Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA), has announced two major grants from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Warhol Foundation grant of $100,000 will support the exhibition The Artist’s Museum, opening in Nov. 2016, which examines the nature of collections and reveals art’s unexpected relationships through the lens of contemporary artists. The Mellon Foundation grant of $500,000 will support curatorial research, graduate fellowships, and publications for three major curatorial projects: Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today (2018); Mark Dion (2017); and The Artist’s Museum (2016).
Upon announcement of the two grants, Jill Medvedow commented, “We are tremendously grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon and Andy Warhol Foundations. These projects continue the ICA’s scholarly explorations into urgent questions in contemporary art, specifically: the impact of the Internet and digital culture on contemporary artists, curators, and museums; the way knowledge is organized and made accessible; and the related tension between the ephemeral and the material in contemporary art practice and museums.”
Under the leadership of Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, the ICA continues its inquiry into key shifts in contemporary art and culture over the last 25 years. The three Mellon-funded curatorial projects—Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today; Mark Dion; and The Artist’s Museum—all address the relationships between the making of objects and the acquisition of knowledge, highlighting the transformation of both activities since the advent of the Internet and its impact on creating, collecting, and curating art today. “We are very grateful to have been selected for these awards,” said Respini. “These funds support our mission to provide inspiration, education, and build a creative community through public access to contemporary art and artists.”
Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today will examine how the Internet has changed how artists see the world, make their work, and disseminate information and images. Highlighting Boston’s role as a leading center of technology, the exhibition will involve Boston-area arts organizations on innovative programmatic events to create a dynamic, citywide experience. Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today features the work of approximately 30 artists from around the globe and is comprised of a variety of mediums—including painting, performance, photography, sculpture, and video— that incorporate the extensive effects of the Internet in their realization. Themes explored in the exhibition include emergent ideas of the body and notions of human enhancement; the Internet as a site of both surveillance and resistance; the circulation and control of images and information; possibilities for new subjectivities, communities, and virtual worlds; and the aesthetics of corporate culture and branding. Throughout, the work in this landmark exhibition addresses the Internet-age democratization of culture that comprises our current moment.
The first U.S. survey of the internationally recognized artist, Mark Dion spans the past 25 years, bringing together many of the artist’s most significant works. The exhibition combines a series of single-room installations with large gallery presentations of sculpture, drawing, and photography, as well as models of major public artworks. Informed by a deep knowledge of history and contemporary issues, these diverse projects illuminate the wondrous, absurd, and macabre outcomes that occur when the natural and cultural worlds collide.
The Artist’s Museum presents immersive installations which feature collections of art, artifacts, and natural material, creating distinct models from each artist’s world. Employing the language of museum display, the artists chart the recurrence of forms and themes across cultures and history, revealing unexpected relationships and affinities and engaging a variety of disciplines and subjects, from dance, music, and design, to gender, sexuality, and technology. Among the artists included are Rosa Barba, Carol Bove, Anna Craycroft, Mark Leckey, Pierre Leguillon, Goshka Macuga, and Christian Marclay.
Dave Ortega
Dave Ortega
Dave Ortega
Photo by Lauren Anca.
There’s something for everyone this February vacation at the ICA: a bunch of fun, creative + FREE activities, exciting exhibitions, wintry waterfront views, and many more reasons to spend the week with us!
Play gallery games, listen to book readings especially for families, enjoy the view, and try your hand with mixed-media storytelling.
Local artist Dave Ortega has spent years interviewing his now 100-year-old abuela (grandmother) and telling her story in comics. In the Bank of America Art Lab he’ll create a giant comic book where participants can explore how stories and pictures are arranged to create narrative and experiment with telling their own stories.
Create Comics with Artist Dave Ortega
Meet the artist during vacation week! Dave Ortega will be in attendance at the museum Fri, Feb 19, 2–4 PM. Join the artist in the Bank of America Art Lab to explore how stories and pictures are arranged to create narrative and experiment with telling stories of your own.
