get tickets

Advance tickets are now available for visits through September 1. Book now

ICA celebrates the tenth anniversary of  its collection and signature waterfront building with an exhibition featuring works by Louise Bourgeois, Paul Chan, Eva Hesse, Cindy Sherman, Kara Walker, Andy Warhol, and many others.

Press are welcome to preview the exhibition on Tuesday, Aug 16 from 10 to 2 PM.  Please contact Lisa Colli, lcolli@icaboston.org, if you need additional information, images, or would like to visit the exhibition on August 16.

The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) celebrates its first decade of collecting and the tenth anniversary in its Diller Scofidio + Renfro-designed facility with the largest and most ambitious presentation of its collection to date. First Light: A Decade of Collecting at the ICA features over 100 works by seminal artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, including Louise Bourgeois, Nick Cave, Paul Chan, Marlene Dumas, Eva Hesse, Cindy Sherman, Kara Walker, and Andy Warhol. Occupying the entirety of the museum’s east galleries, First Light combines audience favorites with new acquisitions, many on view at the ICA for the first time. 

This exhibition is organized by the ICA’s curatorial department under the leadership of Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator. First Light: A Decade of Collecting at the ICA is on view from August 17, 2016 to January 16, 2017. During the first week of October, midway through the presentation, there will be a rotation of some of the sections (or “chapters”) enabling more of the collection to be showcased and new works and juxtapositions to be explored. 

“First Light: A Decade of Collecting at the ICA provides a window onto contemporary artistic practice through the ICA collection. This series of simultaneous exhibitions reveals the driving visions of curators and collectors, the social, political, material, and aesthetic concerns of contemporary artists, and the history of ICA exhibitions over the past many years,” said Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director. “The exhibition celebrates a monumental ten years at the ICA and marks a historic transformation in our community. We are very grateful to our generous supporters who have allowed us to grow the collection significantly and strategically.”

Conceived as a series of interrelated and stand-alone exhibitions, First Light is organized into thematic, artist-specific, and art-historical chapters that each tell a different story. The first section features three major highlights of the exhibition. These are: 

  • Paul Chan’s 2005 projected digital animation 1st Light, created for the ICA, was one of the first works to enter the collection, and the inspiration for the exhibition’s title. This significant moving-image piece highlights the ICA’s aim to collect works of art in diverse media and by important contemporary artists with a critical voice.
  • Cornelia Parker’s Hanging Fire (Suspected Arson) (1999) is a favorite among visitors and the ICA’s first promised work. Parker’s first monographic exhibition was mounted at the original ICA facility in 2000.
  • Kara Walker’s newly acquired monumental cut-paper silhouette tableau, The Nigger Huck Finn Pursues Happiness Beyond the Narrow Constraints of your Overdetermined Thesis on Freedom – Drawn and Quartered by Mister Kara Walkerberry, with Condolences to The Authors (2010), is prominently displayed. On view for the first time at the ICA, the combination of materials—cut-paper silhouettes, wall paint, and framed works on paper—is unusual within Walker’s oeuvre, making the work a major addition to the collection. 

Other highlights include groupings of work by artists held in-depth in the collection including Louise Bourgeois, Rineke Dijkstra with Nan Goldin, and a gallery dedicated to objects from The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women. To accommodate the breadth of stories within the collection, several chapters will switch out halfway through the exhibition’s run. The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women and Soft Power galleries (described below) will be on view through January 16, serving as anchors to the overall exhibition.

A new, multimedia web platform at icaboston.org accompanies the exhibition and features descriptions of the works, interviews with artists, and commentary by current and former ICA curators reflecting on works that entered the collection during their tenure. The content-rich microsite will launch in tandem with the exhibition.   

“In ten years, the ICA has established a collection of great variety, ranging from historically significant work of figures such as Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois to the contemporary explorations of leading artists such as Kara Walker and Paul Chan,” said Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator. “The work in First Light represents a broad range of art-making today by artists who explore the issues of our time.”

First Light explores a diversity of narratives from biography and material to feminism and appropriation in the following sections or chapters.

