Please Note

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

A new book brings together the artist’s fantastical drawings on paper and walls.

 GRAPHIC_Murrow_book.jpgMonumental as it is, Ethan Murrow’s drawing Seastead on the Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall at the ICA is only one small part of the Boston-based artist’s output. A new book, Ethan Murrow (Hatje Cantz) gathers dozens of his works, presenting for the first time in print his large-scale wall drawings in ballpoint pen alongside those he executes on paper. Murrow’s work, photorealist but fantastical, examines the boundaries between fiction and depicted reality while telling stories of the artist’s creation.

Ruth Erickson, Assistant Curator at the ICA and organizer Seastead, contributed texts to the book, available at the ICA Store. Read an excerpt below.

 

The landscape around the ICA seems to be in a state of constant change. New buildings appear over night, while historical structures, like the brick sailor’s church, Our Lady of Good Hope, disappear just as quickly. This dramatic architectural transformation of the Seaport District (what has already taken place and what is planned for the near future) is only echoed in the watery depths of the adjoining Boston Harbor. While the sea’s steady tides might suggest a sense of timelessness—the retreat and return with each moon cycle—the natural harbor links to a vast network of waterways, bodies, and commerce undergoing significant alterations. The harbor becomes a kind of marker of the many ways that environmental changes, from rising sea levels to diminished fishing stocks, reshape, and will increasingly reshape, human existence on the earth. It is with these thoughts in mind that I invited Murrow to create a wall drawing for the ICA’s Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall.

Murrow based his drawing of the large boat on American aircraft carriers, the impressive nautical devices that have been central to the nation’s military prowess. Perched on top of the carrier, Murrow has drawn St. Paul’s Cathedral, which was constructed in London after the great fire in 1666 and withstood the Blitz bombing of World War II. Sourcing images from the Internet, Murrow created a digital mock-up, marrying the carrier and the cathedral in the middle of the sea, and then set out with three assistants to draw it, by hand and in marker directly on the wall over the course of ten days. This formidable task, which took almost 100 hours and exhausted over 400 Sharpie pens, embodied a remarkable commitment and expenditure of raw energy, an effort that resonated with the subject matter.

Structures of immense physical strength, the carrier and cathedral are symbolic of the nations that created them—not coincidentally, the same great powers of Boston’s own Puritan origins—but in Seastead, they appear somewhat tenuous. Is this a rebellious breakaway, a forced exile, or a utopian endeavor? What triggered it? Insurgent political regimes, rising sea levels? The work’s title, Seastead, is derived from “seasteading” (a combination of the words “sea” and “homesteading”), which refers to the creation of an island state outside of the boundaries and the laws of any sovereign nation. If taken at face value, the title and imagery may conjure a break-up of the great Western powers and the formation of a new entity in its nascent stage of assembly, an apt characterization of the twenty-first century. Such a process is replicated in the individual marks that begin as countless crosshatches by a team of hands and then cohere at a distance into a photorealistic drawing only to dissolve into thousands of indeterminable marks upon scrutiny. Murrow holds together these opposing processes, allowing formation and disintegration to coexist in both the narrative arc and drawing. Seastead is neither a beginning nor an ending but rather both at once, capturing the resilience of the one and the many working together.

 

Geoffrey Farmer, Boneyard (detail), 2013

On April 13, 2016, The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens an exhibition focusing on the recent paper works of artist Geoffrey Farmer (b. 1967, Vancouver). Farmer is known for the epic scale and scope of his projects that are often developed over extended periods of time and remain in ongoing states of transformation. As part of the exhibition along with his recent paper works, a new major film work will be presented: a computer controlled montage of thousands of images rescued from a discarded clipping library. Organized by Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator, Geoffrey Farmer is on view through July 17, 2016.

In Farmer’s recent works, processions of figures assembled from fragments of book and magazine photography and illustration manifest the artist’s interest in the cross-pollination of historical and vernacular imagery. Each spectacular composition begins to chart the historical contours of our image-saturated contemporary culture, and suggest the 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.
 
Three large-scale works create the foundation for the exhibition. Boneyard (2013) uses photographs as a sculptural material, and it most directly addresses the relationship between photography and the history of sculpture. Boneyard is comprised of over 1,200 photographs of sculptures removed from an Italian sculptural history folio, ranging from 10 AD to the 1970s. Farmer deploys each exactingly incised figure in the round, creating unexpected historical and thematic groupings and perspectives.  The genres of Western art history, and their attendant cultural influences, march by, creating both a condensed and exploded view into the physical, material expressions of history and their photographic reproduction.
 
