Please Note

Portraits from the ICA Collection may be closed today due to installation. See what else is on view

Artist Diane Simpson gets her due.

“Diane Simpson show at ICA is superb,” reads the headline for the Boston Globe review of Simpson’s first major museum solo show, currently on view at the ICA.

Two years ago, the artist had her first New York solo show in 33 years at the Lower East Side gallery JTT, featuring “crisp, rigorous, body-scale sculptures” (New York Times). In 2010, a retrospective at the Chicago Cultural Center surveyed 40 works produced over 30 years. Diane Simpson has been enjoying a kind of renaissance: while she’s shown steadily throughout the Midwest since the 1970s, the Chicago-based artist recently admitted to Artforum that she’s amazed by the wider attention her work is currently receiving.

Now 80, Simpson attended School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in the 1950s but had her first child just shy of finishing her final quarter. She returned ten years later, when the youngest of her three children entered first grade, to complete her bachelor’s degree.

Using her bedroom as a studio (she and her husband “slept on a hide-a-bed for six years,” she told curator Dan Byers in an interview in the exhibition catalogue), Simpson had been making art all along, and in her 40s she went back to the SAIC to pursue an MFA. “When I first went back to grad school I started making large drawings on graph paper, primarily of tools and mechanical objects,” as well as collagraph prints of boxlike forms, Simpson says. She turned to sculpture when an advisor suggested she try to build one of the drawings.

“The objects I was drawing were very dimensional due to a system of perspective I devised myself,” Simpson explains—a system reminiscent of early non-Western perspective that involves denoting volume via parallel 45-degree angles, rather than the two- or three-point perspective most commonly employed since the time of the Renaissance. “I never gave it a name, but I think ‘axonometric’ might be the system whose description broadly fits what I had been practicing for many years —and thought I had invented,” she says.

With no training in sculpture, Simpson has often invented her own methods for constructing her work, and she says sometimes her unorthodox solutions contribute important aesthetic details, such as the cords that hold together architectural elements in works such as Amish Bonnet and Court Lady

“One of the unique aspects of Diane’s work is the relationship between the drawings and the sculptures, and in how she fabricates them so precisely and beautifully to mimic the angles that are in the drawings,” says Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator. “The physical objects are hard to read—they almost look impossible—even though they’re so physically present and so carefully made. You’re at once sure you’re in the room with something that’s physical and affecting you, and at the same time, it almost feels like an image of itself.”

As much praise as Simpson is currently receiving—the Boston Globe celebrates her “stunning” and “beautiful” work for its craftsmanship, its sensuality, its interplay between media, its significance—Byers believes the artist has not yet received her due. “This show is a great start. But there’s more incredible work in the attic that hasn’t been seen in 30 years,” he says.

Hear Diane Simpson speak about her work in conversation with Dan Byers, Mannion Family Chief Curator, on March 3.

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.

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!

Artsy Activities

Play gallery games, listen to book readings especially for families, enjoy the view, and try your hand with mixed-media storytelling.

  • Art-Making for All Ages
    Try your hand at storytelling and comic making. Join us in the Bank of America Art Lab for sketching, writing, and investigating story arrangement and sequence. Tue, Feb 16 through Thu, Feb 18 from 11 AM–3 PM.
  • Comics: Frame by Frame

    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.

Compelling Contemporary Art

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.