Simone Leigh, Jug, 2022. Stoneware. 62 1/2 × 40 3/4 × 45 3/4 inches (158 × 103.5 × 116.2 cm). Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. Acquired through the generosity of Susana and Clark Bernard, Adelle Chang and Eddie Yoon, the Miller-Coblentz Family, Grace Colby, Fotene Demoulas and Tom Coté, Mathieu O. Gaulin, Jessica Knez and Nicolas Dulac, Christine and John Maraganore, and the Acquisitions Circle. Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery. Photo by Timothy Schenck. © Simone Leigh
Simone Leigh, trophallaxis, 2008/2017. Terracotta, porcelain, epoxy, graphite, gold and platinum glazes, and antennas, dimensions variable. Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), museum purchase with funds provided by PAMM’s Collectors Council
Simone Leigh, Cupboard IX, 2019. Stoneware, raffia, and steel armature, 78 × 60 × 80 inches (198.1 × 152.4 × 203.2 cm). Acquired through the generosity of Bridgitt and Bruce Evans and Fotene Demoulas and Tom Coté. Courtesy the artist. © Simone Leigh
Simone Leigh: Façade, 2022. Thatch, steel, and wood, dimensions variable. Satellite, 2022. Bronze, 24 feet × 10 feet × 7 feet 7 inches (7.3 × 3 × 2.3 m) (overall). Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery. Photo by Timothy Schenck. © Simone Leigh
Exhibition is accompanied by the first monograph of Leigh’s work
(Boston, MA—November 8, 2022) The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens the first museum survey exhibition of Simone Leigh (b. 1967, Chicago), on view April 6–Sept. 4, 2023. Among the most respected artists of her generation, Leigh is representing the United States at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, in a project commissioned by the ICA. Works from the U.S. Pavilion will go on view in the United States for the first time as part of Leigh’s survey exhibition in Boston, which includes over 40 key examples of the artist’s ceramics, bronzes, videos, and installations, covering almost 20 years of highly disciplined production. Following its debut at the ICA, the exhibition Simone Leigh will tour to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. (Nov. 2023-March 2024), and a joint presentation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and California African American Museum (CAAM), on view June 2024–Jan. 2025 in Los Angeles. Simone Leigh is organized by Eva Respini, ICA Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs and Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Anni Pullagura, Curatorial Assistant.
“Simone Leigh’s complex and profoundly moving work honors the agency and ideas of Black women, giving visibility to overlooked narratives and histories,” said Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director of the ICA. “We are thrilled to bring Simone Leigh’s art from Venice back to the U.S. as part of this important survey exhibition, so that audiences across the country have the chance to experience the work of this groundbreaking and influential artist.”
“Although this is the first survey dedicated to Leigh’s art, the work has always been there, and its impact and power can no longer be denied. Leigh’s drive to center Black women can be understood as in spite of and ahead of cultural and political realities, rather than in reaction to them,” said Respini. “Leigh’s art teaches us that time cannot be forced. Her work operates on its own terms, and she has created her own systems for her art, populated with collaborators, writers, and artists of her choosing, continually making room for others.”
Over the past two decades, Leigh has created works of art that situate questions of Black femme, or female-identified, subjectivity at the center of contemporary art discourse. Her sculpture, video, installation, and social practice explore ideas of race, beauty, and community in visual and material culture. Leigh’s art addresses a wide swath of historical periods, geographies, and traditions, with specific references to vernacular and hand-made processes from across the African diaspora, as well as forms traditionally associated with African art and ritual, all while mining historical gaps, inaccuracies, and fallacies. Saidiya Hartman’s conception of “critical fabulation”—a strategy that invites historians, artists, and critics to creatively fill the gaps of history—provides a resonant framework for approaching Leigh’s work.
The ICA exhibition focuses on Leigh’s work in ceramic and bronze—beginning with early sculptural works and concluding with the new body of work created for the U.S. Pavilion in Venice—while also including key examples of works in video and installation to provide the full breadth of the artist’s practice. In Leigh’s ceramics, the artist draws on the vernacular traditions of the American South, Caribbean, and African continent, and challenges traditional hierarchies of art. Domestic vessels such as bowls and jugs, cowrie shells, and busts are recurring forms, and her readdress of these forms over time in various materials underscores the remarkable consistency of Leigh’s vision over two decades.
