get tickets

Advance tickets are now available for visits through September 1. Book now

(Boston, MA—July 29, 2022)—The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) announces the promotion of Ruth Erickson to Mannion Family Senior Curator. In her new position, Erickson will take an expanded role developing the curatorial vision for the ICA’s exhibition and collection program as well as shaping conversations around community partnerships.  

 “I am thrilled to announce Ruth’s promotion to Mannion Family Senior Curator at the ICA,” said Eva Respini, the ICA’s Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs and Barbara Lee Chief Curator. “This new role recognizes Ruth’s extraordinary work and leadership on our curatorial team, including an impressive—and ongoing—run of exhibitions and continued oversight of the museum’s growing collection.”

Erickson’s upcoming exhibitions for the ICA include the major October exhibition To Begin Again: Artists and Childhood, the first thematic group exhibition in the U.S. to explore the influence of children and childhood on the practice of visual artists, and a new commission by Barbara Kruger for the museum’s Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall opening in November. Her group exhibition Revival: Materials and Monumental Forms is currently on view at the ICA Watershed, the museum’s project space in East Boston.

After serving as a Research Fellow for Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-57 and receiving her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Pennsylvania, Erickson joined the museum as Assistant Curator in 2014 and was promoted to Associate Curator in 2016 and Mannion Family Curator in 2017. In her time at the ICA, Erickson has organized 18 exhibitions, including the major thematic group exhibition When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art (2019), a significant artist survey and publication Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 21st-Century Naturalist, as well as solo artist presentations of Vivian Suter (2021), Wangechi Mutu (2018) Kevin Beasley (2018), Ethan Murrow (2015), and the trio Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian (2015). She additionally contributes to growing the ICA’s collection, coordinating the Collections and Exhibitions Committee, and overseeing the digitization of the collection. In 2021, Erickson was a fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership.

About the ICA/Boston

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. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at icaboston.org. Follow the ICA on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.   

Media contact: Margaux Leonard, press@icaboston.org

Sweeping survey of 20th and 21st century art features work by Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Francis Alÿs, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jordan Casteel, Paul Klee, Glenn Ligon, Oscar Murillo, Faith Ringgold, and more

(Boston, MA—July 26, 2022) On October 6, 2022, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens To Begin Again: Artists and Childhood, the first thematic group exhibition in the U.S. to explore the influence of children and childhood on the practice of visual artists. Years in the making, this groundbreaking exhibition examines how childhood is an important yet undervalued subject in the history of art. It begins with the observation that artists have long been inspired by children—by their imagination, creativity, and unique ways of seeing and being in the world—and explores how artists grapple with timely issues of creativity, risk, power, care, labor, and learning through their engagement with childhood. Featuring 40 artists—including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paul Klee, Glenn Ligon, and Faith Ringgold—To Begin Again is comprised of more than 75 artworks, including painting, sculpture, photography, installation, video, and over 20 works made by young people. Using unique exhibition design and didactics, the exhibition brings awareness to the range of ways that different people experience art in museums. To Begin Again is organized by Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Senior Curator, with Jeffrey De Blois, Associate Curator and Publications Manager, and will be on view October 6, 2022 through February 26, 2023.

“This is an exciting exhibition with a range of art that explores the influence of children on visual artists from Paul Klee and Jean-Michel Basquiat to Jordan Casteel and Sable Elyse Smith. Presenting a diverse array of artworks spanning time, geography, generations, and cultures, To Begin Again crafts an important narrative about modernism, innocence, and the institutional structures surrounding childhood,” said Jill Medvedow, the ICA’s Ellen Matilda Poss Director. “Through focused approaches to accessibility and design—including tiered reading levels, lower hanging heights, interactive drawing and reading spaces, and special programs—the exhibition highlights the museum as an intergenerational gathering place, where visitors of all ages and backgrounds can enjoy the critical pleasures of art, learning, and reflection together.”

“The artworks in To Begin Again demonstrate how artists have reflected on and contributed to notions of childhood: they may depict children or involve them as collaborators, represent or mimic their ways of drawing or telling stories, highlight their unique cultures, or negotiate ideas of innocence and spontaneity associated with young people,” said Erickson.

Though artists have been inspired by children for millennia, the works in To Begin Again offer distinctive viewpoints and experiences, revealing how time and place, economics and race, and representation and aesthetics fundamentally shape how we experience and understand childhood. Themes explored in the exhibition include representing childhood, drawing and the creative capacities of children, books and storytelling, dynamics of power, caretaking, and forms of learning. To Begin Again includes historical and contemporary artwork made by young people from across the globe, in different configurations. The exhibition underscores that while there is no single, uniform idea of childhood, it is nevertheless the ground upon which so much of society is built, negotiated, and imagined.

To Begin Again features several recently commissioned works and unique iterations of existing projects. Brian Belott’s newly reimagined installation Dr. Kid President Jr. (2022) includes selections from the massive collection of children’s art assembled by the early childhood educator and psychologist Rhoda Kellogg and his own “failed” copies of the children’s art, staging a dialogue that invites closer reflection on the aesthetic and communicative qualities of children’s drawings and mark-making. Carmen Winant’s new large-scale installation What it is like to be (2022) assembles more than 300 instructional books intended for young people on a wide variety of subjects, from geography to ceramics. Her project traces the capacity of books and their images to travel, to teach outside of language, and to have unintended lives. Oscar Murillo’s Frequencies project (2013–ongoing) totals more than 40,000 canvases, each made by installing a blank canvas on a classroom desk and leaving it in place for a few months. Described by Murillo and his collaborators as inserting a free space for self-expression into the school, the installations have taken place in more than 30 countries throughout the world, generating a vast collection that registers the presence and creativity of students. In To Begin Again, this iteration of Frequencies includes a collaboration with members of the ICA’s Teen Arts Council, who selected canvases from the archive which will be presented on a video monitor within Murillo’s installation.

The exhibition is divided into six thematic sections: “Among Children,” “Draw Like a Child,” “The Page Is a World,” “Born into Being,” “Gestures of Care,” and “After School.”

Among Children

Sculptors today have employed the child figure to generate representations of childhood in rich and varied ways, registering experiences of joy, play, creativity, vulnerability, and resilience that reinvent centuries-old forms and motifs. Conjuring the presence of children and their interior lives, the sculptures included in this section stage encounters between the viewer and the child figure. They negotiate the power of scale and perception, and they become containers for hopes, beliefs, fears, and ideas about humanity. This section includes artworks by John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres, Karon Davis, Duane Hanson, Tau Lewis, Berenice Olmedo, and Charles Ray.

Draw Like a Child

Artists have long sought to imitate, incorporate, or investigate “child-like” drawings in their own work.  Children’s evolving ability to communicate is a fundamental aspect of their development, and within this uneven process, contemporary artists have discovered immense potential for invention and collaboration. Capturing an enduring interest in the expressive and creative capacities of children, this section features artworks by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Brian Belott, Allan Rohan Crite, Mary Kelly, Paul Klee, Helen Levitt, Glenn Ligon, Rivane Neuenschwander, and Sable Elyse Smith. Visitors are invited to make their own drawings at an interactive drawing table included in this section.

The Page Is a World

Just as books shape the lives of children, the vast world of children’s literature has also affected artists. Since the twentieth century, illustrated books intended for young people have offered platforms to innovatively explore relationships between word and image, and provided source material for artists to articulate their own novel visions and worlds. The page has offered artists and children a tremendously rich space for reflecting the world and imagining it anew. This section features works by Henry Darger, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Ekua Holmes, Faith Ringgold, Rachel Rose, and Becky Suss, as well as an interactive reading room—developed in conversation with librarians from Boston Public Schools, Boston Public Library, and a children’s book author—that will invite visitors of all ages to explore the world of children’s literature as a site of significant artistic production.

Born into Being

Dynamics of power—and attendant issues of disenfranchisement and agency—shape the experiences of children from the moment of their birth. Those dynamics are sometimes apparent, but at other times and in other places, they are invisible yet inform conceptions of childhood. This section includes artworks by Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Robert Gober, Mona Hatoum, Sharon Hayes, Deborah Roberts, Heji Shin, and Sable Elyse Smith. These artists give form to the complex processes of becoming, attending to the structures that empower and marginalize young people.

Gestures of Care

Numerous artists reflect on the practical and intangible needs of children and the many individuals who meet those needs, often with an extended hand or a warm embrace. This section considers the figure of the mother in dialogue with fathers, siblings, peers, and domestic workers, highlighting questions of labor and visibility. Featuring artworks by Ann Agee, Jordan Casteel, Lenka Clayton, Ramiro Gomez (now Jay Lynn Gomez), Justine Kurland, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Cathy Wilkes, this section invites us to reconsider caretaking as an act shared in communion rather than the labor of an individual.

After School

Models of learning sometimes appear at the margins of institutions and sanctioned structures, and often involve the imagination of artists and children collaborating. The distinct projects in this section of the exhibition illuminate unexpected paths of learning and the unique competencies of children and artists in navigating them. They also reveal the breadth of expression, play, and knowledge generated by and for children, reminding us that there are as many childhoods as there are children. This section includes artworks by Francis Alÿs, Oscar Murillo, Tim Rollins and K.O.S., and Carmen Winant.  

Artist list

Ann Agee (b. 1959, Philadelphia)
John Ahearn (b. 1952, Binghamton, New York) and Rigoberto Torres (b. 1960, Aguadilla, Puerto Rico)
Njideka Akunyili Crosby (b. 1983, Enugu, Nigeria)
Francis Alÿs (b. 1959, Antwerp, Belgium)
Jean-Michel Basquiat (b. 1960, Brooklyn, New York; d. 1988, New York)
Brian Belott (b. 1973, East Orange, New Jersey)
Jordan Casteel (b. 1989, Denver)
Lenka Clayton (b. 1977, Cornwall, United Kingdom)
Allan Rohan Crite (b. 1910, North Plainfield, New Jersey; d. 2007, Boston)
Henry Darger (b. 1892, Chicago; d. 1973, Chicago)
Karon Davis (b. 1977, Reno, Nevada)
Robert Gober (b. 1954, Wallingford, Connecticut)
Jay Lynn Gomez (b. 1986, San Bernardino, California)
Trenton Doyle Hancock (b. 1974, Oklahoma City)
Duane Hanson (b. 1925, Alexandria, Minnesota; d. 1996, Boca Raton, Florida)
Mona Hatoum (b. 1952, Beirut)
Sharon Hayes (b. 1970, Baltimore)
Ekua Holmes (b. 1955, Roxbury, Massachusetts)
Mary Kelly (b. 1941, Fort Dodge, Iowa)
Paul Klee (b. 1879, Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland; d. 1940, Muralto, Switzerland)
Justine Kurland (b. 1969, Warsaw, New York)
Helen Levitt (b. 1913, Brooklyn, New York; d. 2009, New York)
Tau Lewis (b. 1993, Toronto)
Glenn Ligon (b. 1960, New York)
Oscar Murillo (b. 1986, Valle del Cauca, Colombia)
Rivane Neuenschwander (b. 1967, Belo Horizonte, Brazil)
Berenice Olmedo (b. 1987, Oaxaca, Mexico)
Charles Ray (b. 1953, Chicago)
Faith Ringgold (b. 1930, Harlem)
Deborah Roberts (b. 1962, Austin, Texas)
Tim Rollins and K.O.S. (b. 1955, Pittsfield, Maine; d. 2017, New York)
Rachel Rose (b. 1986, New York)
Heji Shin (b. 1983, Seoul)
Sable Elyse Smith (b. 1986, Los Angeles)
Becky Suss (b. 1980, Philadelphia)
Mierle Laderman Ukeles (b. 1939, Denver)
Cathy Wilkes (b.1966, Belfast, Northern Ireland)
Carmen Winant (b. 1983, San Francisco)

Catalogue

A fully-illustrated, scholarly catalogue edited by Jeffrey De Blois and Ruth Erickson accompanies the exhibition featuring the voices and perspectives of a variety of artists, scholars, and writers, including: Joshua Bennett, writer and Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College; Anna Craycroft, multidisciplinary artist; Jeffrey De Blois, the ICA’s Associate Curator and Publications Manager and supporting curator; Ruth Erickson, the ICA’s Mannion Family Senior Curator and curator; Anne Higonnet, Professor of Art History at Barnard College of Columbia University; Naima J. Keith, curator and Vice President of Education and Public Programs at Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Valeria Luiselli, writer; Oscar Murillo, artist; Sable Elyse Smith, artist and Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University; Mierle Laderman Ukeles, artist; Carmen Winant, artist and Roy Lichtenstein Chair of Studio Art at Ohio State University. The catalogue is co-published by the ICA and DelMonico Books • D.A.P.

Exhibition-related programs

The Artist’s Voice: Deborah Roberts
Thursday, October 27, 7 PM

Roberts will be in conversation with Erickson. More information will be available soon on icaboston.org.

Art Lab with Elisa Hamilton
Opening Date: Saturday, October 1

The Bank of America Art Lab will feature an installation by Elisa Hamilton, a Boston-based multimedia artist. The Art Lab will be open every Saturday and Sunday from 12-4 PM. Activities are drop-in and first-come, first-serve with limited capacity. More information will be available soon on icaboston.org.

Play Date
Saturday, October 29

Join us for a day of family fun and drop-in for an art-making activity with Bank of America Art Lab artist Elisa Hamilton. Explore exhibitions in the galleries, engage in activities designed for families with kids to work on together. Pull up a seat for the return of Books & Looks, live storybook readings throughout the galleries! All activities are drop-in and first-come, first-serve with limited capacity. Request free admission tickets online in advance. More information will be available soon on icaboston.org. Please note: During Play Dates, museum admission is free for families when accompanied by kids ages 12 and under, with up to 2 adults per family. Timed entry tickets are required, and advance reservations are strongly recommended. Day-of tickets are not guaranteed.

Advisory group

In October 2021, with support from the Radcliffe Institute of Advance Study at Harvard University, Erickson and Dr. Anne Higonnet, Professor of Art History, Barnard College of Columbia University, organized an exploratory seminar titled Access Points: Children, Artists, and Museums. This seminar brought together a focused group of scholars, educators, curators, and artists from a range of disciplines to explore how museums offer young audiences access points to the objects and ideas they present. Focused on To Begin Again, the group brainstormed exhibition design, interpretation, engagement, and programs, and many of these individuals have continued as advisors to the project. This group includes: Robin Bernstein, Dillon Professor of American History, Harvard University; Allison Curseen, Assistant Professor of English, Boston College; Clara Dublanc, Director, Itinerant Works; Marah Gubar, Associate Professor of Literature, MIT; Laura Koenig, Team Leader for Children’s Services at the Central Library of the Boston Public Library; Francie Latour, writer, editor, and founder of Wee the People; Robin Meisner, Director of Child Development at Boston Children’s Museum; Camille Owens, Junior Fellow, Harvard Society of Fellows; Vivian Poey, Professor of Photography, Lesley University; Liz Phipps-Soeiro, Director of Boston Public School Libraries; Siddhartha V. Shah, Director of Education and Civic Engagement, Curator of South Asian Art, Peabody Essex Museum; Vita Murrow, author; and Ellen Winner, Professor of Psychology, Boston College.

Press preview and special family event

Media previews are available by appointment beginning Wednesday, October 5; please contact Margaux Leonard at press@icaboston.org to schedule. 

On Saturday, October 15, the ICA will host a family-friendly press event including an exhibition tour by the curators, and a special art-making activity led by Boston-based artist Elisa Hamilton highlighting her installation in the Bank of America Art Lab. Please RSVP to press@icaboston.org.

About the ICA 

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.

Acknowledgments

Organized by Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Senior Curator, with Jeffrey De Blois, Associate Curator and Publications Manager. 

Support for To Begin Again: Artists and Childhood is provided by First Republic Bank.

First Republic logo

Additional support generously provided by Kate and Chuck Brizius, Paul and Katie Buttenwieser, Marina Kalb and David Feinberg, Andree LeBoeuf Foundation, Kristen and Kent Lucken, Tristin and Martin Mannion, Erica and Ted Pappendick, and Cynthia and John Reed.

In-kind support of To Begin Again: Artists and Childhood generously provided by Porter Square Books.