Have a wee one in tow? Create an engaging museum experience for even the littlest visitor with ICA Gallery Games, a free pack filled with activities and tips for looking at and talking about the art on view. Available at the Holly and David Bruce Visitor Center. Recommended for ages 2 and up.
Spend some down-time in our Family Library in the Poss Family Mediatheque. Selected to complement exhibitions, highlight the creative process, or give insight into architecture, these books are best for children ages 3–8.
Saturdays and Sundays at 11 AM and 2 PM, snuggle up on big comfy pillows for in-gallery story hours at Books and Looks, staff-led readings of picture books that relate to the art on view and are accompanied by looking activities. Ask Visitor Assistants for themes and locations. Times may vary during Play Dates or holidays.
Do your kids like to draw? Ask the front desk staff for sketching supplies to use during your museum visit. Sketch with pencil in our galleries.
Hit all the galleries, then stop by the Poss Family Mediatheque to learn more about the art and artists on view at the ICA. Browse photos, videos, interviews, and much more.
Installation view, Nalini Malani: In Search of Vanished Blood, Galerie Lelong, New York, September 6 – October 26, 2013. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Lelong, New York. © Nalini Malani.
(Boston, MA — Jan. 13, 2016) On July 1, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens an immersive video installation by Mumbai-based artist Nalini Malani (b. 1946, Karachi). Organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, In Search of Vanished Blood will open to the public on June 29 and remain on view until October 16, 2016. Malani, India’s foremost media and installation artist, has dedicated her career to artistic achievement as well as activism for women’s rights in her home country and across the globe. This exhibition showcases her groundbreaking installation, In Search of Vanished Blood, which was commissioned by Documenta 13, and premiered in Kassel, Germany in 2012. This immersive multi-media work features six 11-minute projections cast through painted rotating Mylar cylinders suspended from the ceiling. Visitors will witness an intricate shadowplay as an array of layered images are cast onto the gallery walls, enveloping viewers in a dazzling multi-media environment.
Born in Karachi, but forced to move to India following the 1947 partition of India, Malani channeled her life experiences directly into her art. Initially trained as a painter, Malani expanded her interests into video and installation projects that invoked references to her cultural and historical past while also grappling with the inequities of women’s rights. In Search of Vanished Blood takes its name from a poem written by Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz which captures the intricacies of love, war, loss, and bloodshed within a country rocked by political unrest. Malani’s installation revives this history by painted elements that adorn the suspended Mylar cylinders as reference to Eastern and Western historical and cultural iconography, including sources such as Homer’s Illiad to the Ramayana. When illuminated, these icons dance around the room, complemented by an audio track. Malani brings these rich and complex historical narrative threads together with In Search of Vanished Blood.
The presentation of Malani’s installation will be accompanied by additional works on paper and a stop-motion animation.
About the artist
Born in Karachi, India (now Pakistan) in 1946, Nalini Malani received her artistic training at the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art in Mumbai (1964-1969). Malani’s work is influenced by her experiences as a refugee of the Partition of India. She places inherited iconographies and cherished cultural stereotypes under pressure. Her point of view is unwaveringly urban and internationalist, and unsparing in its condemnation of a cynical nationalism that exploits the beliefs of the masses. Hers is an art of excess, going beyond the boundaries of legitimized narrative, exceeding the conventional and initiating dialogue. Characteristics of her work have been the gradual movement towards new media, international collaboration and expanding dimensions of the pictorial surface into the surrounding space as ephemeral wall drawing, installation, shadow play, multi projection works and theatre. Malani was awarded the prestigious Fukuoka Prize 2013 for Arts and Culture.
The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) announces its exhibition schedule into 2017. Upcoming exhibitions include a major solo show of Walid Raad opening this February and an exhibition celebrating the museum’s first decade of collecting opening in August. For more information, please contact Kate Shamon, kshamon@icaboston.org, 617-478-3143.
