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First solo presentation in a U.S. museum of the highly acclaimed video installation

(Boston, MA—February 8, 2022) On March 31, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) will open Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca: Swinguerra, a recent acquisition and room-filling, immersive video installation. Swinguerra (2019) is a 21-minute, two-channel video work that focuses on competitive dancers, including transgender and nonbinary performers, in queer communities of color on the outskirts of Recife, Brazil. This will be the first solo presentation of the installation in a U.S. museum since it premiered at the Brazil Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. Organized by Anni Pullagura, Curatorial Assistant, Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca: Swinguerra will be on view through September 5, 2022, concurrent with A Place for Me: Figurative Painting Now, which celebrates a new generation of artists at the vanguard of contemporary painting.

“We are excited to present Swinguerra for the first time since we acquired it for the ICA Collection,” said Jill Medvedow, the ICA’s Ellen Matilda Poss Director. “The dance and music performance is both exhilarating and a necessary perspective on contemporary Brazilian culture during a time of substantial social and political tension.”

Swinguerra features three contemporary dance styles—swingueira, brega funk, and passinho da maloca—as performed by three competitive dance groups. These mixed dance styles recall Brazil’s colonial and slave trade history, where music and dance functioned as discreet methods of organizing politically under oppressive regimes and in the wake of ongoing social and gender-based violence. The film, whose title fuses two words: swingueira, the dance style, and guerra, the Portuguese word for war or struggle, exceeds genres of documentary and fiction to forward a fluid, narrative experience of movement, choreography, and ideas of self-expression. Fast-paced, athletic, sexy, dreamlike, and aggressive, these dance styles make Swinguerra an exhilarating and unforgettable viewing experience, illustrating how dance and music offer rich sources of agency, resistance, and community.

Collaborating since 2011, Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca create works in video and installation that explore contemporary histories of underground dance and musical genres. Frequently made in collaboration with cinematographer Pedro Sotero, these moving-image works, which they refer to as “documentary musicals,” often center on the South Atlantic diaspora, from the Franco-Indo creole musical genre maloya to frevo dancers and brega singers. Constructing their films collaboratively with the performers, their approach merges the cinematic with the fictional, documentary, and ethnographic to address questions of surveillance, visibility, and creativity in an increasingly connected, postcolonial world.

“Swinguerra explores how these performers use dance and music to create spaces of representation and resistance within larger political systems. The artists’ practice is rooted in a philosophy of collaboration: they frequently work over several years on a project with both the subjects of their films and with colleagues. The collaborative nature of their work means they are very intentional about letting people speak and perform for themselves, foregrounding a celebration of self-possessed knowledge and agency,” said Pullagura. 

About the Artists

Working collaboratively since 2011, Wagner & de Burca have shown in exhibitions, biennials and film festivals, including: the 33rd, 35th Panorama de Arte Brasileira, the 32nd São Paulo Biennial, the 20th Festival de Arte Contemporânea Sesc VideoBrasil (São Paulo, Brazil); the 36th EVA International (Limerick, Ireland); the 5th Skulptur Projekte (Münster, Germany); the 67th, 68th, 69th Berlin International Film Festival (Germany); and the 72nd Locarno International Film Festival (Switzerland). In 2020 they took part in Manifesta, the European Nomadic Biennial. In 2019, Wagner & de Burca represented Brazil at the 58th Venice Biennial and unveiled solo presentations at Jumex Museum (Mexico City, Mexico) and the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, Holland). Their work can be found in collections such as: ICA/Boston (Boston, USA), Kadist Art Foundation (France), Museu de Arte de São Paulo (Masp) and Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM) (São Paulo, Brazil), Pérez Art Museum, (Miami, USA), and Arts Council of Ireland, among others. The artists are represented by Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

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. 

Credit
Swinguerra was acquired through the generosity of the General Acquisition Fund, Fotene and Tom Coté Art Acquisition Fund, and Anonymous Art Acquisition Fund. 

(Boston, MA—February 8, 2022) The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) presents A Place for Me: Figurative Painting Now, an exhibition that celebrates a new generation of artists at the vanguard of contemporary painting. David Antonio Cruz, Louis Fratino, Doron Langberg, Aubrey Levinthal, Gisela McDaniel, Arcmanoro Niles, Celeste Rapone, and Ambera Wellmann are leading figurative painting’s recent revival by depicting what they love—their friends, lovers, and family; studio spaces and homes; and the scenes that make up their everyday. Organized by Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Curator, with Anni Pullagura, Curatorial Assistant, A Place for Me: Figurative Painting Now will be on view March 31 through September 5, 2022, concurrent with Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca: Swinguerra.

Colorful, surprising, and full of life, A Place for Me is a testament to the vitality of contemporary figurative art, reflecting a multitude of styles and approaches to painting through a cross-section of contemporary painting today. Evoking intimacy, community, and the personal in the power to represent oneself in painting, these eight artists claim space for Black, Indigenous, brown, and queer life. Through their work, they consider the politics of seeing and being seen and how painting might register care, tenderness, empathy, and resilience. The exhibition features nearly 40 works arranged by artist.