Porter Square Books logo

The artist’s first solo museum presentation in Boston features signature ceramic sculptures and new works created for the exhibition

(Boston, MA—July 13, 2022) The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) presents Rose B. Simpson: Legacies, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in Boston. The artistic practice of Rose B. Simpson (b. 1983 in Santa Clara Pueblo, NM) encompasses ceramic sculpture, metal work, performance, installation, writing, and automobile design, offering poignant reflections on the human condition. Legacies is a tightly conceived exhibition featuring 11 of the artist’s ceramic figurative sculptures, including new works on view for the first time. Her ceramic sculptures, which range from intimately scaled works to monumental standing figures, express complex emotional and psychological states, spirituality, women’s strength, and post-apocalyptic visions of the world. Part of a multigenerational, matrilineal lineage of artists working with clay, Simpson connects traditional processes of producing clay pottery with innovative techniques and knowledge of her own place in the world today. Organized by Jeffrey De Blois, Associate Curator and Publications Manager, the exhibition is on view August 11, 2022 through January 29, 2023. 

“Simpson is one of the most compelling voices in contemporary sculpture who consistently asks urgent questions about where we find ourselves in the world today through inventive techniques and materials. We look forward to sharing her powerful work with Boston audiences,” said De Blois. 

For Legacies, Simpson’s signature themes and approaches to working with clay are brought together in an open floor plan presentation of individual figures, pairs, and groupings. These ceramic sculptures often incorporate metal, wood, leather, fabric, jewelry, and reclaimed materials, and are frequently marked with a “+” or an “x,” symbols for direction and protection, respectively. While the works included date back to 2014, the focus is on more recent work, including three new ceramic sculptures created for the exhibition. Heights I (original) (2022) is a small, armless standing figure with a series of cup-like vessels growing upwards from its head, suggesting the impulse to reach for new levels of consciousness. Legacy (2022), the work which gives the exhibition its title, is a two-part mother-daughter sculpture made using a technique Simpson refers to as “slap-slab,” involving repeatedly throwing clay against the floor on a diagonal until it is very thin. Built up of overlapping layers of thin clay, these busts are imbued with a sense of watchful vulnerability conveying the shifting complexities of motherhood as your child grows older. In Brace (2022), two armless leaning figures are locked in an evocative embrace, mutually dependent and tenderly joined together with knotted twine adorned with clay beads.

Many of Simpson’s works, like Legacy, consider intergenerational inheritances, or stand as safeguards against legacies of violence. Genesis Squared (2019), located at the gravitational center of the exhibition, features a mother figure who stands holding her child close to her body with feet planted firmly atop an ornately cut metal pedestal. Another cut-metal plate, depicting an intimate scene of mother and child embracing, balances on top of her head like a crown, as an homage to missing and murdered Indigenous women and to address the impact of the ongoing human rights crisis on the children forced to grow up without their mothers. Root A (2019) is a sentinel-like standing figure with crossed arms poised to safeguard women, native lands, and other vulnerable groups against external threats. Made of red, buff, and white clay, Root A is armed with various tools of survival. The figure’s intricately carved face is fixed atop a menacing blade encircling the shoulders. Suggesting an indomitable figure in a post-apocalyptic landscape, Root A “stand(s) tall,” according to the artist, “for justice, healing, and rehabilitation.”

Through such evocative, tactile forms and materials, each with their own commanding presence, Simpson’s work is intended, as she has said, “to translate our humanity back to ourselves.”

The Artist’s Voice: Rose B. Simpson 
Thursday, September 22, 7 PM

Simpson will be in conversation with De Blois. More information will be available soon on icaboston.org. 

Artist biography

Rose B. Simpson (b. 1983, Santa Clara Pueblo, NM) has a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Art, a MFA from Rhode Island School of Design, and a MA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts. She has had recent solo exhibitions at the Wheelwright Museum (Santa Fe, NM), the Nevada Art Museum (Reno, NV), SCAD Museum of Art (Savannah, GA), and University of New Mexico Art Museum (Albuquerque, NM). In the past year, her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including at MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA), The Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland, OH), the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley, CA), and The Bronx Museum of Arts (New York). Her work is in many museum collections, including the Denver Art Museum, ICA/Boston, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Portland Art Museum (OR), Princeton University Art Museum, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Simpson lives and works on the Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico. Counterculture, a new large-scale public artwork by Simpson will be on view at Field Farm in Williamstown from June 18 — November 30, 2022 as part of The Trustees’ Art & The Landscape public art series. 

About the ICA 

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.

Rose B. Simpson: Legacies is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

SPONSOR_NEA extra padding v2

Additional support is generously provided by Karen and Brian Conway, Steve Corkin and Dan Maddalena, Bridgitt and Bruce Evans, Kim Sinatra, Charlotte and Herbert S. Wagner III, and the Jennifer Epstein Fund for Women Artists.