The exhibition opens with the impressively scaled trophallaxis (2008/2017), a suspended sculpture composed of clusters of black terracotta and porcelain forms that resemble fruit or breasts, from which a network of fully extended car antennas protrudes. The title adopts a scientific term describing the transfer of nourishment from insects’ bodies to the collective’s larvae, drawing associations of the femme body with fertility, nourishment, and labor—themes developed throughout the exhibition. A subsequent gallery features a selection of Leigh’s table-top ceramic busts with their distinctive eyeless faces.
In recent large-scale ceramic sculptures, Leigh merges the human body with traditional domestic containers, conjuring unacknowledged acts of female labor. The intersection of architecture with the body is also central to her sculpture, such as the work Cupboard IX (2019), seen in the steel cage-like structures that the artist leaves bare or covered with raffia, evoking the womb, skirts, and sub-Saharan dwellings, often built by women and used as gathering spaces.
Since 2018, the artist has cast her sculptural works in bronze, creating statuary for both gallery presentations and public art commissions. Her bronzes combine figuration with domestic or architectural elements, such as in the 2019 sculpture Jug, featuring the head and torso of a woman’s body atop a large-scale vessel or jug. Through their material choices, these bronzes embody a state of permanence and grandeur, and thus enter the dialogue around monuments in cultural memory. Leigh’s bronzes, with their overtly feminist and Black figurative references, also insist on the centrality—indeed, the necessity—of considering the agency of Black women as subjects in the cultural sphere. The exhibition will feature Leigh’s monumental 24-foot-tall bronze Satellite (2022), sited outside around the ICA campus for visitors to encounter in the landscape, as a beacon for the exhibition, broadcasting ideas around self-determination that is endemic to the work.
Leigh’s video works, often created in collaboration with other artists, draw from historical and fictional representations of Black women and femmes. In the video my dreams, my works must wait till after hell (2011), Leigh and artist Chitra Ganesh reimagine the reclining female nude, a common subject in European art, from their perspective as women of color. A 2011 collaboration between Leigh and artist Liz Magic Laser, titled Breakdown, features mezzo-soprano Alicia Hall Moran singing a script the two artists compiled from scenes of men and women experiencing nervous breakdowns in plays or television shows, offering a stunning meditation on psychology, race, and gender.
Occupying the final four galleries of the exhibition, the body of work Leigh created for the U.S. Pavilion continues her explorations around the effect and legacy of colonialism and notions of self-determination. Featuring interrelated sculptures in ceramic, bronze, and raffia—as well as a video, Conspiracy (2022), made in collaboration with Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich—these galleries will evoke the layout of the Venice exhibition, providing U.S. audiences the opportunity to experience this landmark installation. The exhibition concludes with Last Garment (2022), a bronze based on a 19th-century souvenir photograph of a Jamaican laundress, and explores ideas of labor, specifically the invisible labor of Black women. This sculpture is placed in a large reflecting pool situated within the sightline of Boston Harbor, as the breathtaking final gallery of the exhibition.
A major scholarly catalogue, including images of all the works in the exhibition as well as installation views from Leigh’s Venice presentation, accompanies the exhibition. Serving as the first comprehensive scholarly publication on Leigh’s work, the publication includes newly commissioned essays by over fifteen leading scholars, historians, and writers; writing by Simone Leigh; and an introduction by Eva Respini. The catalogue is designed by Nontsikelelo Mutiti, and co-published by the ICA and DelMonico Books. Contributors to the publication include:
Vanessa Agard-Jones
Rizvana Bradley
Dionne Brand
Denise Ferreira da Silva
Malik Gaines
Saidiya V. Hartman
Daniella Rose King
Jessica Lynne
Nomaduma Masilela
Katherine McKittrick
Uri McMillan
Sequoia Miller
Steven Nelson
Tavia Nyong’o
Lorraine O’Grady
Rianna Jade Parker
Yasmina Price
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts
Christina Sharpe
Hortense J. Spillers
Exhibition Credits
Simone Leigh is organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Anni Pullagura, Curatorial Assistant.
