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Tammy Nguyen 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 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.

Wu Tsang is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker who combines narrative and documentary techniques to explore fluid identities, marginalized histories, and whimsical worlds. After first presenting her work in Art in the Age of the Internet: 1989 to Today (2018), the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston organized Wu Tsang: Of Whales (2024), Tsang’s first solo exhibition in her home state of Massachusetts

Across Tsang’s practice, she frequently features a recurring cast of friends from her expansive artistic community, which is true of her 2015 film Girl Talk. In the video, Tsang captures the poet and scholar Fred Moten dancing and twirling in a meadow in soft drag, or a subtle performance in traditionally feminine clothing and makeup. Moten’s performance is accompanied by Josiah Wise’s (a.k.a. serpentwithfeet) rendition of “Girl Talk,” a 1960s jazz standard composed and written by Neal Hefti and Bobby Troup (respectively) for the biopic Harlow (1965). Troup’s original lyrics perpetuate a misogynistic view of women and their interpersonal talk with each other (hence the pejorative “girl talk”), belittling such as mere gossip and frivolity. Moten, however, specifically choose Betty Carter’s 1969 version of the song, in which she rewrites the lyrics to empower women’s performance of the piece (e.g., referring to women: from “the weaker sex, the speaker sex” to “we, the weaker sex; we, the speaker sex”). With open arms, Moten improvisationally dances to the subversive rendition while wearing white ribbons, studded jewelry, and a purple velvet cloak. Playfully unsettling traditional categories of gender norms, Tsang is also interested in pushing the conventions of filmmaking media writ large. Tsang recorded Girl Talk on an iPhone, which was a radical act for a filmmaker in 2015, only six years after iPhones were video-compatible. The four-minute video embraces imperfect resolution and the instability of the handheld iPhone camera. In Girl Talk, Tsang choreographs a blurred reality by pushing the boundaries of traditional gender tropes and between the role of camera, subject, and viewer.

Zoe Pettijohn Schade creates heavily detailed, labor-intensive, geometric gouache paintings by repeating imagery. Drawing from her own life, memories, and direct observation, Pettijohn Schade creates complex patterns from everyday images to produce layered and dizzying optical experiences. Pettijohn Schade’s work was included in the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston’s exhibition Less is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design (2019).

Attempts at Self Organization: Prevailing Bonds is the culmination of two years of work in which Pettijohn Schade meticulously draws from life using mirror devices that generate internally repeated structures and patterns. The foundational layer of the painting is a marbled pattern that the artist creates using traditional techniques, swirling pigment suspended on a liquid surface and laying paper on the liquid to absorb the patterned color. The artist then paints in gouache the shapes and patterns she observes by placing plants, rocks, a feather, and other materials inside a mirrored polyhedron. As the artist describes, “Mirror symmetry differs from other forms of tiling in that the symmetry—the tiles facing each other as they repeat, has an element of self-regard as well as self-replication.” Her approach lends the work an all-over composition in which no single element stands out, but each tile is entirely unique. In this work, she has paid particular attention to moments when long edges align—or bond. Among these precisely rendered shapes, there are blotches that break up the image’s geometric perfection. Reminiscent of Hermann Rorschach’s psychological tests—during which patients are asked to interpret various inkblots, with their responses being analyzed by the tester to better understand an individual’s subconscious—these shapes interrupt the patterning, inviting viewers to form their own images. Pettijohn Schade outlines the distinct polygons with thin, gilded metallic lines, which create a lattice-like layer that appears and disappears as a viewer moves around the work. Through this series of works, the artist draws upon texts by classical philosophers and theologians, such as Plato and St. Augustine, seeking to explore fundamental questions about the organization of matter and the self.

Guadalupe Maravilla grounds his sculpture, painting, performance, and large-scale installation in activism and healing, informed by his personal story of migration, illness, and recovery. Through powerful and symbolic objects and images Maravilla collects while retracing his own migration route from El Salvador to the United States, his work mixes Latin American and indigenous crafts, medicinal materials and plants, and readymade goods.