The artist’s first solo exhibition in Boston features a selection of intricate embroidered and mixed media works that explore ideas of home, land, and memory 

(Boston, MA—July 13, 2022) On August 11, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens Jordan Nassar: Fantasy and Truth, a solo exhibition of the New York-based artist whose multifaceted practice draws on traditional Palestinian craft to investigate ideas of home, land, and memory. As a self-taught artist, Nassar (b. 1985 in New York) is mostly known for his use of Palestinian tatreez, a matrilineal tradition of cross-stitching. In collaboration with a Palestinian embroidery collective based in the West Bank, the artist composes his embroideries from numerous individually made panels that together weave breathtaking, layered panoramas suggestive of an expansive sky or a boundless horizon. Fantasy and Truth presents the artist’s largest embroidered panels to date, alongside recent work in wood and glass mixed media. Organized by Anni Pullagura, Curatorial Assistant, the exhibition is on view August 11, 2022 through January 29, 2023. 

“Nassar’s work, with its complex patterning and painterly attention to form and color, elevates our understanding of craft traditions as long-standing and deeply meaningful forms of art. We look forward to sharing his work with audiences in Boston for the first time,” said Pullagura. 

Tatreez is a tradition deeply rooted in the history and culture of Palestine. Since 1948, it has become closely tied to ideas of nostalgia, nationality, and heritage. Colors, patterns, and designs could distinguish a wearer both by where they were from as well as their social or familial status, or signal different stages of life. Nassar grew up with many of these motifs in his household, and began incorporating tatreez into his practice after meeting with women-led embroidery collectives in Ramallah, Hebron, and Bethlehem, with whom he now collaborates on some of his artworks. 

Presented across the gallery space, the embroidered works offer visions of homelands at monumental scale. Nassar’s largest works to date—Song of the Flowers (2022) and Lament of the Field (2022)—are each composed of fifty-seven individual panels in richly varied warm and cool colors, introducing familiar motifs and patterns in an arrangement that together suggests a sun rising over a blue mountain or a moon shining across a red valley. Recalling the fragmentation of memory, time, history, and place, the panels individual language and collective dialogue offer a poetic remark on ideas of fantasy and truth. The exhibition title, as well as the titles of the two large-scale embroideries, draw from the poetry collection A Tear and A Smile (1914) by Lebanese writer Gibran Khalil Gibran (1883–1931), whose melancholic poetics address the ebb and flow of memory and history. Similarly, for Nassar, embroidery holds a tension between conflict and harmony in the relationship between stitch and thread, color and pattern. 

“I like to discuss these landscapes as versions of Palestine as they exist in the minds of the diaspora, who have never been there and can never go there,” shares Nassar. “They are the Palestine I heard stories about growing up, half-made of imagination. They are dreamlands and utopias that are colorful and fantastical—beautiful and romantic, but bittersweet.” 

In recent years, Nassar has expanded his practice to include glass and wood-based crafts. The ICA exhibition features glassworks in which the artist has arranged hand-flamed glass beads in a steel armature, similar to decorative latticework. In the wood pieces on display, Nassar has layered the natural grains of the wood with brass and mother of pearl to create richly inlaid surfaces; these designs recur in the artist-made benches also created for this exhibition. 

Retail 

The ICA Store has partnered with Nassar and his clothing brand Adish to develop an exclusive capsule collection available only at the ICA featuring a limited edition embroidered hooded sweatshirt, tote bag, poster, and more. Visit icastore.org for more information. 

Artist biography 

Jordan Nassar (b.1985, New York, NY) earned his B.A. at Middlebury College in 2007. His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions globally at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Asia Society, New York, NY; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ; Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY; Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY; KMAC Museum, Louisville, KY; Center for Contemporary Art (CCA) Tel Aviv; Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA; James Cohan, New York and The Third Line, Dubai, UAE. His work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Rollins Museum of Art, Florida; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; The Museum of Contemporary Art, California; and Rhode Island School of Design Museum, in Rhode Island, among others. 

About the ICA 

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.

Support for Jordan Nassar: Fantasy and Truth is generously provided by Oliver and Negin Ewald.