Photo by Danita Jo
Individual support accounts for more than 60% of the ICA’s annual operating budget. We couldn’t do what we do without your support.
The ICA strives to bring contemporary art and ideas to audiences of all ages in Boston—and we couldn’t do it without support from donors, support that accounts for more than 60% of the annual operating budget.
It is thanks to our contributors that the ICA is able to serve as a platform for thought-provoking conversations and ground-breaking exhibitions, such as this fall’s highly acclaimed Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957.
Black Mountain College, a small liberal school founded in 1933 outside Asheville, North Carolina, has had enormous influence on the post-war culture of the United States—and shares certain similarities to the ICA. Like the progressive college, the ICA has been resolute in its embrace of the art of its time, confident in the belief that a progressive plurality of the arts is essential to a thriving cultural and civic life. The ICA—like Black Mountain College—insists on the centrality of artistic experience in preparing students and audiences of all ages for full participation in our democratic society. Now, nearly a century after the founding of the college and of the ICA, experimentation, collaboration, risk, failure, and experiential learning—key tenets of both institutions—are central to conversations in education reform, workforce development, creative economies, and innovation.
Please consider a 100% tax-deductible donation to ensure that undertakings like Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957—as well as free programming such as talks and tours, Play Dates, and digital media courses for teens—are realized.
Can’t get enough BMC? There’s more to explore – right here in New England!
Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius originally designed the Gropius House, a historic New England landmark, as his family home when he moved to Massachusetts to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Gropius was a former collegue of Black Mountain College educator Josef Albers and they had a close connection. Gropius’s daughter Ati attended Black Mountain College; two of her artworks are included in Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957.
The Gropius House was designed along Bauhaus principles, with an emphasis on efficiency and simplicity of design. Located at 68 Baker Bridge Road, Lincoln, MA, 01773.
The Harkness Graduate Center at Harvard Law was designed by the Architects Collaborative (TAC), a group headed by Walter Gropius. Using $40,000 received from an anonymous donor, Gropius brought several of his former Bauhaus colleagues on as collaborators in the project, including Josef Albers. The influential Black Mountain College teacher, who was strongly influenced by patterns and imagery he saw on trips to Mexico with his wife, Anni, as well as by her work in weaving, designed an abstract pattern for the brick module at the back of the Harkness Center’s commons fireplace. While at Harvard you can also see prints, weavings, and design objects by Josef and Anni Albers at the Harvard Art Museums.
Harkness Graduate Center was completed in 1950 and was first modern building on the campus. The main Harvard Law School campus consists of 19 buildings and is located at 1585 Massachusetts Avenue, on the northwest corner of Harvard Yard, bordered by Massachusetts Avenue and Everett Street. The Harvard Art Museums are a short walk away at 32 Quincy Street.
Located within beautiful Mount Auburn Cemetery lies the grave of Buckminster Fuller—architect, inventor, developer of geodesic domes, and Black Mountain College teacher. You can find it on Bellwort Path, a walking path on a hill between Spruce Street and Walnut Avenue. Fuller’s grave is marked with his name, engravings of a rose and a spherical object, and the phrase “Call me trimtab.” A trimtab is a miniature rudder attached to a boat’s primary rudder: it can be used to stablize a ship—or change it’s course. Fuller took this as a metaphor for the possibilities of influence of the “little individual.”
Pay pilgrimage to another Black Mountain College virtuoso at Mount Auburn Cemetery. Poet, author, and Massachusetts native Robert Creeley was also laid to rest in this graceful cemetery. While at the college, Creeley wrote numerous important poems that illustrate his investments in syntax and in the events of everyday life as a source for poetry.
Mount Auburn Cemetery, an active cultural site and tourist attaction, was designed as the first rural cemetery in the United States and an experimental garden. Located at the Watertown-Cambridge line at 580 Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138.
Josef Albers teaching a drawing class, n.d. Photo by John Campbell.
Students on the porch of Lee Hall, n.d. Courtesy Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina, Asheville, NC.
1944 Summer Music Institute faculty. Front row: Frederic Cohen, Elsa Kahl, Marcel Dick. Middle Row: Joanna Graudan, Heinrich Jalowetz, Lotte Leonard. Back row: Nikolai Grauden, Rudolf Kolisch, Lorna Freedman Kolisch, Edward Lowinsky, Eduard Steuermann, Ernst Krenek, Trudi Straus, Roger Sessions.
Lorna Blaine Halper, rebus letter to her parents, 1947. Ink on paper, 8 ½ by 11 inches. Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina.
Students prepping the ground for the construction of the Studies Building, n.d. Courtesy Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina, Asheville, NC.
Josef Albers’s color-theory class at the 1944 Summer Art Institute. Photo by Josef Breitenbach.
Saturday night dance in dining hall on Lake Eden campus, c. 1945. Courtesy Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina, Asheville, NC.