The Surgeon and the Photographer (2009-13) is comprised of 365 handmade figures, each a highly individual assemblage made from photographs and fabric. When Farmer heard that an important used bookstore in his native Vancouver would be going out of business, he bought hundreds of books from their inventory. Considering the relationship between the book, and the hand, he devised an installation of hundreds of hand puppet-like figures fabricated from the inventory of images culled from the purchased books.  Presented in clusters resembling social groupings, the figures evoke strange processions and gatherings, and the almost magical aura of photography in the 20th century.
 
Finally, Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been; I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell (2013) is a hypnotic computer-generated projected montage of over 15,000 images originally comprised of part of a rescued clipping library and now expanded to incorporate photographic archives for this constantly changing, expanding film. Combined with an archive of sounds, this spell-binding work offers a trans-historical, trans-cultural trip through the world as captured by photographs in the last hundred and fifty years. Each image and sound is tagged with various categories that the computer program brings together different sequences of affinity every time it’s shown. The “movie” is never the same.  In many ways, Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been; I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell, gets to the heart of Farmer’s animation and re-presentation of history through its photographic record, the driving forces in this recent body of work.
 
A full-color exhibition publication, designed by graphic designer Chad Kloepfer in close collaboration with the artist, will take a non-traditional form, inspired by the assembled paper works.
 
About Geoffrey Farmer
Geoffrey Farmer was born in 1967 in Vancouver, Canada, where he continues to live and work.  He studied at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. US solo exhibitions include two shows with Casey Kaplan, New York (2011, 2014), and the recent presentation of a single large scale-work, Let’s Make the Water Turn Black, at Perez Art Museum Miami (2014), (also presented at Migros Museum, Zurich; Nottingham Contemporary; and Kunstverein, Hamburg), as well as exhibitions at REDCAT in LA (2011, the first showing of Let’s Make the Water Turn Black); and Western Bridge, Seattle (2010). Farmer has had multiple solo shows in Canada; In addition to his 2015 mid-career survey How Do I Fit This Ghost In My Mouth? at the Vancouver Art Gallery, he has exhibited the Art Gallery of Ontario (2014); Mercer Union, Toronto (2013); the Banff Center, Banff (2010); National Gallery of Canada Ottawa (2009); Musee d’art contemporain de Montreal (2009) and Contemporary Art Gallery of Vancouver (2002). European Solo Exhibitions have taken place at The Barbican, London (2013); Project Arts Centre, Dublin (2011); Witte de With, Rotterdam (2008); the Tate Modern, London (2007); as well as an important contribution to dOCUMENTA (13) Kassel, Germany (2012).
 

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(Boston, MA —- Dec. 2, 2015) This February, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens a comprehensive survey of the artist Walid Raad (b. 1967, Lebanon), a pivotal figure in contemporary art whose work investigates the ways in which we represent, remember, and make sense of history. Walid Raad, on view from Feb. 24 through May 30, brings together over 200 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. Walid Raad, which originated at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, is organized by Eva Respini, the ICA’s Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Katerina Stathopoulou, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.  Following its presentation in Boston, the exhibition will travel to the Museo Jumex, Mexico City (Oct. 13, 2016–Jan.14, 2017).
 
The exhibition focuses on two of the artist’s long-term projects: The Atlas Group (1989–2004) and Scratching on things I could disavow (2007–ongoing).  These two distinct projects are united by the question: How does war affect bodies, minds, and cultures?

Under the rubric of The Atlas Group, a 15-year project exploring the contemporary history of Lebanon, Raad produced photographs, videotapes, notebooks, and lectures that related imaginary stories. The stories were inspired in part by real events and extensive research in Lebanon’s various archives and elsewhere.

Raad’s recent work has expanded to address the Middle East region at large. His ongoing project Scratching on things I could disavow examines the recent emergence in the Arab world of new infrastructures for the visual arts—art fairs, biennials, museums, and galleries—alongside the geopolitical, economic, and military conflicts that have consumed the region in the past few decades.

The exhibition also features a series of live, in-gallery performances by Raad (see description and dates below). 

