There’s something for everyone this vacation week at the ICA: three celebrated exhibitions, a bunch of fun, creative + FREE activities, wintry waterfront views, and many more reasons to spend the holidays with us!

Artsy Activities for all

  • Collaging With Color: Take in works by Josef Albers and many others in Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957. Then play with color in the Bank of America Art Lab: choose from hundreds of colors to create 2D collages that describe you, your family, or your friends. Pop-up Maker Workshops with local artists will also be offered. For all ages; adult collaboration required for children under 12.
  • Art-Making Workshop: Through a Lens: Take-in Ethan Murrow’s monumental drawing on the Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall, decipher its stories, then imagine and draw your own scenes on acetate slides to fit inside a telescope you design. For children ages 4 and above with adult collaboration. For children ages 5 and above with adult collaboration.
  • Sketching Workshop: Draw the view of Boston Harbor and beyond or draw from your imagination. All materials provided. For children and adults of all ages.
  • Makers’ Workshop: Visit the galleries to see and investigate how contemporary artists with work on view in the ICA Collection connect materials, then create your own up-to-date festoons using mixed materials and plenty of problem solving and imagination. For children of all ages with adult collaboration.

Black Mountain College

Don’t miss one of the season’s most acclaimed exhibitions! Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957 celebrates the memory and myth of a small liberal-arts school in North Carolina where the course of art history changed forever. Despite its brief existence, BMC became a seminal meeting place for many of the artists, musicians, poets, and thinkers who would become the principal practitioners in their fields of the postwar period.

Brand New Exhibitions

Diane Simpson
See Diane Simpson’s “stunning work” in this “superb,” “riveting exhibition.” (Boston Globe)
Chicago-based artist Diane Simpson’s elegantly constructed sculptures evolve from a diverse range of materials, clothing, and architectural sources. While elements of her creations appear to effortlessly hang and fold, they are in fact the result of a rigorous approach to construction techniques, reveling in passages of pattern, joinery, and skewed angles that are by turns humorous and psychologically-charged. Diane Simpson is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition on the East Coast.

Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian: The Birthday Party
The artists “brought the spirit of their underground curation with them: challenge authority, work with friends, blur boundaries, and see what springs up.” (Boston Globe)
Watch Dubai-based artists Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian bring their collaborative artistic practice – and generous, inclusive aesthetic – to the ICA.The three Iranian artists—two brothers and their childhood friend—combine their individual work with that of other artists, in sculpture, painting, drawing, and video, to generate probing and beautiful environments.

British Best-Of

The best adverts from across the pond are here! Celebrate commercial creativity with our holiday tradition, a screening of the British Arrows Awards. (We know you fancy it.)

Guilt-Free Shopping

Find the perfect present or accessory you never knew you desperately needed at the ICA store (recently named one of the best museum shops in the world!): we’re talking special products designed in collaboration with ICA exhibited artists, the best selection of art and photography books in New England, and home items intended to improve – and beautify! – your everyday living. Bring the delights of contemporary art home. PLUS all purchases support the exhibitions and programs of the ICA.