Kara Walker, The Nigger Huck Finn Pursues Happiness Beyond the Narrow Constraints of your Overdetermined Thesis on Freedom - Drawn and Quartered by Mister Kara Walkerberry, with Condolences to The Authors, 2010

The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women

On view August 17, 2016–January 16, 2017

The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women is the cornerstone of the ICA’s growing collection. The collection includes artists working in diverse media who have made significant contributions to art over the past 40 years. This exhibition is arranged by various media and subject matters, highlighting the collection’s strength in works of sculpture and assemblage, as well as drawing and painting. Included are signature works by Marlene Dumas, Ellen Gallagher, Ana Mendieta, Cornelia Parker, Doris Salcedo, Kara Walker, among others, in addition to salient historical precedents set by figures such as Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois. Together, these works examine issues of the political, personal, and social body, and larger concepts of identity, all in distinct and thought-provoking ways. This section demonstrates the strength of the ICA’s expanding collection and how the collection engages in critical discourses in the arts as well as broader social and cultural contexts. The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women is organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator.

A sculpture made of very thick, beige rope or cordwoven together to resemble an abstracted inchworm on a concrete floor.

Soft Power

On view August 17, 2016–January 16, 2017

Formed by pliable materials including rope, thread, string, and fabric, the works in Soft Power derive their presence and power from, on the one hand, the seductive textures, structures, and surfaces of textiles, and on the other, the evocative social and cultural connotations these materials provoke. The smears and patterns of Kai Althoff’s gloss paint on fabric conflate painting and body in a surreal clothing-like fragment in Untitled (2004), while Alexandre Da Cunha’s BUST XXXV (2012) lurks like a floating figure, shrouded in its uncanny cover of mop and string. Sculptures by Josh Faught, Françoise Grossen, Charles LeDray, and Robert Rohm—crocheted, knotted, and sewn—variously lean against the wall, sprawl, pile on the floor, and hang to evoke the body by its covering, adornment, and poses only possible through their shared soft construction. Soft Power is organized by Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator.

A collaged mixed media painting shows a colorful interior scene of a salon with a chaise, bright open windows, and assorted decorations.

Question Your Teaspoons

On view August 17–October 2, 2016

This exhibition explores the sphere of the domestic in the making and meaning of art. A counterpoint to such celebrated contexts as the artist’s studio and the public sphere, the home has often served artists, especially female artists, as a crucial site for the creation of their work. Artists in this exhibition derive inspiration from the objects, relationships, and aesthetics that surround them. Sherrie Levine, Doris Salcedo, and Diane Simpson reimagine mundane objects in their sculptural works; LaToya Ruby Frazier, Cindy Sherman, and Andy Warhol probe familial relations through their photographs; and Chantal Joffe and Mickalene Thomas offer striking paintings of intimate interior scenes. The title of this section is from a quote by Georges Perec, the great cataloguer of everyday life who challenged readers to scrutinize the ordinary. To “question your teaspoons” is to pay attention to—and bring new attention to—a quotidian thing, to study life in order to live it differently. Question Your Teaspoons is organized by Ruth Erickson, Associate Curator.

A color photograph of an older light-skinned woman wearing a yellow blouse and black pants and laughing widely while seated on the edge of a bed.

Rineke Dijkstra / Nan Goldin

On view August 17–October 2, 2016

The ICA has rich holdings of works by Rineke Dijkstra and Nan Goldin, two leading figures in contemporary photography with a keen interest in portraiture. Both artists have a history with the ICA: the museum hosted Goldin’s first solo museum exhibition in 1985 and one of Dijkstra’s first surveys in the United States in 2001. Referencing both the historical genre of portraiture and documentary-style photography, these artists expound upon these traditions in divergent and unique ways. Goldin’s bold images depict her loved ones and closest acquaintances caught in intimate moments. From the artist’s mother laughing to a drag queen lounging at home, her compositions are vibrant and rich, powerfully emotive, and full of psychological intent. Dijkstra’s stark portraits, on the other hand, present the subjects in heightened focus and repose, stripped bare of context. The artists subtly and overtly examine the shifting nature of identity and self. Goldin’s captures an instant within a broader narrative, expressing her subjects’ personal relationships or exploring their gender identities, while Dijkstra’s subjects, including new mothers and children growing into adolescence, are at the cusp of unpredictable chapters in their lives. These works, ultimately capturing everyday moments, encourage the viewers to intimately engage with the pictured subjects, and to seek out clues of their personal lives and character, reflecting our own searches for the extra in the ordinary and the thrill in the mundane. Rineke Dijkstra / Nan Goldin is organized by Jessica Hong, Curatorial Assistant.

