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A renowned artist of the twentieth century who has had lasting influence, Louise Bourgeois is best known for her sculptural work. Influenced by surrealism and the work of émigré artists fleeing Europe during World War II, Bourgeois engaged a wide array of tactics—from enlargement to suspension and assemblage—to probe the human condition: its pain, fragility, violence, eroticism, and complexity.

In the early 1950s, Bourgeois began her series of spiral woman sculptures—swirling and suspended humanoid forms. In Spiral Woman, 1951–52, Bourgeois explores the abstract form and dynamism of the spiral by stacking blocks of wood on a steel rod. The spiral becomes rounded in Spiral Woman, 1984, implying flesh and folds, from which arms and legs protrude. Suspended by a cable from the ceiling, the sculpture resembles a corpse spinning on the axis of its demise.

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

2015.12

A renowned artist of the twentieth century who has had lasting influence, Louise Bourgeois is best known for her sculptural work. Influenced by surrealism and the work of émigré artists fleeing Europe during World War II, Bourgeois engaged a wide array of tactics—from enlargement to suspension and assemblage—to probe the human condition: its pain, fragility, violence, eroticism, and complexity.

In the early 1950s, Bourgeois began her series of spiral woman sculptures—swirling and suspended humanoid forms. In Spiral Woman, 1951–52, Bourgeois explores the abstract form and dynamism of the spiral by stacking blocks of wood on a steel rod. The spiral becomes rounded in Spiral Woman, 1984, implying flesh and folds, from which arms and legs protrude. Suspended by a cable from the ceiling, the sculpture resembles a corpse spinning on the axis of its demise.

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

2015.11

Cady Noland emerged on the art scene in New York in the 1980s, and is now among the leading voices of her generation. Drawing from mass media images such as press photographs of Lee Harvey Oswald and Patty Hearst and found objects from the urban landscape such as beer cans, American flags, and police barricades, Noland’s collages, sculptures, and mixed-media installations examine the underbelly of the American psyche, specifically the fascination with celebrity and violence.

Noland is perhaps best known for her sculptural assemblages of the later 1980s and ’90s that incorporate detritus from American consumer and vernacular culture. A leading example of this vein, Objectification Process deftly explores the American psyche through its most potent symbol of national unity and pageantry—the flag. The motif populates a number of her works from this period, but rather than hoisted high and unfurled, Noland’s flag is often draped or hung, limp or pierced. Objectification Process features a rolled-up flag placed on an orthopedic walker, suggesting a deflated, ailing, or immobilized nation. Noland’s incorporation of walkers, canes, police barricades, and fences conveys narratives of containment, confinement, and violence. The juxtaposed elements in Objectification Process create a powerful critique of the state of American nationalism and identity, a topic that still resonates deeply three decades later.

Although Noland has largely withdrawn from the art world, she continues to have a vital influence on younger artists working in sculpture and collage, including Ellen Gallagher and Rachel Harrison, both represented in the ICA/Boston collection. Noland’s provocative exploration of the more nefarious aspects of American culture paved the way for a generation of artists who also use methods of appropriation in their critique of culture, including Anne Collier, Leslie Hewitt, and Lorna Simpson. Objectification Process joins Noland’s screenprint Untitled, 1989, creating a varied representation of this important artist in the ICA’s collection.

800.16.02

American artist Dana Schutz is best known for her distinctive visual style characterized by vibrant color and tactile brushwork. Her large-scale paintings capture imaginary stories, hypothetical situations, and impossible physical feats. Schutz’s at once dark and humorous paintings combine abstraction and figuration into oddly compelling and intriguing pictures that point to the legacies of such figures as George Grosz and Wassily Kandinsky. Schutz’s unique voice in painting exemplifies the expansive possibilities of the medium today.

Over the last decade, Schutz has focused her painting practice on tightly structured scenes in which subjects are compressed by the boundaries of the canvas. Big Wave exemplifies the artist’s spatial exploration. In the painting, two children kneeling on the shore build a sand castle, while seemingly oblivious to the drowning figures alongside of them. Multiple limbs, bodies, and giant fish are entangled in the tumbling, green wave. The juxtaposition of these two scenes with their distinct color palettes and energy levels creates two worlds within a flatly composed canvas, showcasing Schutz’s truly individual and inventive compositions. As evoked in Big Wave, Schutz explores what can occur within parameters of space and time, and how finite zones can unfold into anomalous and evocative narratives.

Big Wave joins Schutz’s canvas Sneeze, 2002, in the ICA/Boston’s collection. In addition to expanding the museum’s holdings of paintings, this work exemplifies the abstract figuration seen in works by artists Joan Semmel, Lisa Yuskavage, Marlene Dumas, and Louise Bourgeois in the ICA’s collection.