With warmest thanks, the ICA/Boston gratefully acknowledges the following philanthropic partners for their magnificent support.
Major support is provided by the Ford Foundation and the Mellon Foundation.
Lead corporate support is provided by eu2be.
Generous support is provided by Bloomberg Philanthropies, Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser, Girlfriend Fund, and Wagner Foundation
Leadership gifts are provided by Amy and David Abrams, Stephanie Formica Connaughton and John Connaughton, Bridgitt and Bruce Evans, James and Audrey Foster, Agnes Gund, Jodi and Hal Hess, Hostetler/Wrigley Foundation, Barbara and Amos Hostetter, Brigette Lau Collection, Henry Luce Foundation, Kristen and Kent Lucken, Tristin and Martin Mannion, Ted Pappendick and Erica Gervais Pappendick, Gina and Stuart Peterson, Helen and Charles Schwab, and Terra Foundation for American Art
Essential support is also provided by Suzanne Deal Booth, Kate and Chuck Brizius, Richard Chang, Karen and Brian Conway, Steven Corkin and Dan Maddalena, Federico Martin Castro Debernardi, Jennifer Epstein and Bill Keravuori, Esta Gordon Epstein and Robert Epstein, Negin and Oliver Ewald, Alison and John Ferring, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Glenn and Amanda Fuhrman, Vivien and Alan Hassenfeld and the Hassenfeld Family Foundation, Peggy J. Koenig and Family, The Holly Peterson Foundation, David and Leslie Puth with Mark and Marie Schwartz, Cindy and Howard Rachofsky, Leslie Riedel and Scott Friend, Kim Sinatra, Tobias and Kristin Welo, Lise and Jeffrey Wilks, Kelly Williams and Andrew Forsyth, Nicole Zatlyn and Jason Weiner, Jill and Nick Woodman, Marilyn Lyng and Dan O’Connell, Kate and Ajay Agarwal, Eunhak Bae and Robert Kwak, Jeremiah Schneider Joseph, Barbara H. Lloyd, Cynthia and John Reed, and Anonymous donors
Additional support for the publication is provided by the Fotene Demoulas Fund for Curatorial Research and Publications.
Barbara Kruger, Belief+Doubt, 2012, Installation view, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC. Photo by Cathy Carver. Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers.
(Boston, MA—September 20, 2022) On November 3, 2022, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) will debut a new, site-specific commission by Barbara Kruger (b. 1945 in Newark, NJ). For over 40 years, Kruger has been a consistent, critical observer of contemporary culture. Her distinct visual language uses bold textual statements and images taken from mass media to create significant artworks that investigate ideas of power, identity, consumerism, and gender. At the ICA, Kruger will transform the first-floor lobby’s Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall into a monumental, thought-provoking installation that comments on the key issues of our era while reimagining one of her most iconic images. The riveting new work, Untitled (Hope/Fear), 2022, will be on view through January 21, 2024, in a presentation organized by Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Senior Curator.
“Barbara Kruger creates some of the most powerful artworks of our time, using her distinct combination of text, scale, and design to chart a journey from familiarity to eye-popping awareness. At the ICA, all visitors will encounter her monumental installation in our glass-enclosed lobby, a free and open public space,” said Jill Medvedow, the ICA’s Ellen Matilda Poss Director.
“The ICA installation draws on Kruger’s decades-long practice of creating large-scale installations of her text-based art, transforming spaces with her signature aesthetic and pointed content. Continuing in this vein, her brand-new work for the ICA will speak, as her work has done for many years, to issues of war, women’s rights, and power, and ultimately to question authority,” said Erickson.
In the early 1980s, Kruger perfected a signature style of words and images extracted from mass media and recomposed into memorable, graphic artworks. In this new commission for the ICA, Untitled (Hope/Fear), 2022, Kruger uses the wall’s unique architecture to create a bold work featuring three distinct areas of text and image combinations. The largest text—”Another hope, Another fear”—in Futura bold (the artist’s typeface of choice) exemplifies Kruger’s incisive ability to evoke the emotional tenor of our time, a parade of daily hopes and fears fueled by an unceasing newsreel and media feeds. By repeating and replacing words, Kruger creates a cadence of text that cascades across the wall. Another area of the installation displays phrases in graphic black-and-white bands that repeat the word “war”—“War time, war crime, war game”—before turning into the phrase “War for a world without women.” The effect of these phrases pivoting around “war” is to reveal the interrelationships or power. In the concluding phrase “War for me to become you,” Kruger has crossed out the pronouns, confounding clear notions of who is speaking and resisting any univocal position.