“Portraiture has historically been a way that people in positions of power represent and memorialize their authority and positions within society,” said Jill Medvedow the ICA’s Ellen Matilda Poss Director. “A Place for Me presents an exuberant selection of paintings by an emerging generation of queer, female, and BIPOC artists and a multiplicity of perspectives on art and identity.”

“Over the last five to 10 years, there has been a remarkable reemergence of figurative painting with a new attention on who is depicted and who is being seen, and a desire through figurative painting to connect with contemporary experience,” said Erickson. “Shedding light on this, A Place for Me considers questions of identity and community and the diverse ways artists are addressing and exploring these themes through painting.”

About the Artists

David Antonio Cruz
David Antonio Cruz (b. 1974 in Philadelphia) is a Boston-based painter and mixed media performance artist who centers the experiences and agency of the Black, brown, and queer sitters who feature in his work. Drawn from life studies made of friends and acquaintances presented in richly varied compositions and palettes, Cruz’s paintings honor what he calls “the celebration of life, of being. Living in the moment and full of life.”

​Louis Fratino 
Louis Fratino (b. 1993 in Annapolis, MD) is a New York-based artist whose work fuses personal memories with art historical references to explore queerness in the gestures of everyday life. The subject matter of his paintings, sculptures, and prints ranges from nude figures to landscapes and still-lifes, through which he searches to represent visually the emotions and expressions of what he has called the “mysticism around painting, where you can manifest something through it, [whether] it’s something as simple as doing the dishes, or being in love with someone, or feeling close to your family.”

​Doron Langberg
Doron Langberg (b. 1985 in Yokneam Moshava, Israel) is a New York-based painter invested in the relationship between queer lived experiences and emotional states that are universal across social categories. Touch, physicality, and movement are significant areas of focus in his vivid paintings, which include portraits of family and friends in his social circle. “I see my work as an aspirational space where queer experiences can embody more than just what they depict,” explains Langberg. “So, my paintings are both a ‘real’ reflection of my everyday experiences, and an alternate reality where queerness is allowed to be expansive and generative.”

​Aubrey Levinthal
Aubrey Levinthal (b. 1986 in Philadelphia) is a Philadelphia-based painter whose work attends to the quotidian register of experience, what she calls the “uncanny in our everyday lives.” Her abstract figurative portraits are charged with an almost melancholic atmosphere, rendered in muted yet vibrant colors and a close attention to detail, evoking less a portrait of her subjects – which range from herself to those in her familial and social circles – than of their emotional states. As Levinthal explains, “I hope my work is a real, tender accounting of my particular visual life. The paintings can be inventive and distorted, as I often work from memory and through process, but I want them to carry resonance of my experience, which happens to be as a painter, woman, and mother.”

​Gisela McDaniel
Gisela McDaniel (b. 1995 in Bellevue, NE) is a Detroit-based diasporic, Indigenous CHamoru artist. Her work, which engages primarily with processes of healing for womxn and non-binary people of color who have survived personal and historical trauma, is composed as mixed-media assemblages based in oil painting and found objects (often donated by her sitters) and accompanied by audio recordings she makes with her sitters during the painting process. “As survivors, we deal with the aftermath of events that remain with us for years and even lifetimes,” reflects the artist. “By recording the stories of these [womxn], I ensure that history hears their voices and recognizes them as having saved themselves.”

​Arcmanoro Niles
Arcmanoro Niles (b. 1989 in Washington, D.C.) is a New York-based artist whose brightly hued paintings offer views of daily life, drawn from his own personal life and featuring characters as “seekers” who reflect subliminal urges and desires. Often incorporating reflective paints and glitter to enliven the surface of his canvases and those depicted, Niles’s intensely rendered compositions feature himself, friends, and family. “A lot of it is pretty intuitive, especially when it comes to the color, the construction of the composition, and how I want it to feel,” shares the artist. “But I think that, at the end of the day, I am a painter who is interested in color and stories that talk about who we are. Little moments that give us a glimpse into what life feels like.”

Celeste Rapone
Celeste Rapone (b. 1985 in Glen Ridge, NJ) is a Chicago-based abstract figurative painter known for illustrations of mostly women subjects—usually the artist herself—in outlandish, impossible, and even humorous compositions. Her style exceeds the traditional expectations and perspectival grounds of her canvas, drawing attention to the dynamic movement, colors, and details layered into her images meant to evoke a range of feelings from anxiety and restriction to vulnerable freedom and potential. “There’s something about the idea of the women contained, occupying these impossible positions anatomically, but also in terms of expectations, ambition, defeat and self-awareness,” shares the artist. “But even if there are sub-narratives occurring in [my] paintings, inherently they are all about trying. That notion of effort or expectation that goes into trying, which tries to counter failure. But failure is always one aspect of a larger cycle, in life and in painting.”