Walid Raad
Feb. 24 – May 30, 2016
The ICA opens a comprehensive survey of the artist Walid Raad, a pivotal figure in contemporary art whose work investigates the ways in which we represent, remember, and make sense of history. The exhibition brings together nearly 150 works across various mediums—including photography, video, sculpture, and performance. Informed by his upbringing in Lebanon during the civil war (1975–90) and by the socioeconomic and military policies that have shaped the Middle East in the past few decades, Raad’s work is dedicated to exploring archives and photographic documents in the public realm, the role of memory and narrative within discourses of conflict, and the construction of histories of art in the Arab world. The exhibition is accompanied by a scholarly publication. This exhibition is organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The exhibition is curated by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, with Katerina Stathopoulou, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Boston presentation is coordinated by Jeffrey De Blois, Curatorial Assistant, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. Following its presentation in Boston, the exhibition will travel to the Museo Jumex, Mexico City (Oct. 13, 2016–Jan.14, 2017).
Geoffrey Farmer
April 13 — July 17, 2016
Geoffrey Farmer is best known for his installations and sculptural photo collages. Three large-scale works—two “paper works” and a new major film work—create the foundation for this exhibition. Each spectacular composition begins to chart the historical contours of our image-saturated contemporary culture, and suggest recurring cultural themes and formal patterns. Farmer uses movement, sound, animation, puppet characters, and a panoply of highly choreographed bodies and characters to investigate world history from the different angles of its photographic and sculptural accounts. Organized by Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator, with Jessica Hong, Curatorial Assistant.
Nalini Malani: In Search of Vanished Blood
July 1 – Oct. 16, 2016
Nalini Malani is India’s foremost video and installation artist and committed activist for women’s rights. This exhibition centers on her signature multi-media work, In Search of Vanished Blood (2012), accompanied by a selection of related works on paper. The work is comprised of six video projections streamed around the room through five hand-painted Mylar cylinders. As the cylinders rotate, colorful and layered iconography from Eastern and Western cultures is projected onto the walls, creating an arresting environment reminiscent of lantern slide presentations and other proto-cinema experiments in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Jessica Hong, Curatorial Assistant.
Liz Deschenes
July 1 – Oct. 16, 2016
This exhibition is the first museum survey of the Boston-born, New York-based artist Liz Deschenes. Deschenes is known for her lushly beautiful and meditative work in photography and sculpture. Since the early 1990s, she has produced a singular and influential body of work that probes the relationship between the mechanics of seeing, image-making processes, and modes of display. In addition to making discrete two-dimensional works, the artist has created carefully calibrated installations that blur the lines between photography and sculpture. On the occasion of her first museum survey, the artist will create a new site-specific work. The exhibition is accompanied by a scholarly publication. Organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Jessica Hong, Curatorial Assistant.
First Light: A Decade of Collecting at the ICA
Aug. 17, 2016 – Jan. 15, 2017
Coinciding with the ten year anniversary of the ICA’s move to its iconic waterfront building, this exhibition celebrates the museum’s first decade of collecting. Drawn entirely from the ICA’s collection, the exhibition will feature significant new acquisitions. Conceived as a series of interrelated and rotating stand-alone exhibitions, this presentation will highlight major singular works from the collection, including a monumental cut-paper silhouette tableau by Kara Walker, a spotlight on 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 microsite will be created to mark the occasion. This exhibition is organized by ICA’s curatorial department under the leadership of Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Jessica Hong, Curatorial Assistant.
The Artist’s Museum
Nov. 16, 2016 – March 26, 2017
The Artist’s Museum presents immersive installations that feature collections of art, artifacts, and natural material to create distinct models from each artist’s world. Employing the language of museum display, the artists chart the recurrence of forms and themes across cultures and history, revealing unexpected relationships and affinities and engaging a variety of disciplines and subjects, from dance, music, and design, to gender, sexuality, and technology. The exhibition is accompanied by a scholarly publication. Among the artists included are Rosa Barba, Carol Bove, Anna Craycroft, Mark Leckey, Pierre Leguillon, Goshka Macuga, and Christian Marclay. Organized by Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator, with Jeffrey De Blois, Curatorial Assistant.
