Please Note

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

Prefer inspiration to resolutions? Words of encouragement from Black Mountain College artists and educators, from constructive to inspirational to abstract.

Don’t fight forces, use them.

Buckminster Fuller

  • “Our world goes to pieces. We have to rebuild our world.”  –Anni Albers
  • “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.” –John Dewey
  • “When you put a seed in the ground, it doesn’t stop growing after eight hours. It keeps going every minute that it’s in the earth. We, too, need to keep growing every moment of every day that we are on this earth.” –Ruth Asawa

If you don’t have trouble paying the rent, you have trouble doing something else; one needs just a certain amount of trouble.

Robert Rauschenberg

  • “We need not destroy the past. It is gone.”  –John Cage
  • “Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.”  –John Dewey
  • “Ninety-nine percent of who you are is invisible and untouchable.”  –Buckminster Fuller

Creating is the most intense excitement one can come to know.  

Anni Albers

  • “I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.”  –John Cage
  • “All that we can hope for is to put some order into ourselves.” –Willem de Kooning
  • “A thing is never seen as it really is.”  –Josef Albers
  • “I don’t mess around with my subconscious.”  –Robert Rauschenberg

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.

Buckminster Fuller
 

  • “I want to give an example from my lessons: you drink wine for the first time. Please don’t judge, but drink many wines, study them and probably then if you are looking for words to describe a wine you will see that you can’t find them.”   –Josef Albers
  • “The only way to do it is to do it.” –Merce Cunningham
  • “I am happy to have some friends here in the kitchen.” –Charles Olson
  • “Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.” –John Dewey

Falling is one of the ways of moving. 

MERCE CUNNINGHAM

  • “Wholeness is not a Utopian dream, it is something that we once possessed and now seem largely to have lost, or to say it less pessimistically, seem to have lost were it not for our inner sense of direction which still reminds us that something is wrong here because we know of something that is right.” –Anni Albers
  • “The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.” –John Dewey
  • “I’m trying to climb up both walls at once.” –Charles Olson

Art is spirit and spirit is eternal.  

 

JOSEF ALBERS

There is so much to learn from Black Mountain College. Leap Before You Look in 2016!

Chicago-based artist Diane Simpson presented elegantly constructed, architectural sculptures in her first major museum exhibition (at the age of 80).

 

Gallery view

(Boston, MA, Dec. 10, 2015)—The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) has added 20 major works of 20th- and 21st-century art to The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women, today announced Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director of the ICA. This exceptional gift by Barbara Lee, Vice-Chair of the ICA Board, furthers the ICA’s commitment to building a collection of art that addresses the systemic underrepresentation of woman artists in museum collections. 
 
The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women, established at the ICA in 2014, represents three decades of collecting by Lee and brings together painting, sculpture, photography, and videography by iconic modern and contemporary women artists. 
 
Highlights of Lee’s most recent gift include Louise Bourgeois’s tour-de-force sculptural work Cell (Hands and Mirror) (1995); two critically important sculptures by Eva Hesse, Ennead (1966) and Accession IV (1968); Sherrie Levine’s iconic 1996 sculpture Fountain (Buddha); Ellen Gallagher’s suite of 60 prints DeLuxe (2004-05); and a monumental, room-size installation by Kara Walker titled 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). 
 
“Barbara Lee continues to lead by example—her vision and generosity allow the ICA to tell urgent and undertold histories of post-war and contemporary art,” said Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director of the ICA. “With these new acquisitions, our collection is enriched by some of the most important works of recent art history. The introduction of a major installation by Kara Walker is a hallmark addition to our collection and brings an essential engagement between the work in our galleries and the critical issues of our time. The Eva Hesse sculptures Ennead and Accession IV are rare and exceptional works that, in our galleries, will provide vital context for understanding Hesse’s foundational influence on generations of artists.”
 
“My gift puts women artists front and center at an institution known for breaking barriers,” said Lee. “The ICA’s vision aligns powerfully with my own. The museum has a spirit of independence, defies expectations, and challenges the status quo—all things that embody my life’s work to empower women.”
 
Kara Walker’s installation The Nigger Huck Finn…, commissioned for the 2010 exhibition Huckleberry Finn at CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art in San Francisco, is a sweeping installation composed of silhouetted cut-paper figures set on a light brown groundline painted directly on the wall and punctuated by seven framed gouache paintings on paper. To date, only one other wall work by Walker combines these three elements.

“These remarkably generous gifts provide us with an opportunity to continue to build our collection of 20th- and 21st- century art so that our community can enjoy more works by these artists, permanently, furthering the ICA’s mission to expand people’s understanding of art and the salient ideas and issues of our time,” said Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator of the ICA.
 
