nov. 17 at 6:30.  —Shane Silverstein, Performing and Media Arts Assistant

ART: Vision and Justice: The Art of Citizenship at the Harvard Art Museums
Through Jan 8, 2017

The Harvard Art Museums have an illustrious history as teaching museums, and the crop of small exhibitions organized by faculty for their classes this semester demonstrates the beautiful possibilities of a teaching with art. Sarah Lewis’s show Vision and Justice: The Art of Citizenship “examines the contested relationship between art, justice, and African American culture from the 19th through 21st century in the United States” and includes elegant, provocative juxtapositions between formally innovative documentary photography from the 1960s and conceptually driven photographic practices of the current day. A rhyming back-and-forth between clothing and textiles, poignant gestures, and tightly framed bodies presents a pairing of Gordon Parks and Lorna Simpson that I will not soon forget.

Around the corner from Lewis’s show is a small presentation of a few great print works by Philip Guston and Ben Shahn, two of my first favorite artists (we’re definitely overdue huge surveys of both of those artists’ timely and urgent work). The pairing is part of Matt Saunder’s invitingly titled Painting, Smoking, Eating, a painting class that would send me back to undergrad in a second.  —Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator

Sophisticated, tough, smart, and dealing with some culture’s most urgent issues around education, race, gender, relationships, and the digital condition…

ART: UH-OH: Frances Stark 1991–2015 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Through Jan 29

I sadly missed Frances Stark’s survey exhibition when it opened at the Hammer in LA, so I’m happy that our friends at the MFA are bringing the show to our doorstep. Sophisticated, tough, smart, and dealing with some culture’s most urgent issues around education, race, gender, relationships, and the digital condition, Stark’s formal innovations never cease to amaze.  —Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator

FILM: kijidome Presents Lola Rocknrolla
Sep 17–Oct 22; Opening Reception and Screening Sep 17, 6–8 PM

A sucker for anything John Waters-esque or B-movie camp, I am looking forward to kijidome’s presentation of Lola Rocknrolla’s riotous and subversive films this fall. An amalgamation of counterculture, burlesque, drag, and an irreverent practice of taking stereotypes for a joyride and thereby turning them on their heads feels important, timely, and still fresh.  —Kate McBride, Marketing Associate

PERFORMANCE: 1 Minute Solos at Mobius
Sep 24

I am super excited about a performance event that I am involved with at Mobius! It will be an event of one-minute short performances based on the theme movement. I will be exploring how food responds and moves on my body.  —Carlie Bristow, Teen Programs Assistant

FESTIVAL: International Pancake Film Festival at the Brattle Theatre
Sep 29

The International Pancake Film Festival, now in its ninth year, brings a stack of homemade, pancake-centric short films to the Brattle Theatre on Thursday, September 29. For the first time, the festival will add a theme to the standard pancake motif: Nautical. Pancakes served at 7:30; show begins at 8.  —Shane Silverstein, Performing and Media Arts Assistant

TALK: Douglas Crimp at Boston University
Oct 6

More than any other art critic, Douglas Crimp was on the forefront of AIDS activism and theorizing the artistic strategies that would become known as “The Pictures Generation,” and post-modernism more broadly. These seemingly contrasting threads in his personal life and scholarship are the subject of his memoir, Before Pictures, which he will share at Boston University on October 6.  —Samuel Adams, Curatorial Research Fellow

MUSIC: Lake Street Dive at the Wang Theatre
Oct 7

Lake Street Dive are no strangers to Boston, having formed the band while studying New England Conservatory of Music, but I would argue they’re still underappreciated. Smart, spirited, and technically superb, they make even covers—including the Jackson Five’s “I Want You Back” and a genius interpretation of “Rich Girl” by Hall + Oates that surprises me every single time I hear it—sound both classic and totally new. Don’t miss this chance to hear them in the gorgeous Wang Theatre, before they get any bigger.  —Kris Wilton, Associate Director of Creative Content and Digital Engagement

In Edgar Arcenaux’s hands, the historical anecdote becomes like a massive fulcrum, lifting hefty objects and shifting understanding.

ART: Edgar Arcenaux: Written in Smoke and Fire at the MIT List Visual Arts Center
Oct 14, 2016–Jan 8, 2017

Many artists mine history, often for those arcane stories that, when levied, teach us a lot. In Edgar Arcenaux’s hands, the historical anecdote becomes like a massive fulcrum, lifting hefty objects and shifting understanding. I am simply thrilled to be able to see his new performance installation Until, Until, Until… based on Broadway star Ben Vereen’s infamously misunderstood blackface performance at Ronald Reagan’s 1981 inaugural event, in addition to two other significant works.  —Ruth Erickson, Associate Curator

ART: Now’s the Time, at UMass Boston’s University Hall Gallery
Through Oct 17

Todd Pavlisko rarely stays within any boundaries set by galleries, museums, or the visual arts. He has shot a gun down a museum hall of great master paintings, cast discarded coins he’s found in gold, and hammered a nail through his own foot. Last I checked in with him, he was working with students and an engineer at Wentworth to create a functioning catapult. Adventurous, humorous, and earnest (in a cheeky Midwestern way), Pavlisko surely has something interesting up his sleeve for his solo show at the UMass art gallery.  —Ruth Erickson, Associate Curator

MARKETPLACE: Boston Public Market’s Harvest Party
Oct 20

I’ve been a huge fan of Boston Public Market since it opened last summer – all my favorite local vendors are there; plus I’ve discovered so many new things to love! Their Harvest Party in October sounds like all my favorite things – food, cooking, music, and more food – and the ticket price supports their operating costs as a nonprofit.  —Hannah Gathman, Associate Director of Special Events and Outreach

TALK: Zanele Muholi lecture at MassArt
Oct 25

The fall season is often over-packed with incredible events and programming, but I am particularly excited about Zanele Muholi’s lecture at MassArt on October 25. The South African photographer’s poignant and impactful portraits of individuals from black LGBTI communities in her native country have garnered well-deserved international attention and critical acclaim over the past few years. Muholi’s images, some taken a decade earlier, resonate to this day and speak profoundly to our current socio-political climate. As she is based in Johannesburg, it is a treat to have her in the area and should be illuminating to hear her discuss her own work and practice.  —Jessica Hong, Curatorial Assistant

ART: Embodied Absence: Chilean Art of the 1970s Now and Renée Green: Pacing, both at Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts
Oct 27, 2016 – Jan 8, 2017 + October 2016–April 2018 respectively

In advance of leaving the Carpenter Center for California College of the Arts this fall, former director James Voorhies solidified some incredible programming, including Embodied Absence: Chilean Art of the 1970s Now, coordinated by guest curator Liz Munsell of the MFA. Looking back at Chile’s violent coup d’état and its aftermath, the exhibition will smartly carry forward works and documentation from that period into the present through responsive performances and collaborations by a younger generation of Chilean artists. Also starting in October is artist Renée Green’s two-year Institution (Building) residency and exhibition. A professor in MIT’s program in Art, Culture and Technology since 2011, Green has yet to receive the institutional visibility in Boston that her work deserves, so a two-year deep dive is both timely and necessary.  —Jeffrey De Blois, Curatorial Assistant

ART: Bruce Conner: It’s All True at MoMA and then SFMoMA
Until October 2 + Oct 29, 2016–Jan 22, 2017

When I first saw Conner’s pulsating 1966 black-and-white dance film Breakaway, I was mesmerized, and then I learned about his funky assemblage sculptures from Kevin Hatch’s revealing study, and I was hooked. I am not sure I am going to get to see this major survey at MoMA in New York, but I am going to make a special trip to San Francisco to see it at SFMoMA and, while I’m there, scope the newly renovated and massively expanded museum.  —Ruth Erickson, Associate Curator

TALK: “Art After Democracy” at the Clark Art Institute
Nov 1

On November 1, the Clark Art Institute will host a conversation on “Art After Democracy,” allowing thinkers such as Tania Bruguera and Boris Groys to respond to neoliberal practices that have spectacularized and commodified cultural production over the last twenty-five years.  —Samuel Adams, Curatorial Research Fellow

…it hits you in the gut and won’t easily be forgotten.

ART: Doris Salcedo: The Materiality of Mourning at the Harvard Art Museums
Nov 4, 2016–Apr 9, 2017

I was lucky enough to see an exhibition of Doris Salcedo’s work at the MCA Chicago last year, and I can’t believe I have a second chance to experience it so soon again in her solo exhibition Doris Salcedo: The Materiality of Mourning at the Harvard Art Museums. I have a longstanding interest in memorials and monuments, especially quieter, less monumental ones. Among the most poignant I’ve seen are Salcedo’s sensitive, even feminine works memorializing individuals lost to political violence in Colombia, such as A Flor de Piel, a room-sized tapestry of thousands of carefully pressed, hand-stitched rose petals. Like her work Atrabiliarios in the ICA’s collection, it hits you in the gut and won’t easily be forgotten. Also, don’t miss the excellent film about Salcedo’s incomparable public works.  —Kris Wilton, Associate Director of Creative Content and Digital Engagement

MUSIC: The Berlin Philharmonic at Symphony Hall
Nov 11

The Berlin Philharmonic is one of the finest orchestras in the world, with a bottom-heavy, brassy tone that is rarely heard in American orchestras. Their beloved, outgoing conductor, Sir Simon Rattle, leads them in a special concert that includes Gustav Mahler’s monumental 7th Symphony in Symphony Hall on November 11 as part of Celebrity Series of Boston.  —Samuel Adams, Curatorial Research Fellow