2017 James and Audrey Foster Prize Exhibition
Feb. 15– July 9, 2017
The James and Audrey Foster Prize is key to the ICA’s efforts to nurture and recognize Boston-area artists of exceptional promise. 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. This iteration of the ICA’s biennial exhibition of work by Boston-based artists will be organized by Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator, with Jeffrey De Blois, Curatorial Assistant.
Dana Schutz
July 26– Nov. 26, 2017
New York-based artist Dana Schutz has emerged as one of the most prominent painters of her generation. Known for her distinctive visual style characterized by vibrant color and tactile brushwork, her paintings capture imaginary stories, hypothetical situations, and impossible physical feats, such as a figure attempting to eat his own face. Equal parts darkly humorous and surreal, Schutz’s paintings combine abstraction and figuration with expressive imagination, compressing bodies, banal objects, and quotidian scenes into oddly compelling and intriguing pictures. Dana Schutz will be a concise survey of the artist’s paintings made over the past decade, along with a presentation of works on paper. This exhibition is organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Jessica Hong, Curatorial Assistant.
Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 21st-Century Naturalist
Oct. 4, 2017 – Jan. 7, 2018
Acting as traveler, historian, scientist, and artist, Mark Dion has pioneered an influential model of artistic practice that involves research, collaboration, and fieldwork. His process-based work in sculpture, installation, drawing, and public art investigates the construction and display of knowledge about the natural world. The first U.S. survey of the internationally recognized artist, Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 21st-Century Naturalist spans the past 25 years, bringing together many of the artist’s most significant works. The exhibition combines a series of single-room installations with large gallery presentations of sculpture, drawing, and photography, as well as models of major public artworks. Informed by a deep knowledge of history and contemporary issues, these diverse projects illuminate the wondrous, absurd, and macabre outcomes that occur when the natural and cultural worlds collide. This exhibition is organized by Ruth Erickson, Associate Curator, with Jessica Hong, Curatorial Assistant.
ON VIEW
Diane Simpson
Through March 27, 2016
Diane Simpson’s elegantly constructed sculpture evolves from a diverse range of material, clothing, and architectural sources. While elements of her creations appear to effortlessly hang and fold, they are in fact the result of a rigorous approach to construction techniques, reveling in passages of pattern, joinery, and skewed angles that are by turns humorous and psychologically-charged. A concise survey of over thirty years of work, Diane Simpson is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition. Organized by Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator, with Jeffrey De Blois, Curatorial Assistant.
Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian: The Birthday Party
Through March 27, 2016
Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, Hesam Rahmanian live and work communally in a shared house in Dubai. The three Iranian artists—two brothers and their childhood friend—combine their individual work, and that of their friends, in sculpture, painting, drawing, and video, to generate consuming total environments. The ICA invited the trio to create an on-site installation in the gallery, joining the intimacy of the artists’ collective life with their critical engagement of a globalized contemporary culture. This is the first U.S. museum exhibition for the trio. Organized by Ruth Erickson, Associate Curator, with Jeffrey De Blois, Curatorial Assistant.
Ethan Murrow: Seastead
Through Nov. 27, 2016
Ethan Murrow is well known for photorealistic graphite drawings that combine found and invented imagery to form unexpected scenes drenched with humor and irony. At the ICA, Murrow has created a monumental site-specific drawing, in Sharpie, on the Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall. This project is organized by Ruth Erickson, Associate Curator.
Acknowledgments
Walid Raad is organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
This exhibition is curated by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston with Katerina Stathopoulou, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The Boston presentation is coordinated by Jeffrey De Blois, Curatorial Assistant, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston.
Support for the Boston presentation is generously provided by Jean-François and Nathalie Ducrest and The Envoy Hotel.
Major support for The Artist’s Museum is provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The 2017 James and Audrey Foster Prize exhibition and prize are generously endowed by James and Audrey Foster.
