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    Sue Williams (Born 1954 in Chicago) came to prominence in the early 1980s for her densely composed, figurative paintings that explore the body and violence against women. Painted directly onto unprimed canvas, Future Angst with Capybara Lower Left is representative of Williams’s more recent work. Since 2017, she has been painting colorful, loose compositions where figurative elements intermingle with swaths of pure color. Williams is a skilled draftsperson whose early work was strongly influenced by cartoons and comic strips. In her recent, less crowded canvases, the quality of drawing is especially able to come through. While some figurative elements are identifiable—from naked bodies in ambivalent repose, to the titular capybara (a South and Central American species of rodent) at the canvas’s lower left—many elements are left unfinished or dissolve into meandering lines or patchy blocks of pale pinks, yellows, blues, and greens. Future Angst with Capybara Lower Left continues many of the themes and bodily motifs that characterized Williams’s early work, such as gaping bodily orifices and the omnipresent threats of violence and violation, while introducing Williams’s recent interest in open space and sketched renderings of figures.

    One of the most influential artists working today, Carrie Mae Weems (Born 1953 in Portland, OR) draws on photography, installation, text, and video, among other mediums, to investigate history, identity, and power. Through her work, Weems offers incisive critiques with a keen attention to the archive and observational methods, and she has produced numerous series addressing structural injustices and histories that have defined American culture.

    Weems’s Blues and Pinks works are components of the larger installation The Push, The Call, The Scream, The Dream (2020), which pairs the artist’s own photographs with archival images from the 1960s. In Blues and Pinks 3, Weems appropriates photographs by American photojournalist Charles Moore depicting violence against protestors at the 1963 Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, Alabama. She selects portions of Moore’s photographs, highlighting the violence against peaceful Black protestors from the law enforcement sent to suppress them, and arranges the grouped images diagonally. Through both her selection and arrangement, Weems emphasizes the use of force—both anticipated and felt—as dogs bark and bare their teeth, officers swing batons, and concentrated jets of water pummel protestors recoiling in anticipation and experience of pain. She colors the black-and-white photographs blue and pink, colors that have multiple resonances for Weems, from her care for the protestors to the evocation of bruised skin. This work reflects long-running concerns in Weems’s practice, such as the media’s representation of African Americans, mining the archive, and innovative forms of photographic installation.

    Boston-born and New York–based artist Sarah Sze (Born 1969 in Boston) explores the peripheries of the built environment and our increasingly image saturated world through everyday materials in her ambitious paintings, sculptures, and installations. In Surround Sound (After Studio), Sze continues to build upon her longstanding interest in merging art with built space through a personal investigation of the artist’s studio. In 2019, Sze presented a room-size installation that replicated her studio through layered cardboard, folding chairs, a ladder, and blue-taped images on standard printer paper. Surround Sound (After Studio) was presented within this installation, connecting the artist’s painting practice to the expansive and mediated space of the studio. “After” is often used in titles of copies that reference another artist’s work, but, here, Sze “copies” her own studio in a two-dimensional painting that considers the ways in which the studio space shapes paintings. Sze layers images of speakers, Post-it notes, and mirrored surfaces to construct the complex pictorial space that defines Surround Sound (After Studio), which stands over eight feet high and combines a vast array of media. As in her sculptures and installations, Sze resists a singular perspective and conveys a sense of ongoing construction before the viewer’s eyes. In Surround Sound (After Studio), Sze evokes the layered, sensorial, and reflective space of the artist’s studio and the contemporary world writ large through a refracted surface that captures the unique sonic, physical, and aesthetic space of the artist’s studio.

    In her series titled Lost in My Life, Rachel Perry (Born 1962 in Tokyo) “pirates” her own bodies of work and redeploys them in the context of performative self-portraits. For Perry, these works pay homage to “the endless organizing, cleaning, and shopping that form the business of living.” Invested in a rigorous yet playful conceptualism across her practice, Perry uses what she calls the “detritus of everyday life” as both material and inspiration. Between 2014 and 2016, Perry embarked on a series of Chiral Drawings as an attempt to make a drawing using every single pen, pencil, crayon, colored pencil, and marker she owned. Chirality refers to the phenomenon of an image or object being different from its mirror image. Perry used her right and left hands respectively to attempt draw the same line, resulting in an imperfect mirror image. In Lost in My Life (Chiral Lines 3), Perry uses one of her Chiral Drawings as a backdrop for large-scale photographic self-portrait and obscures her face with another drawing on paper. Other works from the series feature self-portraits with key materials from previous projects, including receipts, twist ties, and tinfoil.