A sculpture of two cube monitors on flight cases with video stills of a light-skinned woman with blond hair holding a rose.

The Freedom of Information

On view October 8, 2016–January 16, 2017

The Freedom of Information is a concise survey of artworks that employ strategies of appropriation, from repurposing and rephotographing mass-media images to referencing and copying objects from art history or American consumer culture. While key moments in the history of artistic appropriation (such as the readymade, collage, and montage) date back to the early 20th century, it was in the 1970s and 80s that the critical terms of these practices were established in the context of a new generation of influential artists. The Freedom of Information traces a particular lineage of appropriation that accounts for the variety of its different models. Here, an intergenerational group of artists “take” materials from sources such as books, postcards, television, or art-specific contexts, manipulating them using cameras, printers, or scanners. The works in The Freedom of Information reveal that while such forms of repetition are historically rooted, appropriation remains a critically urgent means with which to address a culture saturated with images. Artists in The Freedom of Information include: Dara Birnbaum, Carol Bove, Anne Collier, Gilbert & George, Leslie Hewitt, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Cady Noland, Thomas Ruff, Sara VanDerBeek, Charline von Heyl, Kelley Walker, and Andy Warhol. The Freedom of Information is organized by Jeffrey De Blois, Curatorial Assistant.

Louise Bourgeois, Arched Figure No. 1, 1997

Louise Bourgeois

On view October 8, 2016–January 16, 2017

One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, Louise Bourgeois worked for more than 70 years in a variety of materials—including wood, bronze, marble, steel, rubber, and fabric—to create a distinctive and expansive body of work. Blending abstraction and figuration, Bourgeois delved into the struggles of everyday life to create personally cathartic objects that reference the body, sexuality, family, trauma, and anxiety. Since the ICA’s exhibition Bourgeois in Boston (2007-08), the museum has acquired a number of her works; this selection brings together sculptures and works on paper to consider her use of framing devices. From the enclosures and doors in her large-scale cell sculptures to vitrines, borders, and platforms, the partition of space recurs in Bourgeois’ work. These “frames” serve various ends, but each articulates a kind of boundary — an inside and an outside, an object and its space, the very divisions Bourgeois so famously disrupted in her life’s work. Louise Bourgeois is organized by Ruth Erickson, Associate Curator.

First Light: A Decade of Collecting at the ICA is sponsored by

Christie's logo

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Additional support is generously provided by Fiduciary Trust Company, Chuck and Kate Brizius, Katie and Paul Buttenwieser, Karen and Brian Conway, the Robert E. Davoli and Eileen L. McDonagh Charitable Foundation, Jean-François and Nathalie Ducrest, Cynthia and John Reed, and Charles and Fran Rodgers.

NEFA logo

 

Fidicuciary Trust Logo

Sonia Almeida, Jennifer Bornstein, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, and Lucy Kim have been named the recipients of the 2017 James and Audrey Foster Prize Exhibition, the museum announced today. In media including painting, sculpture, printmaking, film, and video, and exploring a range of themes and subjects, each of the artists engage the human body with a tactile approach to its cultural, psychological, and historical resonances. Each of the artists will present a major work, or group of works, on view for the first time in Boston. The exhibition is organized by Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator, with Jeffrey De Blois, Curatorial Assistant, and will be on view at the ICA from Feb. 15 through July 9, 2017. 

“This year’s James and Audrey Foster Prize Exhibition shines a light on a selection of established Boston-based artists working at a national and international level, but whose work has only received limited exposure here at home,” said Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director of the ICA. “We are grateful to Jim and Audrey for this opportunity to share such exceptional work with our audiences.”  

“We are very pleased to congratulate the 2017 recipients of the Foster Prize. Their work demonstrates the creativity, strength, and talent of Boston’s robust art community,” said James Foster, Chair of the ICA Board of Trustees and Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer of Charles River Laboratories.

Central to the exhibition, this iteration of the James and Audrey Foster Prize features a new program, Foster Talks, enabling audiences to engage more deeply in the work and practice of the Prize winners. Once a month over the course of the exhibition, in a space in the exhibition galleries, each artist will present their work and invite an important writer, artist, performer, researcher, or other cultural producer who has influenced their artwork, or whose own work resonates with the artist’s. The conversations will be followed by a free reception, open to the public. The Foster Talks will connect questions around contemporary art to a broad range of cultural, intellectual, and political issues, creating relationships between art and different fields. Through the Foster Talks, the ICA will welcome an expanded cultural community to form around the exhibition, animating the galleries throughout the duration of the exhibition.

Images are available upon request.

Profiles of the 2017 Foster Prize Artists

Sonia Almeida was born in Lisbon, Portugal, and lives in Arlington, MA. Almeida received a B.A. from Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade de Lisboa and a M.F.A. from Slade School of Fine Art, University of London. She has received numerous awards and grants, including a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant and an Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her work has been widely exhibited at institutions nationally and internationally, including the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; Culturgest, Portugal; Serralves Museum, Portugal; and Witte de With, Netherlands.   

Jennifer Bornstein was born in Seattle and lives in Cambridge, MA. Bornstein received a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and a M.F.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles, before participating in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program. She has received numerous awards and grants, including a DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm fellowship and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant. Her work has been widely exhibited at institutions nationally and internationally, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Lucien Castaing-Taylor was born in Liverpool, UK, and Véréna Paravel was born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland; they are based in Cambridge, MA, and Paris, France. In 2006, Castaing-Taylor founded the Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL), an experimental film center at Harvard University whose collaborative output in a variety of media—including film, video, phonography, and photography—innovatively draws from the fields of aesthetics and ethnography. Castaing-Taylor’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the British Museum, London, and has been exhibited at Tate, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Whitechapel Gallery, London; and Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. Paravel’s films have won Best First Feature and the Best First Feature Jury award at the Festival del Film Locarno and the Punto de Vista Award for Best Film. Foreign Parts (with J.P. Sniadecki, 2010) was a New York Times Critics’ Pick. Castiang-Taylor, Paravel, and the Sensory Ethnography Lab were included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial.

Lucy Kim was born in Seoul, South Korea, and lives in Cambridge, MA. She received a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design and a M.F.A. from the Yale School of Art. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the MacDowell Colony, and is the recipient of the Carol Schlosberg Memorial Prize and the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship from Yale, as well as the Boston Artadia Award. She is a founding member of the collaborative kijidome, and is currently Lecturer in Fine Arts at Brandeis University. Her work is included in the collection of the Kadist Foundation in Paris, among others. 

About the James and Audrey Foster Prize

The James and Audrey Foster Prize is key to the ICA’s efforts 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. James and Audrey Foster, passionate collectors and supporters of contemporary art, endowed the prize, ensuring the ICA’s ability to sustain and grow the program for years to come. 

Your guide to a new season of music, dance + film at the ICA featuring Bill T. Jones, Kara Walker, Meredith Monk + more!

Tickets are now on sale for a packed season of music, dance, art, and more starting in September:

Get Tickets

Highlights include programs by Bill T. Jones, Meredith Monk, Kara Walker

The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) presents ambitious performances and dynamic artist talks as part of the 2016-2017 season. Highlights include the return of legendary choreographer Bill T. Jones to the ICA stage, a singular evening of music and poetry by Meredith Monk and Anne Waldman, and a free talk by renowned artist Kara Walker.

All events take place in the Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater at the ICA, 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston. Ticketed programs go on sale to ICA members on July 27 and to the general public on July 29. Tickets can be purchased at www.icaboston.org or by calling 617-478-3103.

MUSIC

RY X
Oct 27 | 8 PM
$20 general admission / $17 ICA members + students
Australian singer/songwriter RY X creates songs that are intimate, intuitive, and devotional with lush melodies and raw, emotional lyrics. At the ICA, he will perform in support of his full-length debut Dawn, released earlier this year. RY X is part of the electronic/house-influenced Howling along with musician Frank Wiedemann, and is a member of the band The Acid with DJ Adam Freeland and composer Steve Nalepa.

Meredith Monk and Anne Waldman
Feb 24 + 25, 8 PM
$35 general admission / $25 ICA members + students
Two iconic women known for their mesmerizing stage presences join forces for a singular evening of music, movement and poetry. “One of contemporary music’s great innovators” (The Classical Review), Meredith Monk is renowned for her extraordinary vocal technique and her pioneering compositions, solidifying her reputation as a startling original and intrepid artist. In 1968, she founded The House, a company dedicated to an interdisciplinary approach to performance, and in 1978, she founded Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble to expand her musical forms. Anne Waldman is a prolific poet, playwright, activist, and author of more than 40 collections of poetry and poetics, including Fast Speaking Woman (1975) and Marriage: A Sentence (2000). She was a founder and director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in New York and co-founded with Allen Ginsberg the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado.

Waldman begins the evening in three parts with a performative reading from her “Entanglement Variations,” with visuals of paintings by Pat Steir and sound composition by Ambrose Bye. Monk will then perform several selections of her work with members of her Vocal Ensemble. The evening culminates in an original collaborative duet between Monk and Waldman.

DANCE

Big Dance Theater
Short Form
Oct 14 + 15 | 8 PM
$25 general admission / $15 ICA members + students
In celebration of Big Dance Theater’s 25th anniversary, artistic leaders Annie-B Parson—known for her work with David Bowie, David Byrne, and St. Vincent—and Paul Lazar theatrically re-imagine the conventions of a repertory program. Inspired by disciplines of the concise—novellas, folk tales, diary entries, pencil drawings, thumbnail sketches—Big Dance performs five distinct short works, each a Boston premiere, that embrace the brief, granular, close-range, anecdotal, and microscopic. Plus, discover Big Dance’s unique blend of dance theater on an intimate scale with a 15-minute onstage birthday party at the evening’s center. Hot dogs will be served.

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company
A Letter to My Nephew  — U.S. PREMIERE
Nov 11 + 12 | 8 PM
Nov. 13 | 2 PM
$40 general admission / $30 ICA members + students
A Letter to My Nephew, Bill T. Jones’s latest work, makes its U.S. premiere at the ICA. The work brings together two impulses: the social/political and the deeply personal. A Letter to My Nephew is a street scene or a still from the evening news that superimposes violent street battles in the U.S. and desperate immigrants rushing towards freedom in Europe over the image of a hospital bed untethered from reality.

Composer Nick Hallett, baritone Matthew Gamble, and DJ Tony Monkey accompany the accomplished dancers of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company with a delirious mixture of pop music, lullabies, house music, and more. Video design by Janet Wong turns the stage into a simulated battleground; through the fog, Jones’s words to his nephew come alive on stage.

Alessandro Sciarroni
FOLK-S, will you still love me tomorrow
Feb 17 + 18 | 8 PM
$25 general admission /$15 ICA members + students
Lauded Italian choreographer and theater director Alessandro Sciarroni is known for stagings that straddle dance, performance art, and ritual anthropology. In FOLK-S he refines the Schuhplatter, a Bavarian folk dance whose title translates to “shoe batter,” to its most essential form, invoking a sense of playful experimentation and ritualized trance. Starting from an unceasing repeated sequence, FOLK-S invites us to take part in an extreme, perception-based experience centering on the multiple variations that a form can take—and progressing to the point of exhaustion. Here the folk material finds its clearest revelation by being geographically and culturally decontextualized.

Alessandro Sciarroni is an Italian performing artist with an extensive background in visual art and theater. His works are featured in dance and theater festivals, museums, and unconventional spaces in more than 20 different countries.

Maria Hassabi
STAGED
Mar 17 + 18 | 8 PM
$25 general admission / $15 ICA members + students
Maria Hassabi has honed a distinct practice involving the relation of the body to the still image and the sculptural object. Her mesmerizing work takes its time and asks its viewers to do the same, as it interrogates the separation between the spectacular and the mundane, between subject and object, between performer and audience. Produced for museums, galleries, theaters, and public spaces, her work has been seen worldwide, including recent lauded presentations at Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam) and Hammer Museum (Los Angeles). 