Major support for Mark Dion is provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Support for Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian: The Birthday Party is generously provided by Lori and Dennis Baldwin.
The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) is pleased to present the first mid-career survey of works by New York-based artist Liz Deschenes (b. 1966, Boston, Massachusetts). Organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, Liz Deschenes will open to the public on June 29, 2016 and remain on view at the ICA through October 9, 2016. Over the past two decades, Deschenes has explored and tested the limits of what constitutes a photograph, transfixing audiences with her meticulous and thought-provoking work. The exhibition at the ICA will represent a landmark in the artist’s career, as it is the first survey exhibition to bring works produced from 1997 to the present into dialogue. The approximately twenty works included chart the course of her investigation, showcasing a diverse set of objects which include installation-sized reflective photograms, dye-transfer monochromes, photo-filmic moirés, green-screen works, and sculptural elements that draw viewers’ attention to the architecture of the exhibition space. In a world where we digest hundreds of images at a quick glance, mostly on a screen, Deschenes’s works demand to be experienced in person, proposing seeing as a physical act. She employs the language of sculpture, architecture, and exhibition design to consider the apparatus of viewing art, inviting viewers to slow down, circle her work, see their reflections in it, and become attuned to the architecture that surrounds it and them.
Deschenes’s photographs are the products of her ongoing fascination with the processes of both seeing and image making. Her works reference the history of photography, the architecture of their surroundings, and the history of the spaces they inhabit. A consummate educator, Deschenes’ oeuvre traces a line through technologies that marked the development of the medium of photography—from cameraless photograms that adopt the processes of 19th century daguerreotypes to hybrid prints of digital screen that straddle the divide between the digital and the analog. While refusing to submit to the rules of photographic convention, Deschenes demonstrates her extensive knowledge of photography’s evolving history. Working both within the darkroom and out in the field, her process is characterized not by a single technology, method, or subject, but rather by a sustained engagement with the fundamental materials of photography (light, chemistry, and time) and the mechanics of viewing. Responding to the conditions of production, she calibrates her works to the site as a way to underscore and nuance the spectator’s relationship to space, sometimes encouraging new visual encounters and at other times responding to and disrupting the architectural surround.
The process by which Deschenes executes her distinctive photograms (which make up a significant portion of her work) is inherently performative, as the artist exposes swaths of light-sensitized paper to both the sunlight and moonlight near Bennington College in Vermont, where she teaches. As opposed to traditional photograms, which typically capture the contours of objects placed upon light-sensitive paper, Deschenes’s versions have no subject, but instead bear the literal traces of the ambient conditions present during their production: swirls, pock marks and drips which vary according to the temperature, humidity, phase of the celestial bodies, and mutable nature of the noxious chemicals involved. When mounted, the photograms reflect the viewers own image in their mirrored surfaces, adding an immersive quality to their viewing. It is this powerful play of light and color that resonates throughout Deschenes’ art and encourages the viewer to reflect upon the nature of viewing, image-making, and ultimately, representation. In Tilt/Swing (360° field of vision, version 1), Deschenes playfully deploys mounted photograms in a 360 degree circuit from floor to ceiling. The title suggests an analogy between the gallery and a camera. When viewers encounter the installation, their bodies tilt and swing resulting in an angling and manipulation of vision, the body and by extension experience.
A lushly illustrated publication includes a comprehensive essay by the exhibition curator, essays by noted historian and curators, others artists’ writing on Deschenes, and an interview with the artist.
About the artist
Described by the New York Times as “one of the quiet giants of post-conceptual photography,” Liz Deschenes has exhibited her work regularly since receiving her BFA in 1988 from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. She has recently mounted exhibitions at Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York; Campoli Presti, London and Paris; Secession, Vienna; and Sutton Lane, Paris and Brussels. Featured in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, she is most recently the recipient of the 2014 Rappaport Prize awarded by the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum. Her work is represented in the collections of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Since 2006, she has been a member of the faculty of Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont.