Year in Review

From monumental Fiber art to Black Mountain College, Happenings to premiere performances, a shiny new website to 20 major additions to our collection, 2015 has been a year to remember. Some of the highlights:

• Fiber: Sculpture 1960–present charmed audiences, won awards, and brought Sheila Hicks to the museum.

• Brazilian artist Adriana Varejão taught us the meaning of anthropophagy in her first solo U.S. museum show.

•  Artist Matthew Ritchie capped his 18-month residency at the ICA with The Long Count/The Long Game, a multimedia concert experience featuring Aaron and Bryce Dessner of The National, Kelly Deal of The Breeders, staged installations, and Tarot card readings, and a very memorable baseball bat.

• The legendary Mark Morris Dance Group returned to the ICA for the first time since 2007 to present an evening of dance elaborating on musical masterpieces.

• When the Stars Begin to Fall traveled from the Studio Museum in Harlem, placing works by self-taught, spiritually inspired, and incarcerated artists alongside projects by such prominent contemporary artists as Kara Walker, Kerry James Marshall, David Hammons, and Theaster Gates.
• ICA Reads, our new take on the book club, brought National Book Award winner Claudia Rankine to the ICA to talk race, micro-aggressions and Citizen: An American Lyric.
  
• Ian Schneller’s colorful horn speakers filled the galleries with Andrew Bird’s unforgettable canyon compositions in Sonic Arboretum.

• 

  Armed with a vivid imagination and 400 Sharpies, artist Ethan Murrow created a massive seascape drawing inspired by the ICA’s own neighborhood on the museum’s sprawling Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall.

• This year’s James and Audrey Foster Prize exhibition captured an artistic energy thriving today in Boston—artist collectives and performance artists—with works by Richard DeLima, kijidome, Vela Phelan, and Sandrine Schaefer.
• Everyone loves a sunset on the harbor. This summer we coupled our amazing waterfront view with some incredible tunes: Lucius, How to Dress Well, Mykki Blanco, !!!, Grey Season, Ripe, Oh, Malô, and more! Plus top local chefs prepared al fresco cooking demonstrations and tastings. 
• This year’s First Fridays featured local crooners, wild performance art, steel drummers, a carnival parade, fashion shows, pop-up raw bars, killer DJs, Improv Aslym, holiday kareoke, giveaways, and a bevvy of fun speciality beverages.
• Arlene Shechet’s major survey filled the West Gallery with “some of the most imaginative sculpture of the past 20 years.” (New York Times)
• ICA after 5, a new series of dynamic Friday evening programming, brought harborside yoga, champagne tastings, adult coloring, and latte art to Friday night.
• Our brand spankin’ NEW website launched this September!
• Faye Driscoll’s unforgettable performance Thank You For Coming: Attendance had audiences skipping, dancing, and happily donning ridiculous hats.
• This year the ICA hosted our first College Night! Boston’s universities and colleges took over the museum to experience the ICA as never before with DJ Knife, larger-than-life games, art activities, food and drink giveaways, and, of course, amazing art.
• A second gift from philanthropist Barbara Lee, including significant works by Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, and Kara Walker, brought The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women to a total of 68 major works of 20th- and 21st-century art. See a selection on view this summer!
• Last but certainly not least: landmark exhibition Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957.
  Lauded in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, and Harper’s Bazaar, this expansive multidisciplinary undertaking brought to the museum works by masters Anni and Josef Albers, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, Ruth Asawa, and Robert Motherwell), alongside stunning music, dance, and performance. There is still time to see one of the year’s most acclaimed exhibitions!