In Hassabi’s new theater work, STAGED, four of New York’s most captivating dancers—Simon Courchel, Hristoula Harakas, Molly Lieber, and Oisín Monaghan—perform individual solos, collectively forming an intricate live sculpture that is constantly shape-shifting, abstracting the human form and its capacities. STAGED was developed over a two-week Summer Stages Dance @ ICA residency this past summer.

Summer Stages Dance @ ICA is made possible, in part, with the support of Jane Karol and Howard Cooper, David Parker, George and Ann Colony, The Aliad Fund, and Stephanie McCormick-Goodhart.

Beth Gill
May 12 + 13 | 8 PM
$25 general admission / $15 ICA members + students
2015 Guggenheim Fellow and Doris Duke Impact Award winner Beth Gill makes her Boston debut with a new work premiering only a week earlier at the Walker Art Center in conjunction with the exhibition Merce Cunningham: Common Time. Gill, a three-time Bessie Award winner, is perhaps best known for her 2011 breakout work, Electric Midwife, about which the New York Times stated: “There aren’t many dance makers of Ms. Gill’s generation… working with the kind of clear, penetrating focus that made Midwife — a pair of perfectly symmetrical trios — such a transporting meditation on the body, its intricate physics and intrinsic poetry.”

Beth Gill’s minimalist works explore the tension between formalist structures and psychological themes, where layers of meaning unfold over a prolonged sense of time, while maintaining an extremely vivid sense of the simultaneous visual and visceral experiences of the viewer. The new work reflects on art historic values and aesthetics, and presents in its stead a dense, tangled, corporeal dance in which bodies are both disparately and desperately expressive.

This work is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation Fund project created in partnership with the Walker Art Center, The Yard, American Dance Festival, and NPN.

TALKS

The Artist’s Voice: Nicholas Nixon and Abelardo Morell
Sep 15 | 7 PM
Nationally recognized photographers Nicholas Nixon and Abelardo (Abe) Morell join Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator at the ICA, in a conversation about art, photography, and life in New England. This special event is organized to accompany the exhibition First Light: A Decade of Collecting at the ICA, which includes photographic works by both artists. Free admission, first come, first served; tickets available two hours prior to start of program.

The Artist’s Voice: Liz Deschenes
Oct 16 |  2 PM
Artist Liz Deschenes guides visitors through her first mid-career survey, featuring 20 years of exploration of and experimentation with different photographic technologies, methods, and sculpture. Join Deschenes as she answers your questions regarding her creative process. Free with museum admission, first come, first served; tickets available two hours prior to start of program

The Artist’s Voice: Kara Walker
Nov 17 | 7 PM
Renowned contemporary artist Kara Walker has inspired a national conversation on some of the many tragedies and transgressions littering American history thanks to her unique and provocative artworks. Walker’s practice, which has included the construction of intricate cut-paper silhouettes and producing a 40-foot-high sphinx made with sugar, has influenced a new generation of artists and thinkers. Her innovative and poetic approach to making art, recognized by the MacArthur Foundation via a “Genius” grant when the artist was just 28, continue to be celebrated. In this special engagement, Walker will discuss her creative process and share the many inspirations for her cut-paper installation in the ICA’s collection galleries. Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, will join the artist. Free admission, first come, first served; tickets available two hours prior to start of program.

FALL EXHIBITIONS

First Light: A Decade of Collecting at the ICA
Aug. 17, 2016–Jan. 16, 2017
The ICA marks 10 years of collecting with the largest and most ambitious presentation of its collection to date, First Light: A Decade of Collecting at the ICA. Occupying the entirety of the museum’s east galleries, this exhibition features more than 100 works by artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Nick Cave, Paul Chan, Marlene Dumas, Eva Hesse, Cindy Sherman, Kara Walker, and Andy Warhol. It brings together audience favorites as well as new acquisitions, many of which are on view at the ICA for the first time. A new, multimedia web platform, including texts by current and former ICA curators, accompanies the exhibition. This exhibition is organized by the ICA’s curatorial department under the leadership of Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator.