Ambera Wellmann
Ambera Wellmann (b. 1982 in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, Canada), a New York-based artist, explores themes of absurdity, familiarity, and uncertain intimacy in her paintings. Portraying human and, on occasion, animal bodies, commingled into numberless, genderless figures, Wellman’s paintings forgo a dominant, heteronormative Western figurative canon in favor of a distinctly feminist and queered perspective. Interested in visualizing the fluidity of gender and identity expression, Wellmann notes, “There’s this urge sometimes when you’re painting to answer things. I try to avoid that, actually. A painting should end with a question; it helps lead you to the next one.”

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. 

Credit
Support for A Place for Me: Figurative Painting Now is generously provided by Katie and Paul Buttenwieser, Ellen Poss, Stephen Baker and Gavin Kennedy, Patrick Planeta and Santiago Varela, and an anonymous donor.

First major Boston survey of the artist’s works celebrates his influential, 50-year artistic practice

(Boston, MA—January 25, 2022) On February 17, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) will open a solo museum presentation of the work of Napoleon Jones-Henderson (b. 1943, Chicago), the most comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s work in Boston to date. For more than 50 years, Jones-Henderson has created works that strive to highlight, celebrate, and empower the communities where he lives. The artist has been based since 1974 in Roxbury, Massachusetts, where he is an influential community member, educator, and mentor.

Organized by Jeffrey De Blois, the ICA’s Assistant Curator and Publications Manager, in close collaboration with the artist, Napoleon Jones-Henderson: I Am As I Am – A Man will be on view through July 24, 2022 and feature more than 20 works from the artist’s career, including a new work created for the exhibition. This shrine-like devotional sculpture from the artist’s series “Requiem for Our Ancestors” is dedicated to writer James Baldwin. As in other shrines by Jones-Henderson, it is inspired by vernacular architecture in the American South—specifically the modest one-room shacks he photographs in his travels throughout the South—and grounded in spiritual traditions of ancestor reverence.

Jones-Henderson is a longstanding founding member of African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists (AfriCOBRA), an artist collective that came together in Chicago in 1968. His work translates AfriCOBRA’s aesthetic principles—to create images inspired by the lived experience and cultures of people of the African diaspora in an accessible graphic style—into woven tapestries, mosaic tile works, shrine-like sculptures, varied works on paper, and wearable art made in collaboration with fellow AfriCOBRA artist Barbara Jones-Hogu. His kaleidoscopic works, often focused on themes of Pan-Africanism and racial justice, aim to be self-affirming and reflective, with an eye toward both a fraught past and a liberated future.

“The ICA’s presentation of Jones-Henderson’s work is an overdue opportunity for audiences to encounter influential works from the artist’s extensive career. AfriCOBRA is a critically important artist collective that helped shape the Black Arts Movement, and Jones-Henderson is one of the group’s most significant proponents. He has exhibited his artworks widely across the country and we are honored to present them here in Boston,” said Jill Medvedow, the ICA’s Ellen Matilda Poss Director.

Napoleon Jones-Henderson brings together a suite of major works from across the artist’s career—centered around his magisterial woven textiles—displaying the breadth of his practice and the singularity of his vision. In his work, the artist alludes to African and African American culture, integrating forms from African ritual sculpture and vernacular architecture from the American South, as well as reverential references to jazz musician Duke Ellington’s ‘Sacred Concerts,’ musicians Stevie Wonder and The Blind Boys of Alabama, and writers June Jordan and James Baldwin, among others. The exhibition includes a range of influential and rarely seen tapestries and enamel on copper works alongside drawings, prints, and collages on a variety of themes both personal and cultural, and a gallery dedicated to Jones-Henderson’s Requiem shrine works, encompassing altar-like sculptures dedicated to memorializing impactful events and cultural luminaries.

“Living and working in Boston since 1974, Jones-Henderson has had a longstanding influence on the city’s cultural landscape and beyond. The exhibition at the ICA is a great opportunity for audiences to explore and learn more about the work of this important artist, who has put his practice in service of themes of Black self-determination,” said De Blois. 

The Artist’s Voice: Napoleon Jones-Henderson

Thursday, March 3, 7 PM
Jones-Henderson will be in conversation with De Blois. More information will be available soon on icaboston.org.

Artist Biography

Born in 1943 in Chicago, Jones-Henderson attended the Sorbonne, Paris, holds a B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a M.F.A. from Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. As a member of AfriCOBRA, he was included in the collective’s first exhibition Ten in Search of a Nation at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1970, which was later presented at the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists in Roxbury and the University Art Gallery at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. More recently, his work was included in AfriCOBRA: Messages to the People at Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami in 2018, a portion of which traveled to Venice, Italy, as AfriCOBRA: Nation Time, an official Collateral Event of the 2019 Venice Biennale. Jones-Henderson has been awarded several public art commissions, including at the Bruce C. Bolling Municipal Building in Roxbury and Roxbury Community College. He is Executive Director of the Research Institute of African and African Diaspora Arts in Roxbury, Massachusetts, where he lives and works.

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.