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In the 1980s, Annette Lemieux was part of the burgeoning scene of appropriation artists working in New York, including Sarah Charlesworth, Barbara Kruger, David Salle (for whom Lemieux worked as a studio assistant for a time), and Cindy Sherman. Lemieux uses painting, photography, and found-object assemblage to create works that yoke the cultural and the personal. Her work addresses war, time, memory, art-making, and the relationship between personal experience and history.

In Homecoming, Lemieux has compiled a mostly monochromatic assemblage of visual references to mid-twentieth-century wars. A large canvas is painted as a flag, with one gray star centered on black and brown rectangles. A framed black-and-white photograph hanging adjacent to the painting features a middle-aged woman sitting before a framed photograph of a uniformed man. On the wall of her home is a flag very much like the painted one. To the right of these two elements hangs another framed image––a blue sheet with a white star. The title evokes the homecomings everyone has waited for at some point in their lives, and may now remember with nostalgia. But for Lemieux, such wistful images also critique power structures, like those symbolized by flags, and the sacrifices made for the beliefs that the flags represent.

Lemieux is an important Boston-based artist and teacher whose work was featured in a solo exhibition in 1986 at the ICA/Boston, which included Homecoming, the first work by the artist to enter the collection. The work bolsters the museum’s strength in work by women artists, including such painters as Dana Schutz, Amy Sillman, and Charline von Heyl, and enables the museum to tell a fuller story of art in the 1980s and ’90s.

2012.11

In a distinctive and powerful body of work, Charles LeDray has employed diverse sculptural languages with materials such as needle-stitched cloth, carved human bone, and hand-thrown ceramics. In an era of high-tech production values, LeDray insists on a painstakingly manual fidelity that lends an air of deeply felt experience to his work. His diminutive sculptures transport viewers to moments of shared personal and cultural history, from childhood games to festive occasions.

LeDray learned to sew at home and intuitively developing his sense of the sculptural possibilities of vernacular forms and working most often at a micro scale. His objects carved from human bone are exquisitely rendered, with astonishing precision, to sixteenths of an inch. He creates ceramic pots that are smaller than many people’s fingers, yet technically perfect and extraordinary in their diversity. At the same time, LeDray’s work is in no sense “naïve”; he has studied and absorbed the most sophisticated art of the classical, modern, and contemporary periods.

Untitled is an assemblage of denim like fabric patches that covers a form suggestive of the body of a child, perhaps taking refuge or playing hide-and-seek. Possessing a compelling magnetism, the unique floor sculpture displays LeDray’s rigorous and virtuosic handwork. The artist works on pieces in meticulous detail over weeks and years, without the help of studio assistants. His process and techniques of sewing and carving recall the visionary work of folk and outsider artists, and his commitment to everyday material is consistent with the broad interest in manual craft and the handmade in contemporary art.

2011.3

In his works on paper, tattoo artist Dr. Lakra transforms found prints, advertisements, and objects. His work is often tinged with gothic overtones, as he adds morbid symbols to the found imagery. Spiders and snakes, blood stains and skeletons, sneak onto the pages of his unsuspecting subjects.

This untitled portrait shows an unidentified man wearing a black suit coat and white dress shirt; his hair is slicked back neatly in place. He stares ahead with a direct and vacant gaze, as if posing for a passport or visa application. Opaque though he is, many of the symbols found in the image hint at a potentially violent history. Spider webs fill the upper corners of the picture and creep onto his chin, as if he were metaphorically caught in an inescapable situation. The number 666 is scrawled on his forehead, a reference to satanic practices, and tears drip down both cheeks, signifying that he may have killed someone while serving time in prison. The initials “MS” on his forehead and the word “Salvatrucha” across his eyelids signal an affiliation with the infamous Salvadoran gang Mara Salvatrucha, a powerful transnational group that originated in Los Angeles and now has members all over the world. The inscriptions “Big One Ocho,” to the right of his head, and “18 S,” across his cheeks, refer to the Hispanic LA–based 18th Street gang. Dr. Lakra stresses the importance of territory to gangs by listing the cardinal directions. At the bottom of the page, to the right of his prominent signature, he has inserted “OAX” in reference to his hometown of Oaxaca, Mexico.

This portrait appeared in a solo exhibition of Dr. Lakra’s work presented by ICA/Boston in 2010. Enhancing the collection’s strength in figurative work, it complements the populist and street-culture references found in collection works by Shepard Fairey and Swoon.  

800.10.1

Christian Jankowski gained recognition in the 1990s for challenging conventional perceptions of art by producing his projects within interactive situations. His performative work is often captured and displayed on videos that take into account the context of the viewing space.

The Hunt, first conceived in 1992, is Jankowski’s most seminal early project, and the first of his videos to include the conceptual twists and self-reflexive humor that now define his mature practice. In this video, edited from weeklong filming, he tests the cliché of the “starving artist” while immersing himself in the realm of everyday commerce. The footage captures a young Jankowski’s quest to eat only groceries he shoots in the supermarket with a bow and arrow. The metaphors for striking success and survival as an artist are implicit. Amplifying the absurdity of “hunting” for shrink-wrapped, price-tagged products is the nonchalance of a cashier who rings up the arrow-struck items without reaction. The result is an amusing critique on the disaffected commercialization of securing sustenance, long a trope of high-adrenalin masculinity and honor in mythology and art history.

Included in the ICA/Boston’s inaugural installation in its new building, The Hunt was a gift to the museum from the artist, and it joins his 3-channel video Point of Sale, 2002. Incisively direct, the early work shows the groundwork for the latter project’s more discursive investigation of art, business, and their overlap. Differing in level of subtlety, complexity, and production value, both works frame the uncertain stakes of pursuing art in a world now defined by sales. Joining a number of other video works in the ICA’s collection, The Hunt marks the museum’s important support of video art from the 1970s to the present.

2007.1

In his work, Christian Jankowski often invites the participation of others—from theologians, children, psychoanalysts, talk-show hosts, and art professionals to passing strangers—overturning notions of artistic “control” to open us to questions about the nature of contemporary art and its relation to other forms of social expression and connection. With video and film works produced through such expressive venues as televangelism, traditional documentary, therapy sessions, Hollywood special effects, karaoke recordings, and magic, Jankowski reveals the construction of belief required by each, with a winking humor that lets us laugh with him.

Point of Sale exemplifies the primary strategies of Jankowski’s practice: collaboration, crossover, chance, and critical wit. In the video, he has spliced together interview and video footage of three New York professionals in their workplaces to form a synchronized three-part exchange. Appearing on three separate channels are uptown management consultant Clayton Press; veteran electronics dealer George Kunstlinger (in his Chinatown shop, Kunst Sales, Inc.); and Jankowski’s art dealer Michele Maccarone (whose new gallery, maccarone inc., opened upstairs from Kunst Sales). Interviewing both Kunstlinger and Maccarone, Press questions, consults, and advises these neighbors on their respective clienteles, financial challenges, and business strategies. Meanwhile, Jankowski has arranged for the interviewees to deliver each other’s answers, effectively spotlighting the shared risks, challenges, and goals of their highly specialized ventures. As Jankowski’s first project for a commercial gallery in New York, Point of Sale plays on the overlapping location and vocation of two small businesses (their “point” of sale) while probing the wider intersection between art and commerce—and Jankowski’s own place in it.

A video work that challenges the status quo of contemporary art production, consumption, and presentation, Point of Sale is a bold first statement of the ICA/Boston’s new commitment to collecting the most innovative work of our time.

2005.1

Over the past decade, Thomas Hirschhorn has become known for ephemeral constructions he calls “displays” rather than “installations.” Often overflowing their museum or gallery environments, these works resemble shanties, makeshift altars, or department stores gone awry. To build his displays, Hirschhorn employs low or untraditional art materials—cardboard, packing tape, aluminum foil, plastic, and plywood—which are then layered with all manner of text and image: hand-scrawled slogans, clippings from newspapers and magazines, stacks of philosophy and political science books. The result is an intense and immersive interplay of ideas made physical.

