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Although her work encompasses painting, photography, sculpture, and video, Yayoi Kusama is perhaps best known for her overwhelming installations. Using various combinations of motifs such as lights, dots, and phalluses, Kusama creates environments that are frequently described as “obsessive,” filling entire rooms with repeated shapes and images. The artist herself has said she is an “obsessional artist.” The term refers not only to her art but also to her mental condition. The artist has experienced obsessive-compulsive disorder since 1973, the year she returned to Japan from the United States. She checked herself into a hospital for the mentally ill in Tokyo in 1975, and since 1977 has lived in the facility, within walking distance of the studio where she works.

A Flower (No. 14) is one of Kusama’s early works, created before she arrived in the U.S. in 1958. Originally trained in the traditional Japanese style of painting, Kusama began studying Western styles in 1952, becoming especially interested in the work of American artist Georgia O’Keeffe, with whom she began a correspondence in the late 1950s. A Flower (No. 14) reveals the influence of O’Keeffe’s floral paintings: Kusama foregrounds her subject on the picture plane, and seems to play on the similarities between vaginal and floral anatomies. One of several related compositions Kusama made during this period, A Flower (No. 14) is an early example of her experimentation with the dots that would eventually become a signature motif that is repeated throughout her monumental installations.

The first work by Kusama to enter the ICA/Boston collection, A Flower (No. 14) strengthens the museum’s holdings of work by key feminists working in the 1960s and ’70s, such as Louise Bourgeois and Nancy Spero, and serves the ICA’s goal of augmenting its collection of works by international artists.

2014.28

Doris Salcedo distorts the familiarity of everyday objects, transforming domestic furniture into menacing statements of violence, mourning, and trauma. The artist has made powerful sculptures and installations since the mid-1980s that build on the memories and testimonies of victims of political persecution during the civil war in her native Colombia.

In Untitled, 2004–05, Salcedo displaces the imagery of household chairs, modifying their form and function while adding new layers of significance. This work is part of a larger series in which she evokes the violence of state interrogation techniques practiced by corrupt governments. To produce these works, Salcedo made wax models of the sculpture and collaborated with a New York-based factory to create the stainless steel models. The chair, once a support for the body, is presented as a disabled form—missing backs and battered corners—that speak to brutal and violent actions.

Untitled, 2004–05, joins a number of sculptures by Salcedo in the ICA/Boston’s collection. It augments the museum’s holdings of works that investigate themes of war and violence by such artists as Mona Hatoum, Willie Doherty, and Yasumasa Morimura.

2014.36

In the 1960s, a decade known for the ascension of minimalism, postminimalism, and conceptualism in sculpture, Eva Hesse was one of the most significant artists working in New York. Through the mid-to-late ’60s, Hesse used materials such as cord and rope, nets, plaster, steel, wood, papier-mâché, latex, rubber, and fiberglass to create forms that derived their structure from repetition and geometry but were executed with intuitive sensitivity. She made many important formal decisions in response to chance, gravity, randomness, and the circumstances of gallery architecture. Hesse created richly organic works that locate human tendencies, contradiction, and a dose of the surreal within the rigor of process-based conceptualism.

Ennead is composed of a thick, rectangular board gridded with three-dimensional papier-mâché hemispheres, with a single dyed string hanging from the center of each dome. The orderly, formulaic application of the threads devolves into an increasingly chaotic composition as they accumulate and tangle toward the floor. A few strands are affixed to the adjacent wall, cordoning off a wedge of space that becomes part of the sculpture itself. This gesture also draws the viewer’s attention to the corner of the gallery, activating this normally overlooked area. Additional material hangs to touch the floor, thus uniting three planes. “Ennead” means a group of nine, in this case referring to the nine points from which the strings extend.

Ennead is an important piece in the ICA/Boston’s collection of fiber works, including pieces by artists such as Françoise Grossen, Sheila Hicks, and Faith Wilding. Furthermore, Hesse’s work provides the foundation for the “loaded” material choices and conceptual relationship to the gallery’s architecture that inform works by younger artists as diverse as Taylor Davis, Tara Donovan, and Mona Hatoum, all of whom were influenced by Hesse and her cohort.

2015.15

Born in Germany, Charline von Heyl moved to New York in the mid-1990s and has pursued a vigorous and multivalent artistic practice. In her paintings, drawings, prints, and collages, von Heyl harnesses abstraction as a process of discovery, adding marks and obliterating them to produce vibrant and layered works.

This set of ten untitled drawings from 2003 was originally exhibited as part of an installation of forty-four black-and-white works at Petzel Gallery in New York. They demonstrate von Heyl’s interest in stimulating play between figuration and abstraction, as recognizable elements seem to lurk within the matrix of the abstract works. In 2001, von Heyl had begun to work with a photocopier, using the device as part of her experimental process of deriving patterns, lines, shapes, and motifs from found images. Von Heyl has drawn on a diverse range of visual sources, from Otto Ubbelohde’s illustrations for an early twentieth-century edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales to images from Dion Buzzati’s 1969 graphic novel Poema a fumetti, based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. In von Heyl’s hands, such sources relinquish their specific references and figures, offering a plenitude of marks and gestures that she integrates into powerful and unified artworks.

This suite of drawings is part of the ICA/Boston’s collection of works that explore the history of abstraction and mark making by such artists as Matthew Ritchie and Amy Sillman, and complements another work by von Heyl in the collection, the large-scale painting Guitar Gangster, 2013.

2015.25.1-10

Though she works in a variety of mediums, from painting and drawing to light-projection and video, Kara Walker is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes. A visual language introduced at her New York debut at the Drawing Center in 1994, the silhouette has become Walker’s signature means of interrogating the highly fraught histories of slavery, racism, and gender discrimination in the United States.

The Nigger Huck Finn … was commissioned for the 2010 exhibition Huckleberry Finn at CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art in San Francisco, the final in a trilogy of exhibitions based on canonical American novels. Huckleberry Finn revisits Mark Twain’s investigation of racial tensions in America through an extensive range of materials, including historical artifacts, documents, silent film footage, existing works, and fourteen new commissions that responded directly to the novel. Walker’s response is a sweeping cut-paper wall installation composed of silhouetted figures set on a light brown ground line painted directly on the wall, punctuated by seven framed gouaches. In preparing for the exhibition, Walker reread Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, coming away from it, as she has said, with “a better understanding of Huck, because he’s an abused child and a seeker of freedom.” Using this reading as a point of departure, The Nigger Huck Finn … depicts repeated Huck Finn–like characters—alongside caricatures of Jim and Pap, as well as Topsy from Uncle Tom’s Cabin—in a series of scenes adapted imaginatively by Walker to convey a heightened sense of violence and sexuality.

The Nigger Huck Finn … is unusual within Walker’s body of work, as it combines cut-paper silhouettes, wall paint, and framed works on paper, making it a major addition to the ICA/Boston’s collection. It joins works by Kerry James Marshall and Lorna Simpson that also engage with the complex and pressing issues of race and identity through the distinctive vision of contemporary art.

2015.09

Eva Hesse was one of the most important artists working in New York in the 1960s, until her untimely death in 1970. In constant dialogue with that decade’s most influential minimalist, postminimalist, and conceptual artists—including Mel Bochner, Dan Graham, Sol LeWitt, Robert Smithson, and Ruth Vollmer—Hesse’s work reflected that circle’s emphasis on rigorously structured sculptural process and fabrication techniques, but also exemplified and in many cases influenced the group’s more corporeal, psychologically loaded, and, to use the critic Lucy Lippard’s term, eccentric strains that ran through postminimalism and process art, and continue to resonate in contemporary sculpture today.

Part of Hesse’s prodigious experimental art making includes the Accession series, created from 1967 to 1968, four iterations of which are extant today. With this series, Hesse created one of the decade’s most radical and psychologically resonant bodies of work based on the primary form of the cube. In each sculpture, rubber tubing is threaded through perforations in the walls of a cube open at the top. The rigidity and aggressively protective exterior walls are subverted by the formal and material complexity of the rubber tubing, with its slick surface, hollow interior, and biomorphic behavior. The smallest in the series, Accession IV has a dense interior space that forcefully underscores the differences between outside and inside, steel and rubber. One of Hesse’s best-known forms, it is an exemplar of postminimalist sculpture, fusing repetition, geometry, and industrial materials with media and processes that suggest the complexity of human experience and the psychically loaded spaces of our built environment.

Accession IV is an important representation of minimalism and conceptualism within the ICA/Boston collection. Hesse’s work provides the foundations for the “loaded” material choices and conceptual relationship to the gallery’s architecture (why a work sits on the floor instead of a pedestal, for instance) in works by younger artists as diverse as Taylor Davis, Tara Donovan, and Mona Hatoum, all of whom have responded to Hesse’s influence and the art history it represents.

2015.14

Sculptor, feminist, and influential artist Louise Bourgeois has produced a distinctive oeuvre over her seventy-year career, combining abstraction and figuration and a wide array of media to explore such themes as the body, trauma, and sexuality.

One of several major sculptures by Bourgeois in the ICA/Boston collection, Untitled is one of the artist’s early carved and painted-wood totemic sculptures, which she refers to as “personages.” Starkly vertical, thin, and luminescent, Untitled is an abstract, almost tusklike form that suggests the fragility of the upright human figure. The influence of the surrealists on Bourgeois is apparent in this work, in which the tension between the familiar and unfamiliar becomes paramount as the figurative adopts a new form.

Since introducing Bourgeois to Boston audiences in a 1953 group exhibition, the ICA has featured her work in a number of exhibitions, including the major 2007–08 solo show Bourgeois in Boston. This work joins the ICA’s rich collection of sculptures by Bourgeois and adds to the holdings of figurative sculptures by such artists as Rachel Harrison, Juan Muñoz, and Kiki Smith.

2015.10

Since emerging as one of the most important video artists of the 1980s, Dara Birnbaum has used video, sound, found footage, and an array of editing and image-processing techniques to investigate the content and conventions of television and mass media.

Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry is a groundbreaking early work made after Birnbaum came to attention with her first solo exhibition at Artist Space in New York in 1977. Taking what would become her signature approach, the artist drew on mass media’s vast reservoir of images and editing techniques to reveal the ideological content of television. Birnbaum constructed the six-minute video from excerpts of the television game show Hollywood Squares, isolating the participants’ expressions and gestures. When strung together and repeated, these banal looks—darting eyes, craning necks, and waving hands—reveal themselves as deeply conditioned by social codes. Presented on two cube monitors staggered in space, the installation reflects the technologies of the late-1970s period, while formally reiterating the repetition at the center of the unconscious gestures. Like much of Birnbaum’s work, Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry draws out and “talks back to” the seductive and alienating effects of mass media, especially as they inequitably implicate women.

This work by Birnbaum, one of the most important artists working in the 1980s, augments the ICA/Boston’s strong holdings of work from this period, especially those by other appropriation artists, such as Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, and Cindy Sherman, who were part of the so-called Pictures Generation. Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry is also an early example of sculptural video work, a genre used extensively in recent years by such artists as Mika Rottenberg and Hito Steyerl, both of whom are represented in the ICA collection.

2015.33

Working in sculpture, photography, performance, and video, Mona Hatoum—like her peers Robert Gober, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Doris Salcedo, and Rachel Whiteread—defamiliarizes ordinary domestic objects and transforms them into minimalist, conceptual, and performative art objects. Corrupting the essential features and functions of items such as kitchen utensils or household furniture, she infuses benign forms with the capacity to harm. Hatoum engages viewers’ tactile imagination, provoking them to imagine their own bodies responding to these newly aggressive objects. The multiple and often contradictory allusions contrast the comfort and safety provided by the domestic realm with the history of violent conflict in the London-based Palestinian artist’s homeland.

This photograph documents an early performance during which the artist trudged barefoot through the streets of Brixton—an ethnically diverse, working-class suburb of London—dragging heavy, black Dr. Marten boots tied to her ankles. This particular style of boots was worn by both the British police and skinheads, overt opponents during the racially charged history of early 1980s London. Hatoum’s bare feet allude to the vulnerability of ethnic minorities in face of the violence and discrimination of a public authority charged with community protection.

Performance Still is part of a significant grouping of works by Hatoum at the ICA/Boston, and it engages with other many other works that explore performance, such as those by Ragnar Kjartansson, Yasumasa Morimura, and Cindy Sherman.

2014.21

The sculptural installations of Carol Bove draw together found and made objects into thoughtfully constructed assemblages that explore both historical misapprehensions and modernist modes of display.

Bove has long addressed the social dynamics of the late 1960s and early ’70s through the presentation of objects, looking at, as she says, “the tiniest details to think about history and to think about history to reflect on the present moment.” She began by drawing portraits of women who appeared in issues of Playboy from 1966 to 1972, a period when she observed a “calculated ambivalence” in the women being photographed. Bove’s engagement with the era resulted in sculptural arrangements of its cultural artifacts; she employed furniture such as Knoll tables as settings for books, magazines, and objects that suggestively, albeit indeterminately, tie together various histories. Bove often put wall-mounted shelving units such as those designed by George Nelson and Poul Cadovius to similar ends. Innerspace Bullshit is one such wall-mounted shelf with an arrangement of books, objects, and ephemera, including Gregory Battcock’s conceptual art anthology Idea Art (1973), a small-press magazine called Grope, a collection of Michael McClure’s poetry called Ghost Tantras (1964), a rock from Marfa, and a pseudo-cubist sculpture. Bove’s meticulous arrangement further encodes the objects to project the aura of the ’60s, both the decade’s utopian impulses and its failures, creating a system through which history can be reevaluated in the present.

Bove’s shelf-based arrangements of books and objects are an early signature trademark of what has developed into a unique and important sculptural practice. Innerspace Bullshit contains all the hallmarks of this practice and points to Bove’s evolution, providing a crucial link between her early drawings and her more recent expansive installations. This work forms part of the ICA/Boston’s diverse holdings in contemporary sculpture, especially works that reference the practice and legacy of integrating found elements, also seen in the works of Taylor Davis, Rachel Harrison, and Roni Horn.

2015.26