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One of the defining artists of her generation, Catherine Opie is known for her photographic portraits and landscapes. She frequently combines the two genres by training her camera on people within their environments—from Boy Scouts at their campgrounds to ice fishermen on frozen lakes and surfers waiting for the next wave. Drawing on the tradition of American landscape painting and of social documentary photography by artists like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, Opie gives us a view of democracy in action. Her photographs explore the intimate relations between community and politics, citizens and the landscape, offering a dynamic, open, and complex portrait of the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Untitled #1 (Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival) documents a six-day international festival that occurs every August outside Hart, Michigan. Drawing nearly 10,000 visitors annually, the event is built, staffed, and run entirely by women for women (referred to as “womyn” to avoid overtones of patriarchy) of all age groups, ethnic backgrounds, and abilities. The festival was founded in 1976 by Mary Kindig, Kristie Vogel, and Lisa Vogel in response to the misogyny they experienced working at festivals and music venues run by men. Through a sea of tents, bodies, and trees, Opie presents a collective identity that has come to represent an idyllic version of female solidarity, diversity, and community.

Following the 2011 exhibition at the ICA/Boston Catherine Opie: Empty and Full, the artist donated Untitled #1 (Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival) to the museum. The addition of this work augments the ICA’s focus on work by women artists and its strong holdings of photography by such leading artists as Rineke Dijkstra, Lorna Simpson, and Sara VanDerBeek.

2011.2

Ray Navarro and Zoe Leonard emerged as artists in New York in the 1990s. Working primarily in photography, both artists have harnessed the conceptual aspects of the medium.

Navarro conceived Equipped after losing his vision due to AIDS-related medical complications, and he reached out to Leonard to help him produce it. Leonard functioned as his “eyes” in executing the work, recalling that “it was a very moving and intimate process, working together with him.” Each photograph in this triptych portrays a mobility device used by people with a disability, and is accompanied by a sexual euphemism or phrase etched on an office-style desk plaque. The juxtapositions of images and words, such as an image of a wheelchair flipped over accompanied by the phrase “HOT BUTT,” rearticulate the sexualized body by signaling the physical degradation caused by a disease that is often perceived as a consequence of sexual behavior. The frames are painted a warm pink to evoke the generic Caucasian flesh colors of most prosthetic devices, underscoring the link between the disabled body and assistive mechanisms.

Building on the ICA/Boston’s strength in photography, Equipped helps the museum tell the history of the AIDS crisis and its impact on art production and artistic communities, a key theme in the 2012 ICA group exhibition This Will Have Been: Art, Love, & Politics in the 1980s, in which this work appeared.

2011.4

Boris Mikhailov has been called “the former Soviet Union’s most influential living photographer,” yet it has only been in the past decade—since the fall of the USSR—that his work has been widely exhibited in either the East or the West. Mikhailov’s exhibition at the ICA/Boston in 2004 was the artist’s first retrospective in the United States. His career has run parallel to the height, decline, and fall of the Soviet Union and its aftermath. Over the past forty years, he has produced an exceptional body of work that bears witness to these tumultuous times.

Mikhailov’s Case History series documents the homeless community that has appeared since the end of Communism in the Ukrainian city of Kharkov. In the late 1990s, he began photographing the so-called bomzhes, approaching them with his wife, Vita, and asking if he could take their photograph. The subjects, with tattered clothing and ailing bodies, bluntly reflect the economic deterioration of the post-Soviet era. Here, an older woman who appears in several photographs from the series crouches in a somewhat awkward pose in front of a tree. She looks cold in this wintry scene; her clothes are layered and threadbare, her gloveless hands clasped. In printing the image at almost life-size, Mikhailov confronts the viewer with his subject’s grim reality. Even so, her piercing blue eyes look straight ahead with a steady, sure gaze, never fully revealing what must be her daily struggles. Mikhailov’s Case History photographs expose a reality that most do not see or would rather ignore; they archive a community and a reality that would otherwise be erased, like so much of the suffering during the Soviet era.

Untitled is one of two works from this series in the ICA/Boston’s collection, and it joins the museum’s strong holdings of contemporary photography by such figures as Rineke Dijkstra and Nan Goldin.

2015.03

Jason Middlebrook works in sculpture, drawing, painting, and installation to image the clash between nature and the built environment. In California, where the artist was raised, this is called the suburban/wildlife interface: a trouble zone where wildfires regularly decimate neighborhoods and where you might see a coyote trotting down the street. In these edge scenarios, humankind encroaches on nature. Middlebrook’s drawings depict weedy, trash-strewn hillsides teeming with avian life. Roughhewn wooden planks, looking like construction castoffs, are embellished with paint and varnish and lean against the wall like surfboards or minimalist sculptures.

In Finding Square, Middlebrook moves away from quasi-narrative depictions of decaying landscapes and toward abstract modes. A roughly hewn empty wooden frame speaks more to roadside handicrafts (chainsaw animal sculptures) than to fine art accoutrements. The molding is painted with concentric, deep umber-red geometric borders of diminishing width that suggest pictorial recession. These nested borders are evocative of Frank Stella’s groundbreaking early painting, Sol LeWitt’s drawn and painted lines, and Josef Albers’s Homage to the Square series. The frame is, therefore, a ground for painting; with timber substituting for stretched canvas, the painting is also object. The found object is readymade by nature—or, rather, by our manipulation of it. The interior space remains empty, making the wall on which it hangs the “picture” on display. Other works in this series are planks of similarly roughhewn wood, painted to highlight the wood grain or time-demarcating rings.

The addition of Finding Square to the ICA/Boston’s collection augments the strong holdings in works that elegantly merge the conceptual with the highly crafted, such as those by Taylor Davis, Charles LeDray, Josiah McElheny, and many others.

2012.1

A fiercely experimental artist, a catalyst in her native Glasgow art community, and a deeply perceptive writer on the work of her peers, Lucy McKenzie is a foremost emerging artist. Like Andy Warhol or Martin Kippenberger, McKenzie has a profoundly self-conscious sensibility, one that is rigorously engaged with her world on all fronts. Trained in the commercial techniques of decorative painting, she slyly recalibrates the legacies, both aesthetic and social, of abstract painting, investigating technique and proposing new attendant meanings.

Often layering her work with cultural signification, double appearances, and euphemism, McKenzie is noted for pastiching historical design styles to extract their latent meanings—from the woodsy proto-modernism of Charles Rennie Mackintosh to socialist realist posters to the graffiti and New Wave fonts of the 1980s. Untitled is a humorous and layered exploration of the art-historical tensions between abstraction and figuration, between so-called “high” art and popular culture. At first glance, the work looks like an abstract painting with the shadows of two women cast on its surface, as if they were contemplating it in a museum (or, since the left-hand figure is McKenzie herself, smoking a cigarette, perhaps her studio?). The painting recalls the style of Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, an allusion McKenzie spoofs by rendering the blocks in faux marble—a decorative device used to add “class” to the ugly or banal. The geometric image is, in fact, a stylized figurative representation. Tilt your head to the side, and you can make out a pair of amorous robots, an image McKenzie took from a condom vending machine advertisement for “Mates,” a leading brand of prophylactics in the United Kingdom.

In 2004, the ICA/Boston presented McKenzie’s first one-person museum exhibition in the United States. Untitled thus marks the museum’s early commitment to this artist and adds a significant painting to the collection.

2016.34

2016.35

Josiah McElheny’s installations of handmade glass objects in precisely designed vitrines, pedestals, or wall units with explanatory texts, documentation, or titles entice us to reflect on the origins of this traditional craft, the history of aesthetics it embodies, and the ideologies these aesthetics project. The product of an ancient technology that defies scientific classification as liquid or solid, glass is an amorphous medium ideally suited to McElheny’s presentation of classic stylistic forms as suspensions of unsettled ideals. Through them, seemingly absolute notions such as perfection, infinity, self-reflection, and utopia are recast as malleable artifacts subject to the forces of history and culture, the advances of art and science, and the contemporary context of their display.