The Atlas Group (1989-2004)
It was with The Atlas Group that Raad established the brilliantly daring artistic methodology that he employs to this day. The project was established in Beirut in 1989 to preserve, study, and produce audio, visual, literary, and other documents that shed light on Lebanon’s history. Each of The Atlas Group documents is attributed to a source who, like the organization, is fictional. None of the “documents” produced by The Atlas Group is wholly imaginary: these photographs, texts, and videos are borrowed from original sources, such as newspapers, or from Raad’s own street photography. But when Raad rephoto­graphs or scans them and mediates their presentation through story lines, literary titles, narrative wall texts, and engaging performances, they move into the imaginary realm. Raad calls these hybrids “hysterical documents.”

The Atlas Group’s various characters are all seemingly involved in absurdly exhaustive tasks like recording sunsets (I only wish that I could weep, 1997/2002) or locating every car bomb detonated during the civil war (My neck is thinner than a hair: Engines, 1996–2001). Violence is rarely pictured in The Atlas Group archive, which focuses instead on peripheral details like the purported gambling habits of fictional historians during the civil war (Notebook volume 72: Missing Lebanese wars, 1989/1998).

A number of The Atlas Group works are attributed to Dr. Fadl Fakhouri, including Notebook volume 72: Missing Lebanese wars, Notebook volume 38: Already been in a lake of fire (199½003), and Miraculous beginnings/No, illness is neither here nor there (1993/2003). Dr. Fakhouri, an esteemed, recently deceased, imaginary historian of the Lebanese wars whose papers were donated to The Atlas Group, lends the project authenticity. Civilizationally, we do not dig holes to bury ourselves (1958–59/2003), is a series of small black-and-white photographs purportedly taken by the scholar during his first and only trip to Europe, in the late 1950s. These self-portraits capture the lone Fakhouri lounging in hotel rooms, reading in cafés, and viewing the tourist sites of Paris and Rome. The images, repurposed from family snapshots, actually feature Raad’s father.
 
Let’s be honest, the weather helped (1998/2006) comprises images of notebook pages featuring black-and-white photographs that Raad himself took in Beirut during and after the civil war. These images of pockmarked buildings and bombed-out neighborhoods are overlaid with different-sized colored disks that map bullets and shrapnel, again collected by Raad after bombings and battles when he was a child in Beirut. The colors are linked to the national origins of the ammunitions and form a more expressive and poetic image, rather than one that is purely meant to document. The weather, referenced in the title of the work, is a recurring motif in The Atlas Group; the banal staple of small talk, it is neutral, unpredictable, and acts as an equalizer, circumscribing the direct address of violence.

In making his own documents, along with their accompanying narratives, Raad has created the documents that he felt these experiences and situations deserved; the documents he wished someone had created all along.

Scratching on things I could disavow (2007-)

Scratching on things I could disavow, which Raad began in 2007, is an interrelated series of photographs, videos, sculptures, installations, and performances. While each of the series within this larger body of work stands individually, taken together they constitute an examination of how art history is being forged within the new infrastructures for art in the Arab world.  Why are the Sheikhs and Sheikhas in the Arabian/Persian Gulf building massive new museums?  To answer this question, Raad visited and documented the emerging museums, galleries, art fairs, and public collections, and found himself asking another question: How has art in the Arab world been affected physically and otherwise by the wars of the past century?

Scratching on things I could disavow is marked by narratives of absence and withdrawal—the shrinking of works of art, for instance, or empty museum spaces with un-enterable doorways. In this body of work, Raad seems more like the narrator of a play, creating scenarios wherein works of art are no longer fully available to be seen, read, or experienced.
 
Blank walls, polished floors, and empty doorways become active players in Section 88: Views from outer to inner compartments (2010 and 2015), the title of both a video and a sculptural installation. Raad devised a set of doorways that are fashioned from wood and mimic the architectural style of Western museums of the 19th century. This set-like quality is enhanced in the ICA display with theatrical lighting that casts strong shadows. 
 
Another work, Section 139: The Atlas Group (1989–2004), also uses museum architecture and infrastructure in innovative ways.  This work—a maquette of a never-realized Atlas Group retrospective— recognizes the need for new modes of display and content formation in areas with histories of conflict and trauma. In Section 139, Raad has faithfully re-created his own artworks, down to the videos, which play in a model-size version of a white-cube gallery space. The accompanying text explains that in 2008, after agreeing to exhibit in a chic new gallery in Beirut (in the neighborhood of Karantina, site of one of the deadliest massacres of the Lebanese Civil War), Raad found that his works had become inaccessible to him, shrunk down to 1/100th of their original size.  
 