The final element restages the text from one of Kruger’s best-known works, Untitled (Your body is a battleground), 1989, which she originally produced as a poster for the women’s march in Washington, D.C. to protest new laws limiting women’s access to healthcare. In this 2022 version, she changes both image and font, overlaying text on top of a black-and-white photograph of a face. Untitled (Hope/Fear), 2022, reflects Kruger’s signature style while revealing her breathless and ongoing innovation of text and image. This newest work confirms Kruger’s status as one of the sharpest respondents to contemporary culture.
The ICA’s Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall is dedicated to site-specific, commissioned works by leading contemporary artists. Located within the museum’s glass-enclosed lobby, the Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall is the visitor’s first encounter with art upon entering the building.
The ICA Store has collaborated with Kruger to develop exclusive merchandise including a t-shirt, tank top, and tote bag featuring the “Your body is a battleground” motif from the Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall. Available only at the ICA. More details will be available soon on icastore.org.
Media and visitors are encouraged to use #BarbaraKruger in their social media posts.
Kruger lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and New York, NY. She studied at Syracuse University and Parsons School of Design, New York. Solo shows include Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2022), Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2022), The Art Institute of Chicago (2021), AMOREPACIFIC Museum of Art, Seoul (2019), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2016), High Line Art, New York (2016), Modern Art Oxford (2014), Kunsthaus Bregenz (2013), Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2011), Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2010), Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow (2005), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2000), Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1999), Serpentine Gallery, London (1994), Musée d’art contemporain, Montreal (1985) and Kunsthalle Basel (1984). Group shows include those at Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2021), Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2018), V-A-C Foundation, Palazzo delle Zattere, Venice (2017), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2014), Biennale of Sydney (2014), Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2013), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2010), Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010, 2009, 2007), Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2006), Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2004), Tate Liverpool (2002), Centre Pompidou, Paris (1988) and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1987). Her is also currently on view in The Milk of Dreams, the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2022), curated by Cecilia Alemani.
Since its founding in 1936, the ICA has shared the pleasures of reflection, inspiration, imagination, and provocation that contemporary art offers with its audiences. A museum at the intersection of contemporary art and civic life, the ICA has advanced a bold vision for amplifying the artist’s voice and expanding the museum’s role as educator, incubator, and convener. Its exhibitions, performances, and educational programs provide access to the breadth and diversity of contemporary art, artists, and the creative process, inviting audiences of all ages and backgrounds to participate in the excitement of new art and ideas. The ICA is located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA, 02210. The Watershed is located at 256 Marginal Street, East Boston, MA 02128. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at icaboston.org. Follow the ICA on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Photo by Ernesto Galan
Photo by Nathan Bajar
Photo by Ari Marcopoulos
Photo by Thais Aquino
Photo by Stephanie Berger
Photo by Eric Politzer
Photo by Maria Baranova
Okwui Okpokwasili, Poor People’s TV Room. Photo by Ian Douglas.
(Boston, MA—Aug 26, 2022) Member tickets are now available for the ICA’s new performance season. Highlights include Liz Gerring, Jason Moran + Alicia Hall Moran, Bill T. Jones, Okwui Okpokwasili, and much more!
Fri, Sep 30 | 8 PM
L’Rain
$17 ICA members + students / $22 general admission
Brooklyn-born-and-based musician, experimentalist, and multi-instrumentalist Taja Cheek, aka L’Rain, blends genres including gospel, jazz, and neo-soul with an array of keyboards, synths, and hauntingly delicate vocals.
Fri, Oct 21 + Sat, Oct 22 | 8 PM
Liz Gerring Dance Company with the JACK Quartet: Harbor
$20 ICA members + students / $30 general admission
Liz Gerring Dance Company debuts “Harbor,” a world-premiere performance combining movement, poetic illumination, and a newly commissioned string quartet by Pulitzer Prize–winning composer John Luther Adams performed by JACK Quartet.