In Czech Modernism Mirrored and Reflected Infinitely, a line of eight polished decanters is viewed through a sheet of one-way glass that reflects the enfilade in what appears to be endless recession into a horizon-less darkness beyond the limits of our vision. A close look at the surface of each object reveals its own reflection, which itself contains another, like a Russian nesting doll. This vacuum of containers-within-containers completely bereft of our own reflection is a vision of modernism devoid of the human element. The seamless landscape of shining forms entrances our senses but denies our presence, hinting at the dangers of infinite absolutes.

Striking for its craftsmanship and conceptual rigor, this perceptually stimulating piece provides a counterpoint to other sculptural works in the ICA/Boston’s permanent collection, such as Taylor Davis’s finely fabricated Untitled, 2001, and Mona Hatoum’s handworked Pom Pom City, 2002.

2006.4

800.13.03

Although a brain tumor ended the life of Eva Hesse at age thirty-four, the style of postminimalism she developed during her abbreviated career has made her one of the most influential artists of the postwar period. Hesse blended the industrial materials and hard, geometric shapes of minimalism with softer, more organic forms to create work that suggests both human pain and mechanical indifference. While the work for which she has received the most recognition is sculptural, drawings and collage are an important part of her oeuvre. The artist’s first solo exhibition, at Allan Stone Gallery in March 1963, consisted of works on paper, and she continued making drawings after she began to create sculpture in 1964–65.

In 1959, Hesse graduated from Yale University’s School of Art and Architecture, where she studied color theory and advanced painting with Josef Albers, and gained a reputation as a talented colorist. Untitled shows the artist experimenting with various color combinations, as well as with black-and-white forms. After leaving Yale, Hesse worked as a textile designer in New York. The gridded composition of Untitled, in which each rectangle bears a distinct design, is reminiscent of a woven piece of fabric or a quilt, and also anticipates Hesse’s later use of the grid in her three-dimensional work.

Hesse is one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century. Untitled is representative of an important early moment in her career, before she turned to sculpture. This piece strengthens the ICA/Boston’s holdings of works by important female artists, and complements the pivotal Hesse sculptures in the collection.

2014.25

Through performances and multimedia installations, Sharon Hayes investigates how speech—both public and private—transects with politics, history, personal identity, desire, and love. By appropriating the tools of twentieth-century protest and demonstration, she reconfigures the images of the protestor in a manner that destabilizes the viewer’s expectations, exposes the possibilities and challenges of reviving past models of protest, and highlights the friction between collective activities and personal actions.

Ricerche: three is the first in a series of works that will carry the title Ricerche. In Ricerche: three, Hayes interviews 35 students at Mount Holyoke College, a women’s college in western Massachusetts, about issues surrounding sex, sexuality, and gender. As the interview unfolds, the camera alternates between a focus on the group and on Hayes with specific interviewees. This provides a unique dual portrait of the student body and of individual students, a distinction that grows as the conversation becomes more heated and individual identities become more prominent. By investigating students at a women’s college, Hayes addresses individual and collective issues surrounding gender-segregated institutions, including the perception that women’s colleges are a hotbed of lesbian culture and the community’s responsibility to accommodate students who change their gender after enrollment. Ricerche: three is inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1963 film Comizi d’amore, in which Pasolini investigates Italy’s postwar cultural attitudes toward sex by asking Italians—young and old—to speak in detail about various issues: childbirth, virginity, homosexuality, divorce, and prostitution. His questioning and his manner are intrusive, judgmental, and at times confrontational. Hayes uses Pasolini’s film as a model for a contemporary inquiry into the issues around sexual identity in the United States today.

This important work adds to the diversity of the ICA/Boston’s growing collection of video, including works by Kader Attia, Paul Chan, Christian Jankowski, and Mika Rottenberg. Ricerche: three also contributes to the ICA’s collection of photographs that examine individual and collective identity by artists such as Rineke Dijkstra, Nan Goldin, Ragnar Kjartansson, and Catherine Opie, who similarly challenge long-held assumptions about sex, gender, and sexuality.

2014.03