    Multidisciplinary artist Hew Locke (Born 1959 in Edinburgh) explores individual and collective relationships to power, cultural memory, and migration. Much of his richly detailed work across media has addressed histories of British imperialism and its afterlives. Composed of toy magic wands and tiaras, plastic flowers and butterflies, and dripping plastic beads, Europa is a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II and highly representative of Locke’s practice, which often deconstructs iconographies of British imperial power through lush compositions. 

    The artist spent his formative years in the then newly independent country of Guyana, a former British colony, where images of Queen Elizabeth II were frequently reproduced in schoolbooks. He recalls being scolded by teachers for defacing images of the Queen when caught doodling mustaches or spectacles on her image. This playful spirit of critique endures in his practice through his ongoing series of collaged object portraits, such as Europa. In this raucous and colorful composition that is both celebratory and disquieting, Locke offers a grotesque and captivating portrait of the former Queen as what critic and curator Kris Kuramitsu has described as a “fragmentary postcolonial subject.” Indeed, Locke has emphasized that these object portraits would not have been possible before globalization—the ubiquity and cheapness of the plastic toys and tchotchkes that compose the Queen’s visage, are made possible by the same global flows of capital that European colonialism inaugurated.

    In her monumental paintings, sculptures, and installations, Firelei Báez (Born 1981 in Santiago De Los Caballeros, Dominican Republic) creates fictional worlds that explore legacies of colonial rule across the Americas, the African diaspora, the Caribbean, and far beyond. Her exuberant artworks contain complex and layered uses of pattern, decoration, and abstract gestures alongside symbols rooted in Afro-Caribbean cultures. Báez painted Tone tonal time (or an economy of care) on the occasion of her first North American survey, organized by the ICA/Boston in 2024. 

    The artist’s quintessential paintings overlay paint onto reproductions of colonial-era maps, architectural plans, and other archival documents. These layered works challenge our understanding of acknowledged power, suggest alternative histories, and create expansive narratives of renewal and recalibration. In Tone tonal time…, a figure rendered in energetically layered paint merges with a finely detailed tableau of flora and glass. Drawing from her extensive art historical training, Báez engages with the traditions of still life vanitas paintings from the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch Golden Age of painting, and often contain animals, flowers, insects, rotting food, and skulls to convey the moral message that earthly life is transient and finite. While vanitas paintings consider death as their primary subject, Báez’s Dutch flowers and Murano glass—both symbols of global trade—center beauty and enduring life. A reproduction of a seventeenth-century Dutch maritime map provides the ground of Báez’s painting. While charming at first glance with its cherublike figures, such maps were frequently used by colonizers to expand into Africa and the Americas. Báez acknowledges this history while her painting imagines an alternative rendering focusing on an expansive femme subject who contains an entire galaxy of color. Ultimately, Báez’s intervention is not one of obliteration, but rather one of reimagining a past, present, and future that foregrounds beauty and belonging.

    Diedrick Brackens (Born 1989 in Mexia, TX) is an American textile artist known for his large-scale figurative weavings that pair a deep attention to the technical aspects of craft and an interest in African diasporic storytelling and myths, as well as narratives from literary fiction and the artist’s personal biography. Attentive to the techniques and innovations of diverse craft traditions, Brackens infuses his works with trademark characteristics of traditional West African textiles, including Kente cloth and Asafo flags, and quilting traditions from the American South, such as those of the quilters of Gee’s Bend, Alabama. The artist depicts histories of labor, migration, and domestic scenes, especially intimate moments of love and care. 

    Brackens’s mind of my mind consists of three panels created using a floor loom and varied weaving techniques, including double-weave, double-weave pickup, and strip weaving. The composition centers a figure with raised arms—a gesture that suggests a form of ecstatic, even divine, inspiration. The hands appear to be generating a red circular field from which the two flanking figures recoil in ambiguous positions of awe or fear. Brackens subverts traditional European tapestry techniques through his meticulous placement of imperfections, such as the swapped red and green along the top left border or the extended tassels along the piece’s bottom edges. Deep hues of red, black, and green display Brackens’s laborious hand dyeing technique while evoking the Pan-African flag designed by the Universal Negro Improvement Association and Marcus Garvey in 1920. The title mind of my mind is drawn from Octavia E. Butler’s 1977 novel of the same name, and which narrates the rise of a society of telepathic humans. In this work, Brackens renders an iconic scene with layered symbolism, inviting the viewer to enter a visual world that synthesizes faith and fiction through innovative craft technique.

    John Ahearn (Born 1951 in Binghamton, NY) is an American artist best known for the public sculpture he produced during the 1980s in the South Bronx, New York. Working in collaboration with Rigoberto Torres, the artist created painted life casts of his neighbors engaged in everyday activities, such as jumping rope or listening to music. Ahearn and Torres worked together with neighborhood volunteers on the casting process, attributing the final work to the artist who paints the cast. 