Fri, Nov 18 + Sat, Nov 19 | 8 PM
Jason Moran and Alicia Hall Moran: Family Ball
$25 ICA members + students / $35 general admission
This world premiere performance by pianist and composer Jason Moran and mezzo-soprano and composer Alicia Hall Moran scrutinizes the intricacy of human partnership, presenting it in raw form through music and song.
Fri, Feb 10, 2023 | 8 PM
Suzanne Bocanegra: Honor
$15 ICA members + students / $25 general admission
This performance by conceptual artist Suzanne Bocanegra masquerades as an artist talk but reveals Bocanegra’s current fixation with one of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s greatest tapestries. Honor features celebrated film and theater actor Lili Taylor in the title role of “The Artist.”
Fri, Feb 24, 2023 | 8 PM
HYENA
$15 ICA members + students / $25 general admission
Composer Georg Friedrich Haas’s HYENA features a remarkable score accompanying the autobiographical story of Haas’s wife, the writer Mollena Lee Williams-Haas. Williams-Haas narrates, with music by Boston’s Sound Icon Ensemble led by Jeffrey Means.
Fri, Mar 10 + Sat, Mar 11, 2023 | 8 PM
Sun, Mar 12, 2023 | 2 PM
Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company: Curriculum II
$30 ICA members + students / $40 general admission
A timely new work by Tony-winning Bill T. Jones, choreographed with Janet Wong and the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, Curriculum II explores the historical and persistent connection between race and technology and the pursuit of what is human.
Fri, Apr 21 + Sat, Apr 22, 2023 | 8 PM
Sam Green: 32 Sounds
$15 ICA members + students / $25 general admission
This immersive documentary from filmmaker Sam Green explores the elemental phenomenon of sound, performed in its “live cinema” form, featuring live narration by Sam Green and live original music by JD Samson.
Fri, May 12 + Sat, May 13, 2023 | 8 PM
Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born
$20 ICA members + students / $30 general admission
Keep an eye out for more information on this world premiere from a team of “Bessie” Award winners: writer, performer and choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili, and director, designer and filmmaker Peter Born.
Since its founding in 1936, the ICA has shared the pleasures of reflection, inspiration, imagination, and provocation that contemporary art offers with its audiences. A museum at the intersection of contemporary art and civic life, the ICA has advanced a bold vision for amplifying the artist’s voice and augmenting art’s role as educator, incubator, and convener for social engagement. Its innovative exhibitions, performances, and educational programs provide access to contemporary art, artists, and the creative process, inviting audiences of all ages and backgrounds to participate in the excitement of new art and ideas. Spanning two locations across Boston Harbor, the ICA offers year-round programming at its iconic building in Boston’s Seaport and seasonal programming (May-September) at the Watershed in an East Boston shipyard.
The ICA is located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA, 02210. The Watershed is located at 256 Marginal Street, East Boston, MA 02128. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at icaboston.org. Follow the ICA at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Acknowledgments
The ICA is supported in part by grants from the Barr Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Mellon Foundation, the Mass Cultural Council, and the Reopen Creative Boston fund, administered by the Mayor’s Office of Arts & Culture.
Support for FAMILY BALL is generously provided by Kathleen McDonough & Edward Berman.
Honor, an Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra, was commissioned in part by UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance, which also hosted a creative development residency in November 2019.
This performance of HYENA is a coproduction of the Boston University Center for New Music and the ICA/Boston.
Support for the ICA’s presentation of Curriculum II is generously provided by Jean-François and Nathalie Ducrest and The David Henry Fund for Performance.
Curriculum II is commissioned and produced by New York Live Arts with commissioning support from Peak Performances at Montclair State University (MSU) and the American Dance Festival. Curriculum II premiered with Peak Performances at MSU in June 2022.
32 Sounds is commissioned by Stanford Live, Stanford University; The Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi; Ferst Center for the Arts at Georgia Institute of Technology; Green Music Center of Sonoma State University; Arizona Arts Live at University of Arizona; and developed through a creative residency at MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts.
This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Support for the upcoming Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born premiere is generously provided by Leslie Riedel and Scott Friend.