Wood-Chain VIII (Pisa Tower) is a more discrete work than Hirschhorn’s usual production—but it is just as difficult to classify. Neither sculpture, relief, nor painting, the work resembles a giant necklace supporting a pendant made of wood inscribed with burned-in figuration and detail. Hirschhorn’s signature mode is to juxtapose different, sometimes incongruous, types of symbolism, making intellectual and political leaps that create rough collisions. Wood-Chain VIII (Pisa Tower) links or “chains” together a conversation about architecture and globalization––its tower is an oversized version of a memento that might be bought at a tourist gift shop, its wooden chain a reference to the gaudy jewelry of hip-hop or mafia dons colloquially named “bling” (for the “bling-bling” sound of the cash register). The work speaks to the circulation of architectural signs along the trashy byways of touristic commerce—not without irony, given Hirschhorn’s use of patently un-bling burnt wood. Branded on the pendant’s base is the phrase “Utopia, Utopia, One World, One War, One Army, One Dress,” the title of Hirschhorn’s 2005 exhibition at the ICA/Boston, which denotes the artist’s longtime preoccupation with the dystopian conflicts of globalization.

This work, by an artist supported by the ICA with a major early exhibition, deepens and broadens the museum’s holdings in object-based or sculptural work, joining major sculptural works by Tara Donovan, Rachel Harrison, and Mona Hatoum.

2009.6

Arturo Herrera works in sculpture, wall painting, collage, photography, and video. He is known for collage works that intertwine found images of Disney cartoon characters and abstract shapes. Through the fragmentation and recontextualization of familiar childhood images, Herrera evokes collective memories, often calling into question the innocence of such memories. In the artist’s words: “I believe the tension within constructed images reflects an essential tension inherent in life, where reconciling the familiar and the unknown is a continual, though generally unconscious, process. For this reason animated films and illustrations have been a rich source for my work. Their stylized, graphic qualities communicate the familiar in an effortless and immediate way that can also be pushed quickly into abstraction through fragmentation and dislocation.”

In the large collage Hasen, Herrera has composed an expansive, abstract field from cut paper and brightly colored paint. Moving beyond his more recognizable cartoon images, Herrera here works with a multitude of references, from magazines and newspapers to cartoons and coloring books. Alternating between legibility and abstraction, Herrera’s juxtaposition of the cutout and painted elements generates an unusual sense of wholeness—an allover field.

Celebrated for his reuse of mass-produced imagery, Herrera has stretched the means and methods of appropriation in his ambitious collages, paintings, and architecturally scaled installations. The acquisition of Hasen furthers critically important conversations around the history of appropriation and the relationships between painting and abstraction as explored in works by such artists as Kai Althoff, Dr. Lakra, and Thomas Hirschhorn in the ICA/Boston collection.

800.12.01

Nan Goldin is known for candid photographs that capture intimate moments in the lives of her friends and family. When she visited Tokyo in 1992, however, she was struck by the beauty of the city and people and for the first time photographed strangers on the street: “I sensed change in the air, things boiling up from underground, people coming out, and women emerging with new attitudes.” She returned to Tokyo in 1994 to work alongside her Japanese counterpart, the photographer Nobuyoshi Araki. Together, they published an artists’ book of their photographs of Japanese youth, titled Tokyo Love. In the book, Goldin reflects on the similarities between her formative years in the US and the rebellious Japanese youth she encountered in Tokyo, and remarks, “I fell in love with face after face. What started as a documentary project emerged as a journey back into my own adolescence, a rebirth of innocence, a time before my community was plagued by AIDS and decimated by drug addiction, a return to the garden.”

Many of the images in the Tokyo Love series celebrate youthful energy and romance as well as the subjects’ evolving and fluid sexuality. Takaho After Kissing, Tokyo is a sexually charged portrait of a young man reclining on a leopard-print sofa wearing only white underwear and a fishnet scarf. Glancing sideways, he smiles widely, red lipstick smeared across his mouth, capturing the emotionally charged state “after kissing.”

Takaho After Kissing, Tokyo joins a number of works by Goldin in the collection and adds depth to photographic portraits by such artists as Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, and Boris Mikhailov.

2010.2

2009.4

2009.3