The Artist’s Museum
Nov. 16, 2016–March 26, 2017
The desire to collect objects and images of personal significance, and to make connections between them, is a nearly universal human experience. The Artist’s Museum begins with this impulse to collect and connect, bringing together large-scale installations, photography, film, and videos that employ artworks from the past as material in the present, animating existing artworks, images, and histories to reveal art’s unexpected relationships and affinities. Each of the artists in The Artist’s Museum reimagines the lives of artworks and charts recurring forms and themes across cultures and history. They tweak the language of museum display and organization to engage a variety of disciplines and subjects, from dance, music, and design to gender, sexuality, and technology. The exhibition is accompanied by a scholarly publication. The Artist’s Museum features works by Rosa Barba, Carol Bove, Anna Craycroft, Rachel Harrison, Louise Lawler, Mark Leckey, Pierre Leguillon, Goshka Macuga, Christian Marclay, Xaviera Simmons, Rosemarie Trockel, and Sara VanDerBeek. Organized by Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator, with Jeffrey De Blois, Curatorial Assistant.

First Republic Bank is proud to sponsor the ICA’s 2016–17 Performance Season.

First Republic Bank logo

First Light: A Decade of Collecting at the ICA is sponsored by

Christie's logo

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Additional support is generously provided by Fiduciary Trust Company, Chuck and Kate Brizius, Katie and Paul Buttenwieser, Karen and Brian Conway, the Robert E. Davoli and Eileen L. McDonagh Charitable Foundation, Jean-François and Nathalie Ducrest, Cynthia and John Reed, and Charles and Fran Rodgers.

NEA logo

Fidicuciary Trust Logo

 

Current exhibitions and recent acquisitions at the ICA show photography’s diversity and how our relationship with it has evolved over recent decades.

We are living through an image explosion. The internet’s advent and subsequent online sharing platforms connect us to disparate geographies and time zones. Everything is easily sharable, and one of the simplest things to share with a virtual audience is an image or photograph. Arguably, the virtual photograph is the representative object or product of this era. Using available statistics, New Yorker web and technology writer Om Malik estimated that we, across the globe, take an average of four billion photographs a day, thanks in part to our smartphones. The photograph or image exists in the physical and virtual realms, and with new virtual reality technologies, those realms can be intermixed. The idea of the photograph as window, and one that is exclusively evidentiary, documentary, or archival, has essentially been dismissed. Especially as new software programs are able to alter the original image into entirely new ones—creating novel scenes, contexts, and meanings—it transforms the photographic window into a virtual screen of infinite potential.

As rapidly as we take and reproduce images, we wanted to take the time to reflect on the photographic medium. This summer and fall, the ICA/Boston is presenting a vast array of photography, including the solo exhibitions Geoffrey Farmer and Liz Deschenes, as well as several works in First Light: A Decade of Collecting at the ICA. Furthermore, with the ICA’s recent acquisitions and current holdings of photography, we are able to consider the diversity of the medium and how it, as well as our relationship with photography, has evolved over recent decades.

Since its inception, artists have experimented with photography and the camera apparatus, exploring the medium’s aesthetic and technical possibilities. In the age of mass reproduction, much of that exploration has addressed the medium itself and its enduring effects. In the late twentieth century, artists of what is now known as the Pictures Generation (named after the pivotal 1977 exhibition Pictures, organized by art historian and critic Douglas Crimp at New York’s Artists Space), represented in the ICA’s collection by Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, and Cindy Sherman (see their work this summer and fall in First Light: A Decade of Collecting at the ICA), notably appropriated and modified the panoply of images reproduced in mass media. They investigated the fraught constructions of gender, race, sexuality, and identity generated by the commercial sphere. These thematic strands and methodological strategies continue today, as seen in work by artists like Sara VanDerBeek and Leslie Hewitt, also represented in our collection. Rather than merely continuing the legacy of the previous generation, however, they spearhead these innovations into new, multidisciplinary realms, as many contemporary artists no longer work in only one medium, with many incorporating photography into their broader practice; if working primarily in photography, they do so through expansive means.

