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At age eight, Kerry James Marshall moved with his family from Birmingham to the neighborhood of Watts in South Central Los Angeles. The environment of his upbringing had a profound impact on the subject matter of his work, which revisits the legacy of the Civil Rights era and the nation’s progress—or lack of progress—toward the goal of racial equality. As Marshall has stated: “You can’t be born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 and grow up in South Central near the Black Panthers headquarters, and not feel like you’ve got some kind of social responsibility. You can’t move to Watts in 1963 and not speak about it. That determined a lot of where my work was going to go.”

The five dinner plates in this set feature the texts “We Shall Overcome,” “Burn Baby Burn,” “By Any Means Necessary,” “Black Is Beautiful,” and “Black Power,” taken from a print series shown in Mementos, a 1998 solo exhibition of Marshall’s work organized by the Renaissance Society in Chicago, which traveled to the ICA/Boston, among other venues. The ceramic plates were produced as an edition to benefit the Renaissance Society. The affirmations they present are slogans popular during the 1960s Civil Rights movement, and they range in tone from peaceful to aggressive, reflecting the plurality of stances taken in the fight for equality in that era. In discussing the prints in his essay for the Mementos exhibition brochure, curator Hamza Walker considers them elegiacally, as “fallen monuments, tombstones even, to popular slogans which have lost their ability to galvanize the black community.” On benign, domestic plates, their revolutionary impact is perhaps further softened.

This edition, which was included in the 1999 ICA exhibition Collectors Collect Contemporary: 1990–99, builds on the museum’s interest in craft media, while introducing into the collection the work of an important contemporary practitioner, teacher, and voice.

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Though Glenn Ligon began his career as an abstract painter, after enrolling in the Whitney Independent Study Program in the mid-1980s he turned to more conceptual concerns. He is now known for using text and found images to introduce a broad range of references in his work.

Rückenfigur is an important neon piece that was included in the 2011 exhibition Glenn Ligon: America at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. It consists of a neon sign, painted black, installed on the floor. The title, literally “back figure,” is a German art-historical term for the Romantic device of depicting a subject from behind, often contemplating a grand landscape, as in the work of Caspar David Friedrich. Facing the same direction, the viewer can more readily identify with the subject’s experience. Ligon literalizes the title by placing the ostensible “front” of the neon sign against the floor, placing the viewer in the symbolic position of looking at the back of the vast and diverse landscape that is America.

A flagship work by Ligon, and his first to enter the ICA/Boston collection, Rückenfigur engages with questions of national and racial identity as well as the process of identification in a simple, rigorous way. It enters into dialogue with other text-based works in the collection, especially those that address the complexity of race, by such artists as Ellen Gallagher, Kerry James Marshall, and Lorna Simpson.

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Originally trained as an architect, Klara Lidén uses found material to create psychologically charged sculptures, paintings, and installations that mine the anxieties of the urban environment. Scavenging the streets of cities around the world, Lidén collects detritus to build sculptures that are often scaled to her own body. Her work alters the space of the museum by connecting it to the material and political realities of the world outside.

Untitled (Poster Painting) belongs to a series of paintings composed of layers of advertising posters the artist excised from city walls and lampposts. Retaining the roughness of the paper’s surface by layering the sheets and trapping the air pockets between them, Lidén obliterates the topmost image by painting over the unfurling stack. She hints at what lies beneath by folding over the first few layers.

Untitled (Poster Painting) is one of several works in the ICA/Boston collection that incorporate everyday found materials, using their expansiveness to provide, ultimately, novel ways to understand the world around us. It establishes a dialogue with works by such artists as Carol Bove, Alexandre da Cunha, Tara Donovan, and Annette Messager.

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