The complete list of new works added to The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women:

Dara Birnbaum
Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry, 1979
Two channel video (color, sound; 06:26 minutes), and flight cases
Dimensions variable

Louise Bourgeois
Untitled, BOUR 0913, 1947-49
Wood and paint
25 ¼ x 10 ¼ x 6 ⅝ inches (64.1 x 26 x 16.8 cm)

Louise Bourgeois
Spiral Woman, 1951-52
Wood and steel
62 ½ x 12 x 12 inches (159 x 30.5 x 30.5 cm)

Louise Bourgeois
Spiral Woman, 1984
Bronze and slate
14 x 4 x 5 inches (35.6 x 10.2 x 12.7 cm); Slate disc: 1 ¼ x 34 ¾ inches (3.18 x 88.3 cm)

Louise Bourgeois
Cell (Hands and Mirror), 1995
Marble, metal, and mirror
63 x 48 x 45 inches (160 x 122 x 114 cm)

Carol Bove
Innerspace Bullshit, 2007
Fourteen books, comic book, letter, bronze sculpture, Marfa rock, ocean ephemera, mirror, and pamphlet on wood and metal shelves
42 x 36 ⅛ x 12 inches (107 x 91.8 x 30.5 cm)
 
Ellen Gallagher
DeLuxe, 2004–05
Photogravure, etching, aquatint, and drypoints with lithography, screenprint, embossing, tattoo-machine engraving, laser cutting, and chine collé; and additions of plasticine, paper collage, enamel, varnish, gouache, pencil, oil, polymer, watercolor, pomade, velvet, glitter, crystals, foil paper, gold leaf, toy eyeballs, and imitation ice cubes
Sixty parts, each 13 ½ x 10 ½ inches (34.3 x 26.7 cm); overall 84 x 176 inches (213 x 447 cm)
 
Eva Hesse
Ennead, 1966
Dyed string, papier-mâché, and paint
96 x 39 x 17 inches (244 x 99.1 x 43.2 cm)
 
Eva Hesse
Accession IV, 1968
Galvanized steel and rubber tubing
8 ⅛ x 8 x 8 ¼ inches (20.6 x 20.3 x 21 cm)
 
Louise Lawler
Grieving Mothers (Attachment), 2005
Silver dye bleach print (Cibachrome)
46 x 41 inches (117 x 104 cm)

Sherrie Levine
After Henri Matisse, 1985
Ink and graphite on paper
13 ⅞ x 10 ⅞ inches (35.2 x 27.6 cm)
 
Sherrie Levine
Chair Seat: 7, 1986
Casein on wood
18 x 18 x 2 ¼ inches (45.7 x 45.7 x 5.72 cm)

Sherrie Levine
Untitled (Gold Knot: 6), 1987
Oil on wood
62 ½ x 50 ¼ inches (159 x 128 cm)
 
Sherrie Levine
Fountain (Buddha), 1996
Bronze
12 x 17 x 16 inches (30.5 x 43.2 x 40.6 cm)

Marisol
Couple No 1, 1965-66
Wood, paint, fabric, electric motor, and mixed media
71 x 34 x 26 7/16 inches (180 x 86.4 x 67.2 cm)
 
Alice Neel
Vera Beckerhoff, 1972
Oil on canvas
60 x 32 inches (152 x 81.3 cm)

Alice Neel
Margaret Evans Pregnant, 1978
Oil on canvas
57 ¾ x 38 inches (147 x 96.5 cm)

Cady Noland
Untitled, 1989
Screenprint on aluminum
72 x 48 inches (183 x 122 cm)

Charline von Heyl
Untitled, 2003
Mixed media on paper
Ten parts, each 23 ⅞ x 18 ⅞ inches (60.6 x 47.9 cm)

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
Cut paper and paint on wall and gouache and ink on paper
Approximately 57 feet
16 cut paper elements, dimensions variable; 7 framed works on paper, each 11 ½ x 15 inches (29.2 x 38.1 cm)

The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women
The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women represents three decades of collecting by philanthropist and political activist Barbara Lee. It brings together painting, sculpture, and photography by iconic modern and contemporary artists. Ranging from portraiture to performance, abstraction and representation, conceptual and craft-based work, the art in the Collection presents personal and political explorations of identity; feminism; materiality; and the body as the site of pleasure, violence, repression and expression. Artists represented in the Collection include Louise Bourgeois, Tara Donovan, Marlene Dumas, Mona Hatoum, Cindy Sherman, and Lorna Simpson, and adds groundbreaking works by artists who are part of the ICA’s exhibition history including Sandra Cinto, Rachel Harrison, Eva Hesse, Jenny Holzer, Roni Horn, Louise Lawler, Ana Mendieta, Doris Salcedo, Joan Semmel, Amy Sillman, Kiki Smith, Shelburne Thurber, and Lisa Yuskavage. 

In the largest gift ever made to the museum, trustee Barbara Lee donates 20 works by 12 artists to become part of the Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women including a room-sized installation by Kara Walker exploring the legend of Huckleberry Finn, as well as works by Louise Bourgeois, Carol Bove, Ellen Gallagher, Eva Hesse, and Sherrie Levine.