Artists Nan Goldin and Rineke Dijkstra, both represented in depth in the ICA’s collection, seemed to presage the rise of today’s selfie culture, through very different means, in their groundbreaking work of the 1970s and 80s. Nan Goldin began taking photographs of her loved ones and family members in this period; these private moments are framed to imply a greater narrative as she engages with subject matters such as gender and identity. Rineke Dijkstra, contrastingly, captures stark portraits of subjects caught in life’s transitional moments, from new mothers to young military recruits. Using a large-format 4 x 5 camera with long exposure, she privileges time and the temporality of the medium. Though Dijkstra and Goldin took these photographs in moments that have already passed, they resonate in today’s image-saturated and self-reflexive environment. As our personal lives have moved into the public realm, these images may now appear all too familiar. However, unlike today’s virtual mass of images, these contemplative works require us to stop before them. Their intimacy and boldness augment the images’ psychological effects, expanding into the viewers’ space, forcing us to contend with the depicted subjects.

Photography that provides insight into social issues is a significant strain throughout the medium’s history. Nicholas Nixon’s portraits of George Gannet in the ICA’s collection (part of the larger series “People with AIDS”) explore the intimate lives of individuals living with the disease. This series’ initial critical reception, taken and exhibited at the height of the AIDS crisis, revealed the fraught politics of representation and largely the convoluted relationship between art and politics that we still contend with to this day. LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photographs examine issues of politics as well as individual agency. In her series Notion of Family, she partnered with her mother, composing revealing portraits of their private lives in her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, to also act as broader investigations into the city’s socioeconomic and environmental downturn. Frazier’s works often include references to African-American life and culture, as do Ellen Gallagher and Lorna Simpson’s works in the ICA collection. These artists scrutinize in distinct ways—using magazine advertisements or employing techniques of ethnographic photography—black culture and the societal effects on black bodies, particularly black female bodies. These artists use photography to present their individual voices, providing nuanced perspectives and understanding to complicated, yet potent issues in today’s sociopolitical climate.  

As our collective image trove has proliferated, artists such as Geoffrey Farmer and Walid Raad have mined archives, extracting and examining images to show how we represent, or even make, history through these images. The Atlas Group, a fictional entity conceived by Raad, presents archival, photographic documents related to real events in Lebanon. The artist probes the distinctions between fact and fiction in relation to the constructions of histories of art in the Arab world. Geoffrey Farmer engages similarly with the image, as he uses reproduced photographs to create near-fantastical sculptural installations that he modifies each time they’re installed. These large-scale, photo-based sculptural works, for which he is best known, chart our historical and cultural landscapes. Scanning or hand-cutting images from outmoded art history textbooks to old Life magazines, Farmer, like Raad, examines the power of images and how they shape our social and cultural imaginaries. As these artists, however, work in different contexts, they expose the divergent, multiple facets and consequences of an image—how it can be used, even manipulated for various ends.

Moving from constructions of knowledge to actual architectural surrounds, Liz Deschenes, working at the intersection of photography, sculpture, and architecture, creates stunning sculptural installations exploring various photographic techniques that respond to the environment of a given site. Her works incorporate shifts in light, reflections, and movements of visitors, ultimately analyzing the mechanics of seeing. Deschenes’s non-figurative works are unique phenomenological experiences, and expand the possibilities of the photographic medium and what an image can be and do. The Artist’s Museum, opening at the ICA this fall, will also feature a selection of compelling photographic works that contend with the sculptural and spatial, embracing and enhancing a holistic understanding of the medium.  

From Nan Goldin’s portraits to Geoffrey Farmer’s malleable installations, all of these artists either anticipated or remain cognizant of our image-based, digital world. Subjects in Collier Schorr and LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photographs in the ICA’s collection appear to have a natural relationship with the now-ubiquitous camera lens, while artists including Frazier reveal everyday hardships many face silently throughout the country in images that can now go publicly viral. The blurring of reality and fiction, and public and private, seems to be a through-line with many of these artists. However, even though these artists all employ photography, they demonstrate the diverse and near-boundless possibilities of the medium and—from technological capabilities to the overtly political—what we are able to communicate through photography. Today, we are living in an era of image overload, and the exponentially growing virtual milieu has fully entered into our physical lives. Considering how expansive photography has become in the larger cultural sphere, it is important to contemplate its effects and consequences, and will look forward to the possibilities and further influence of the medium in the coming future. 

The ICA presents the first mid-career survey of the work of Boston-born artist Liz Deschenes, whose singular and influential achievements in photography and sculpture consider light, color, and the relationship between the mechanics of seeing, image-making processes, and modes of display.