2016.19

In the late 1970s, Laurie Simmons began employing photography as a means of critiquing representations of women in mass media. Simmons drew on childhood memories of her mother and representations of mothers she saw on television in the 1950s to stage imagined domestic tableaux, often with a lone female figurine in the interior of a dollhouse, which she then recorded with photography. These artworks subversively explored the concept of the ideal housewife as a fabricated construct.

Inspired by packs of dancing cigarettes seen in television commercials and magazine advertisements, Simmons began her Walking Objects series in the late 1980s. She added human legs to books, handbags, cakes, and guns, and then photographed the assemblages at human scale. Often dramatically lit against anonymous backdrops, the Walking Objects anthropomorphize the objects they picture and simultaneously point to the objectification of people, especially women, in contemporary, commodity culture. In Walking Camera (Jimmy the Camera / Gift to Jimmy from Laurie), the prop camera is worn by Simmons’s friend, the artist Jimmy DeSana, a key figure in the East Village art scene in New York in the 1970s and ’80s, who taught Simmons how to develop film. Here, it is DeSana who literally embodies the camera and likewise photography. The enlarged scale of the photographed camera, and its mobility on legs, points toward the ubiquity of photography in everyday life. The photograph also serves as a memorial to DeSana who died of HIV/AIDS-related illnesses in 1990.

This photograph adds depth to the museum’s photography collection, joining key works by Jimmy DeSana, Cindy Sherman, and Louise Lawler. Simmons’s studio-based photography is also a key precedent for artist’s in the collection, including Roe Ethridge, Leslie Hewitt, Anne Collier, and Sara VanDerBeek.

2016.21

Lynda Benglis came of age as an artist in New York in the 1960s, and her work was closely associated with both process art and minimalism. She is best known for pouring industrial materials such as latex and foam—often directly onto the floor, echoing Jackson Pollock’s style of painting—to compose abstract, biomorphic forms. An important feminist icon, Benglis expanded the purview of minimalism, a genre dominated by male artists, by experimenting with color and form and engaging explicitly with the body.

In the 1970s, Benglis created a series of metalized knot structures from materials such as wire mesh and aluminum. Hung on a wall, they appear to hover in space. Robert Pincus-Witten, an editor at Artforum, described the artist’s work as “frozen gestures,” exemplified in this 1974 work Sierra. Paula Cooper Gallery presented these knot works in 1974, the same year Benglis took out the infamous Artforum ad picturing her nude and holding a dildo in front of her genitals as a comment on the male-dominated art world. Implicating her own body in these works, she makes the process of knotting visible, while the structure resembles twisted arms, internal organs, or entwined bodies. Sierra demonstrates Benglis’s unique and expansive approach to sculpture and the ways it can reference the body and bodily experience through abstraction.

Sierra bolsters the Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women and adds a seminal woman artist who is not yet represented in the museum’s collection. This hallmark work, the twin of which is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, joins major sculptures by Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Cady Noland, and Faith Wilding. Benglis’s exploration of the body is in conversation with works by Bourgeois, Ana Mendieta, Kiki Smith, and Nancy Spero. Her early use of industrial materials creates an interesting dialogue with the work of younger artists such as Tara Donovan and Rachel Harrison. The acquisition of this work allows the ICA/Boston to tell a fuller story of twentieth-century feminist art.

2017.19

Lorraine O’Grady is an artist and critic who employs strategies of conceptual art, performance, and installation to address issues related to gender and sexuality, class, cultural hybridity, and race, and their relationship to art history. The artist was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts. Her work has explored her middle-class upbringing in New England and her experience as the daughter of Caribbean immigrant parents. O’Grady received her BA from Wellesley College in 1955 and worked as an intelligence analyst for the US government, a literary translator, a rock music critic, and an independent writer before pursuing a career as a visual artist in the 1970s at the age of 40. She describes her practice as a form of “writing in space,” deeply informed by early 20th-century surrealist and futurist manifestos.

O’Grady’s first public performance, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, which premiered in 1980 at Just Above Midtown Gallery in New York, remains a pivotal work of race, gender, and class critique. These photographs document the sequence of events as O’Grady’s persona, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (Mademoiselle Black Middle-Class), crashes an opening reception of the exhibition Persona at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, which featured artists working with alter egos—all of whom were white. Dressed in a handmade costume of 180 pairs of white gloves and carrying a cat-o’-nine-tails (in her words, “the-whip-that-made-plantations-move”) made from sail rope studded with white chrysanthemums, O’Grady made other uninvited appearances in art spaces throughout New York as her persona, demanding attention for black artists. Furthermore, through this persona she explores her own background as part of the black middle class in Boston.

This iconic work, along with O’Grady’s costume, was on view in We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 at the ICA in summer 2018. O’Grady is an artist with local origins, and this work strengthens our photographic holdings and works in portraiture as it joins the Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women. Mlle Bourgeoise Noire engages with the performative, like artists such as Nick Cave and Ana Mendieta, and is in dialogue with works by artists in the ICA’s collection exploring issues related to race and representation, such as Howardena Pindell and Lorna Simpson.

2018.10