Minimum House, designed and constructed by students, 1947-48. Photo by Jerrold Levy. Courtesy Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina, Asheville, NC.
Scene from Xanti Schawinsky’s Danse Maccabre, May 14, 1938. Courtesy Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina, Asheville, NC.
The progressive liberal arts college was a utopian experiment: interdisciplinary, communal, non-hierarchical, and unlike anything else in the United States.
The teachers and students at Black Mountain College came to North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains from around the United States and the world. Some stayed for years, others mere weeks. Their education was unlike anything else in the United States. They experimented with new ways of teaching and learning; they encouraged discussion and free inquiry; they felt that form in art had meaning; they were committed to the rigor of the studio and the laboratory; they practiced living and working together as a community; they shared the ideas and values of different cultures; they had faith in learning through experience and doing; they trusted in the new while remaining committed to ideas from the past; and they valued the idiosyncratic nature of the individual. But most of all, they believed in art, in its ability to expand one’s internal horizons, and in art as a way of living and being in the world. This utopian experiment came to an end in 1957, but not before it created the conditions for some of the 20th century’s most fertile ideas and most influential individual artists to emerge.
Lorna Blaine Halper, rebus letter to her parents, 1947. Ink on paper, 8 ½ by 11 inches. Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina.
Try your hand at colorful code-making as students at Black Mountain College did.
Appropriate for: Creative minds age 6 + up
A rebus is a word puzzle. Pictures of things that sound the same as syllables or letters in the words are combined with words to create one-of-a-kind messages or stories. For example: Re + 
.
The rebus message project is inspired by Lorna Blaine Halper’s letter to her parents from the ICA exhibition Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957. In her letter, Halper uses familiar symbols and pictures she has drawn to keep in touch with her family. Deciphering Halper’s letter is not so easy! For more inspiration, take a peek at the rebus letter examples below created by artists visiting the ICA then create your own rebus messages. Or create rebus stories and poems!
(Use what you have on hand already.)
+ brave and + have!
Come and see the artworks that inspired the rebus letter project in the exhibition Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957, on view at the ICA through January 24, 2016.
Join us the last Saturday of every month (except December) for Play Dates, when kids activities from art-making to film screenings to dance demos fill the ICA. Admission is FREE for up to 2 adults per family when accompanied by children ages 12 and under. Youth 17 and under are always admitted free to the ICA.
This project was created by ICA Family Programs Coordinator Kathleen Lomatoski, with support from Julia Cseko, Bianca Marrinucci, and Cathy McLaurin.
© 2015 Department of Education, The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston
With humor, charisma, devotion, and a keen sense of formal complexity and information design, Paul Laffoley’s work ran through all manner of theories of everything.
The great Boston artist Paul Laffoley died on on Monday, November 16. I’d seen his work over the years, and had always been an admirer. He loved some of the same 20th-century utopian, cross-discliplinary thinkers I do, and he made beautiful, strange, and complex works in response to their ideas. His mandala-like paintings, architectural models and plans, and assemblage-like sculptures are a welcome, deeply informed response to an increasingly formulaic approach to integrating theories and their authors into artworks. Poised between manifesto, illustration, architectural plan, devotional painting, cosmic model, and expressive tool, Laffoley’s works were part of a larger system of thought that drew from mathematics along with some of the most progressive ideas about being in the world. Though he had major retrospectives recently, and early encounters with some of the late 20th century’s most important thinkers (Frederick Kiesler, Andy Warhol, for instance), he produced his work both outside art centers, and outside of their strictures and camps.
Upon my recent return to Boston, his work was on my mind. Former ICA Mannion Family Senior Curator Jenelle Porter left a Laffoley catalog (produced by the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, organized by Luis Croquer) in the office I now occupy. She made sure I saw it, and we talked about our mutual interest in his visionary work. And my good friend and colleague Tina Kukielski had recently made Laffoley a central part of an exhibition she organized at James Cohan Gallery in New York.
On a very rainy, dark Saturday afternoon this fall I walked by Kent Fine Art on 11th Avenue in Chelsea, and remembered they were showing Laffoley. The bright, beautiful exhibition brought together work from the 1960s to the present, and included a range of painting and sculpture. With humor, charisma, devotion, and a keen sense of formal complexity and information design, the works ran through all manner of theories of everything. The show was overwhelming and calming by equal measure. I’m so happy I saw it.
Here is an obituary, followed by his full biography, from Kent Fine Art. RIP one of Boston’s finest.
The influential photographer on sex, love, loss, inspiration, and why she relies so heavily on the “family” she’s created.
“I’m not modest about it. I think in the 80s I created a sea change in photography. I gave people permission to show their own lives as valuable and as valid as all the other documentary of people they didn’t know. And I think I opened a door.”
Nan Goldin: I Remember Your Face, a 2013 documentary directed by Sabine Lidl, turns the camera on one of the most influential photographers of her generation, known for intimate, unflinching portraits and documentation of her friends that brought counterculture to life.
Following Goldin around Europe as she prepares work and meets with some of the friends she’s immortalized in bathtubs and squats, the film provides a window into Goldin’s sometimes chaotic life, her thoughts about her parents, love, sex, loss, inspiration, and why she relies so heavily on the “family”—artists, lovers, gay men—she’s built across continents and decades.
“It was never about marginalization,” she says. “We were the world.”
Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, featured in the film, was shown at the ICA in This Will Have Been: Art, Love, and Politics in the 1980s in 2012. The permanent collection includes ten of her photographs.
Nan Goldin: I Remember Your Face screens at the ICA Saturday, November 14 at 6:30 PM as part of the Boston Jewish Film Festival.
John Cage and Pierre Boulez weren’t as different as some might think.
I will never forget the typically grey evening when, as a wide-eyed freshman composition student at the Cleveland Institute of Music, I walked into Harkness Chapel on the adjacent campus of Case Western Reserve University to hear a live interview with the reigning king of contemporary music, Pierre Boulez. I remember the raspy, soft tone of his voice and how we paid rapt attention, aware of both his connection back to the old world of the late 19th century and everything he had done to bring music to where it is today. Afterward, however, my classmates and I were disappointed with the master’s half-hearted response to a question on the state of American music. He mentioned a few things about Elliott Carter, then briefly touched on the experiments of John Cage, implying that they were eventually fruitless. A few years later, during the centennial celebrations of John Cage, I began to read the correspondence between Cage and Boulez, and understand the complexity behind Boulez’s comment. This concert, presented by the ICA in collaboration with the Ensemble Intercontemporain and exploring music written by each of these composers during their extensive correspondence, brings that period to life.
To many of us entranced in contemporary and 20th-century music, the fact that John Cage and Pierre Boulez extensively corresponded tends to come as a shock. In the second half of the 20th century, when my teachers were in school, Boulez was the dominant voice in contemporary music, leader of the camp of composers who stood for a nearly mathematical approach to the control of composition that stemmed from the 12-tone technique of Arnold Schoenberg. Boulez founded IRCAM in Paris, the largest center for the study of electro-acoustic music in the world, as well as the premiere contemporary music ensemble, the Ensemble Intercontemporain. In most American academic institutions, if a young composer was not writing in the highly structured, complex method of serialism spearheaded by Boulez, they would generally have little luck earning an academic job or finding performances among an inner circle controlled by these polemicists. To other composers of that generation who wished to pursue fresh directions, the voice of John Cage was liberating. His use of chance and indeterminacy removed the ego from music that had caused these issues in the mainstream camp. Cage’s experimentation with other art forms, along with his desire to push what was possible in art and music, allowed a younger generation to feel free to write whatever they desired. Eventually, composers associated with Cage, such as Terry Riley, would begin to experiment in another direction, and Minimalist music would emerge, “saving” the discordant music of much of the 20th century.
At least that is what many people of that generation would have you believe. In fact, there is an astonishing amount of freedom in the heavily controlled music of Boulez, and a relentless amount of control in the chance and indeterminate compositions of John Cage. Realizing this, their fruitful relationship begins to make more sense. Between 1949 and 1954 the composers were in extensive contact and were excited about each other’s new ideas. Both had been incorporating ways of confining music to strict hierarchies, and in addition to their own work, much of their correspondence dealt with informing each other of the experiments in the musical avant-garde in their respective countries.
Boulez was a proponent of total serial composition, a method of composition by which every perimeter of sound production (pitch, rhythm, articulation etc.) is set into a predetermined series that dictates which events must come before others. A simple example would be if a six-pitch series were A, D, C, B, E, G; one would have to employ each of these pitches in order, either as a melodic linear material, or as a harmony, before repeating the series. The process becomes much more complex when you apply modifying operations to the series, or use series of different lengths to control rhythm vs. pitch, etc.
As Cage began to study Zen Buddhism, it led to experiments in indeterminacy and chance. In writing Music of Changes, Cage reached musical decisions by consulting the I Ching, or “Book of Changes,” an ancient Chinese divination text, and applying these results to charts of sounds, durations, tempi, densities, and dynamics. The music is freely written, without any metric system to divide the music into separate numbers of measures. It was at this point that the two composers reached unprecedented disagreements. Boulez agreed that an element of freedom needed to be introduced into strict systems of composition, and he countered Cage’s interest in chance and indeterminacy with what he called “aleatoric music.” In this type of composition a particular element is left to the performers’ control, for example in the aleatoric piece Jeux Venetiens by Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski, the conductor chooses, in an improvisatory manner, which groups of predetermined, fully notated music are played, often producing a dense sound mass. In contrast, much of Cage’s later chance music requires the composer to plot out the work in the same way that he himself wrote Music of Changes. Thus, a performer will receive a type of chart, and will be required to roll dice and conduct other chance operations in order to produce a personal score used to realize the work. Essentially, it seems that Boulez found this total lack of control disagreeable and the friendship between the two cooled. However, the discordance between them, just as their musical differences, has been overdramatized by history.
As such, this concert at the ICA is a representation of the de-polarization of the contemporary music community, as a program like this would have seemed impossible in previous generations.
—Jesse Limbacher is a composer, performer, and presenter based in Boston. He is currently interning at the ICA.
Help recreate a run-down church in Braddock, Pennsylvania, as a “work of art, a center for creativity, and a place for new beginnings.”
Since 2007, our friend Swoon, the artist and activist who last showed at the ICA in 2012, has been working to reinvent a rundown church in North Braddock, Pennsylvania, as a “work of art, a center for creativity, and a place for new beginnings.”
Swoon, whose work often dovetails with social and humanitarian projects, fell in love with the church, slated for demolition that year, while working on an art installation in the former steel town (also poignantly depicted in the work of LaToya Ruby Frazier).
Working with the local community, the artist collective Transformazium, and more than 70 artists, Swoon founded the Braddock Tiles print project, which plans to provide the church with a much-needed new roof by creating 20,000 ceramic tiles—by hand. To do so, they’ll build a working ceramics studio in the church and hire and train local young people to create the tiles. Ultimately the church will open as a community center and Braddock Tiles will will function as a local business making and selling interior and decorative tiles and partnering with artists to release signature editions.
One of the foremost street and activist artists working today, Swoon is deeply engaged with social, humanitarian, and community-building efforts in both art and life. Past projects include sailing SWOON boats created from reclaimed materials with groups of artists and friends during the 2009 Venice Biennale and collaborating on sustainable building in Haiti in the wake of the devastating 2010 earthquake.
Support the Braddock Tiles Kickstarter—ending Nov. 12—and get a Braddock tile, a limited-edition artwork, or a tour of Swoon’s studio, or provide one of the kilns that will make the business possible.
On Dec. 16, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) will present The Birthday Party —the first U.S. museum exhibition dedicated to Dubai-based artists Ramin Haerizadeh (b. Tehran, 1975), Rokni Haerizadeh (b. Tehran, 1978), and Hesam Rahmanian (b. Knoxville, 1980). Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian: The Birthday Party is on view at the ICA through March 27, 2016.
The trio of Iranian artists—two brothers and a childhood friend—live and work communally in a shared house, using their domestic space as a site for creative production. Combining their works with others that they collect actively, the artists have constructed an exuberant environment, in which every surface is decorated with color and pattern, and every corner contains a unique assemblage. For the ICA, the artists will create an on-site installation that extends this technique to the gallery. The exhibition will bring together their collective and individual works with those of a diverse, multi-generational group of artists.
The title of the show, The Birthday Party, is borrowed from Nobel-prize winning English writer Harold Pinter’s play of the same name, which features at the center of its plot a birthday party for a man who does not know it is his birthday. Earlier this year, the three artists staged a performance in a vacant Dubai gallery that took The Birthday Party as a point of departure. During the performance, they shuffled around the space in costumes made of long prayer robes that obscured their vision, spilling paint across a floor they constructed, while unwrapping presents and making accumulative sculptures out of their contents. In the ICA’s Buttenweiser gallery, the artists will reassemble the remaining material from that performance—including the painted floor, the improvised accumulations, and video documentation of the action—in combination with a diverse group of new works and a selection of works by other artists, including Louise Bourgeois, Hassan Sharif, Bahman Mohassess, and Ree Morton. The exhibition, like the artists’ house, is both improvisational and accumulative, weaving together the intimacy of their collective life with their critical engagement of a globalized contemporary culture, all staged provocatively within the walls of an art institution.
Organized by Assistant Curator Ruth Erickson.
Support for Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian: The Birthday Party is generously provided by Lori and Dennis Baldwin.
About the artists
Ramin and Rokni Haerizadeh have lived in Dubai since 2009, after the Iranian government raided the home of one of their collectors. At the time, the brothers were in Paris and, fearing imprisonment, they have never returned to Iran. Hesam Rahmanian joined the Haerizadehs, and the three artists have worked together in a home/studio in Dubai. The artists have exhibited individually and together internationally over the past six years. Their collaborative projects have been presented at the Sharjah Biennial 10 (2011), Isabelle Van Eynde Gallery (2012, 2014), Carnegie International (2013), Kunsthalle Zürich (2015), Callicoon Fine Arts (2015), and Brisbane Festival (2015). In 2014, the three artists participated in the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation’s residency in Captiva, Florida.