Mariposa Relámpago Retablo recounts the creation of the artist’s largest sculpture to date, Mariposa Relámpago, commissioned by ICA/Boston for the ICA Watershed in 2023 and currently touring the United States. Building on the tradition of retablos—devotional paintings often placed in a church, chapel, or one’s home—Maravilla began his Retablo series in 2019 after a trip to Mexico retracing his own migration route. During the trip, he met traditional retablo painters (retableros) Daniel Alonso Vilchis Hernandez and his father Alfredo Vilchis Roque. Maravilla began an ongoing collaboration with the painters in which he creates a digital sketch and writes the accompanying text, and then Daniel and his father paint them in oil on tin. In Mariposa Relámpago Retablo, he adapts this folk art form to chronicle his own life story and express gratitude for notable events. Maravilla depicts the creation of the monumental work Mariposa Relámpago, which began as a school bus in the United States, had a second life transporting workers in El Salvador and Mexico, and was transformed by Maravilla into a sculpture and musical instrument for vibrational therapy. He depicts details such as the gongs and enormous feather serpent that adorn the bus and significant moments from this process, including sound ceremonies performed by healers in El Salvador. Around the painting, Maravilla constructs a sculptural frame and embeds objects he has collected that relate to broader themes in the artist’s practice, including a copper bird representing freedom and squash-shaped coin purses referencing one of the foods that Maravilla ate following his chemotherapy treatments.

Rania Matar grapples with issues of personal and collective identity in her work. Born in Lebanon, Matar has lived in the United States since 1984. Drawing on her cultural background, cross-cultural experiences, and personal narrative, she has produced photographic series focused on womanhood, adolescence, and periods of individual evolution.

Since 2005, Matar has collaborated with Samira, a third-generation Palestinian refugee who Matar met at the Bourj El-Barajneh Camp on the outskirts of Beirut. While the earliest images are taken inside the refugee camp, later images record Samira and Matar on ventures outside Bourg El-Barajneh, taking photographs near the sea and in other areas around Beirut. Taken across almost twenty years, Matar’s poetic photographs capture Samira growing up. The moments Matar and Samira share in these photographs are contemplative and tender, capturing states of being and transformation.

Samira at 13, Bourj El-Barajneh Refugee Camp, Beirut was taken eight years after Matar first photographed Samira. This portrait captures Samira’s growth and development, her emergence into adolescence, and the progression of her identity. Viewers are drawn to the image through striking details, such as the colorful interior environment, the interplay of different hues of blue, and the visual rhyme between the bedazzled bow on the subject’s shirt and the textiles beside her. Most significant, perhaps, is the sitter’s penetrating gaze, which suggests self-possession and confidence as she meets the eyes of her viewers. This photograph serves as a bridge between two other images of Samira in the ICA’s collection, creating a formal echo with how Samira herself spans childhood and adulthood.

Rania Matar grapples with issues of personal and collective identity in her work. Born in Lebanon, Matar has lived in the United States since 1984. Drawing on her cultural background, cross-cultural experiences, and personal narrative, she has produced photographic series focused on womanhood, adolescence, and periods of individual evolution.

Since 2005, Matar has collaborated with Samira, a third-generation Palestinian refugee who Matar met at the Bourj El-Barajneh Camp on the outskirts of Beirut. While the earliest images are taken inside the refugee camp, later images record Samira and Matar on ventures outside Bourg El-Barajneh, taking photographs near the sea and in other areas around Beirut. Taken across almost twenty years, Matar’s poetic photographs capture Samira growing up. The moments Matar and Samira share in these photographs are contemplative and tender, capturing states of being and transformation.

Samira, Hasna, and Wafa’a, Bourj El-Barajneh Refugee Camp, Beirut is the first image in this body of work, taken when Matar first met Samira. In the photograph, Samira is flanked by family members as her mother extends a tray with tea and snacks. More than just marking the beginning of Matar and Samira’s extensive relationship, the image centers themes of hospitality and hope within difficult material circumstances. It also speaks to the relationships among daughters, sisters, and mothers—a long-running theme in Matar’s practice.