    Ciba is an exemplary, representative work from the community casting workshops Ahearn held in the South Bronx during the early 1980s. This sculpture emerges from an important period in Ahearn’s career, displaying the technique that would define his practice shortly after receiving attention as the co-organizer of The Times Square Show (1980) held in a shuttered commercial space and a model for artist-organized, interdisciplinary exhibitions. Ahearn and Torres’s process emphasizes the singular details of each subject. The artists cover their subjects’ faces with a skin safe molding material, apply a layer of bandages to create a rigid shell mold, and place straws in their subjects’ nostrils to allow them to breathe. Once the mold hardens, the artists fill the molds with plaster to make casts that are carved and painted. Here, Ciba’s shy, thoughtful gaze is a pure evocation of childhood. The subjects of Ahearn’s earliest portraits were often the result of chance street encounters, but many of his later works focused on specific individuals in the South Bronx with whom the artist had long-standing relationships. Ciba was cast along with a group of friends when Ahearn and Torres were active in their Dawson Street studio (1981–83), a space also known as the Kelly Street Block Association Youth Center. This important early work touches on key themes of childhood, self-representation, race, and community with the artist’s notable commitment to honor everyday people.

    Tammy Nguyen (Born 1984 in San Francisco) creates paintings, works on paper, unique artist books, and publications. In the densely layered symphonic space of her gilded paintings, Nguyen explores contradiction and confusion through intertwining narratives of geopolitical, environmental, and spiritual subjects. Many of her paintings are composite images that reconsider lesser-known histories against the backdrop of lush landscapes teeming with insects, plants, and animals imbued with agency, and varied symbols of violent conquest or soft power. In 2023, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston organized Nguyen’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States.

    Ralph Waldo Emerson belongs to a series of works Nguyen made for her ICA exhibition related to the relationship between people and nature, landscape, and wilderness, as articulated in Emerson’s influential essay “Nature,” written in 1836 in Concord, Massachusetts. In the essay, Emerson outlines the spiritual and philosophical basis of transcendentalism, which suggests that God is reflected everywhere in nature and that reality can be understood by interacting directly with nature. This painting is a portrait of Emerson (in many ways the central figure of Nguyen’s exhibition), surrounded by dense layers of foliage combining the plants and trees of the Northeast with the flora and fauna of tropical environments, such as Vietnam. Nguyen portrays Emerson’s body as interchangeable with nature, a literal representation of his philosophical worldview. Nguyen layers the surface of the painting with elements drawn from the U.S. National Archives about land reform programs in Vietnam following the Vietnam War. The artist poetically maps out how ideas Emerson penned nearly 200 years ago echo across time and space to influence U.S. policies abroad.

    Didier William (Born 1983 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti) creates fantastical figurative paintings on wooden panels that incorporate carving, collage, and traditional Haitian iconography to explore themes of personal belonging and transnationalism. Throughout his oeuvre, William depicts figures suspended in space as if underwater or floating in the air. The artist notes that the absence of gravity and a stable foundation speaks to both queerness and diaspora as unmoored states that require constant navigation to construct a sense of belonging. In 2023, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston included William’s work in its presentation of Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today.

    In Gwo Tet, a large, central figure hunches over a grainy wooden floor, their arms raised above their head in a defensive gesture. To the upper left, four hands extend menacingly from beyond the edges of the panel as if beckoning or casting a spell on the central figure. In Haitian Creole, gwo tét means “big head,” a phrase used pejoratively. William candidly notes that many of his works reconstruct memories of traumatic events. In this case, Gwo Tet depicts an episode where the artist was ridiculed on his walk home from school. The title is not translated to English, a move the artist has linked with a desire to withhold information about his subjects and his memories. In this way, the use of titles in Haitian Creole, or Kreyól, in his work is both a gesture toward Haitian diasporic identity and a way of maintaining a form of privacy. This tension between the knowable and the unknowable is also present in William’s singular iconography. The artist covers his figures in a cloak of carved eyes, a formal device he says liberates them from constant perception. William typically transfers sketches onto wood panels, which he dyes with ink before carving into their surface with a rotary tool. William employs this intervention to layer deeper meaning across his works through carved patterns and collages that echo Haitian textiles from his childhood. Here, William’s ambiguous figures, sexless and ageless, modulate the viewer’s ability to superficially understand them. The work suggests that living with a degree of uncertainty and maintaining anonymity is a right not often afforded to those who fall outside the bounds of white, heteropatriarchal systems.