Scratching on things I could disavow encompasses an entire constellation of the ephemera that accompany the production and display of art in today’s accelerated art economy. Appendix XVIII: Plates 22–257 (2008–14) is a series of photographs drawn from documents of real exhibitions and art activities in the Arab world: books, catalogues, posters, invoices, and invitations. One such work in the series, Plates 22–24: A History of Venice IV (2009), is drawn from promotional materials for the Lebanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of 2007, the first time Lebanon was represented with its own national pavilion there.
 
Performance is the central axis around which Scratching on things I could disavow revolves—indeed the overall body of work includes a perfor­mance, Walkthrough. Scheduled regularly throughout the run of the ICA exhibition, Walkthrough takes the form of a gallery talk, accommodating 40 visitors who sit on the stools that the museum’s educators use to seat attendees at their lectures. Raad’s presentation style ranges from sober investigator to psychotic telepath, as he recounts some of the economic and ideological motives behind the cultural boom in the Middle East, but also some of the fantastical situations he found himself in along the way.

Performance Schedule
 
Tickets are required for the Walkthrough performance. A limited number of same-day performance tickets will be available at the museum on a first-come, first-serve basis. The performance is 55 minutes long and is free with museum admission.

Wednesday, February 24, 2PM
Thursday, February 25, 7PM
Thursday, March 17, 6PM 
Friday, March 18, 1PM
Saturday, April 9, 2PM
Sunday, April 10, 2PM
Thursday, May 12, 7PM
Friday, May 13, 1PM
Saturday, May 14, 2PM
                                              
About the artist
Walid Raad was born in 1967 in Chbanieh, Lebanon. In 1983, he left Beirut for the United States, where he attended high school and college. Raad enrolled at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he studied photography and Middle Eastern studies and earned his PhD in visual and cultural studies from the University of Rochester. Raad frequently returns to Lebanon, and is deeply involved in the artistic community there. He currently lives in New York, and has been an Associate Professor of Art at The Cooper Union since 2002. Recent exhibitions of Raad’s work in Europe have been met with enthusiasm and critical accolades. Solo exhibitions have been held at Museo Madre, Naples (2014), Carré d’Art, Nimes (2014), the Louvre, Paris (2013), Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg, (2011), Kunsthalle Zürich (2011), Whitechapel Gallery, London (2010), and Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2006).
 
Catalogue
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated 192-page scholarly publication with a major essay by the exhibition curator Eva Respini, and contributions by art historian Finbarr Barry Flood and Walid Raad, that surveys nearly three decades of Raad’s practice in a variety of mediums. Essays by Respini and Flood place Raad’s art in the international context of contemporary art making, and a special eighteen-page visual contribution by Raad provides insight into his practice. 192 pages, 216 illustrations.
 
This exhibition is organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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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 of Walid Raad is generously provided by Jean-François and Nathalie Ducrest.

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!

The Gropius House

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 Josef Albers Fireplace at Harvard Law

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. 

Buckminster Fuller’s Grave

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.”

Robert Creeley’s Grave

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.

 

 

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.

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 +  bus.png.

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!

Materials Needed

(Use what you have on hand already.)

  • Paper (unlined or lined papers of all kinds are fine!) including practice paper
  • Pencils and erasers
  • Drawing tools and coloring materials (crayons, color pencils, markers, pens, gel pens, etc.)
  • Envelopes and stamps (to mail your rebus message!)

Directions

  1. Using practice paper and a pencil, write out in words what you want your message to say.
  2. Then brainstorm the ways you can change some of the words in your message using symbols and pictures. (Hint: Words like “and” already have a symbol to represent them:  “&.”  Words like “the” or “at” can be written out in letters. There’s no “wrong” way to create a rebus message, you can decide!)
  3. Once your first copy is complete, work using another piece of paper to turn your message into a rebus! (You may also choose to write a letter, story, poem, or sign using the rebus style.)  For example, your parent might create this sign:

    bee.png  + brave and bee.png  + have!
     

  4. OPTIONAL: Use an envelope and a stamp to mail your letter if you choose. Invite the person to whom you send your rebus message to create a rebus response message and mail it to you.

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


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