Rania Matar grapples with issues of personal and collective identity in her work. Born in Lebanon, Matar has lived in the United States since 1984. Drawing on her cultural background, cross-cultural experiences, and personal narrative, she has produced photographic series focused on womanhood, adolescence, and periods of individual evolution.

Since 2005, Matar has collaborated with Samira, a third-generation Palestinian refugee who Matar met at the Bourj El-Barajneh Camp on the outskirts of Beirut. While the earliest images are taken inside the refugee camp, later images record Samira and Matar on ventures outside Bourg El-Barajneh, taking photographs near the sea and in other areas around Beirut. Taken across almost twenty years, Matar’s poetic photographs capture Samira growing up. The moments Matar and Samira share in these photographs are contemplative and tender, capturing states of being and transformation.

Samira, Jnah, Beirut, Lebanon reflects Matar and Samira’s travels outside the refugee camp to create portraits. Here, Samira is centered and set within a field of tall grasses and budding wildflowers, the Mediterranean Sea just barely visible in the background. The natural setting’s sense of freedom and openness is undercut by tangled rings of razor wire. This image, taken by peering through these barriers, raises central questions of freedom and movement as they shape Samira and Matar’s lives.

Yu-Wen Wu is a Boston-based, Taiwanese-American artist whose work examines issues of displacement, arrival, and assimilation. At the crossroads of art, science, politics, and social issues, her practice includes drawing, sculpture, site-specific video installations, community engaged practices, and public art. 

The material conversations within Wu’s practice foreground the artist’s interest in navigating her subjectivity as an immigrant to the United States and a member of the Asian diaspora. Tea, gold, and red thread are significant and recurring forms in her work, operating as cultural and personal touchstones. Intentions (III), which is composed of three strands created for Wu’s presentation in the 2023 James and Audrey Foster Prize, brings together these materials in the form of wrapped, gilded orbs that approximate Wu’s grandmother’s Buddhist prayer beads. “I remember sitting on her lap as a young child and listening to her hushed voice recite prayers and intentions,” shares the artist, who, to make this work, fashioned knotted strands of 108 (referring to the number of prayers within Buddhism) or 88 (being an auspicious number within Chinese culture) orbs in groupings that refer to other numerical systems of value, such as binary code.

Each orb is made of brewed and dried Taiwanese tea, collected by her mother and aunt, and gilded with painted gold—a material notable both for its associations with preciousness and prosperity as well as a specific reference to the history of Chinese immigration to the United States at the height of the Gold Rush. The red thread recalls ideas of bloodlines, community, and family ties across generations, geographies, and lifetimes. “Unlike circular prayer beads,” explains Wu, here the arrangement of the strands “are suspended in space, resting in a spiral, referring to open possibilities and developing intentions.” 

Kathleen Ryan is a sculptor who is best known for her three-dimensional sculptures of moldy fruit recalling vanitas and their reminder of the impermanence of life. In her practice, Ryan manipulates found and handmade forms with surprising materials—delicate grapes made of concrete, flower seed pods from a repurposed yellow showerhead, and mold using precious gemstones.  

Ryan’s series of larger-than-life, studded Bad Fruits harness the material and visual excess of gems to comment on how and why objects are valued. Fruit has long been a symbol of human consumption and decay in Western art—from Dutch Golden Age still life painting to the beaded fruit craft tradition of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s that influences her work. Playing on a genre of craft objects often given little monetary value and relegated to the shelves of thrift stores, Ryan’s work considers luxury and value.  

In Ryan’s Bad Lemon (Cameo), fake gems adorn the artificial lemon’s healthy yellow rind, while precious pearls and crystals are reserved for the moldy bacterial growths, a playful inversion of what is wanted or valued and what makes the lemon “bad.” The artist’s meticulous translation of a natural phenomenon like decay through the accumulation and arrangement of thousands of stones and beads renders the surfaces of her sculptures mesmerizing. This play between attraction and revulsion and the benefits of close looking are at the heart of Ryan’s singular practice.