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Françoise Grossen’s work is central to the wave of innovations in fiber art that took place during the second half of the twentieth century. In describing her artistic development, Grossen summarizes two of the most important ways in which artists transformed fiber in the late 1960s: “First we broke with the rectangle, then we broke with the wall.” By exploring the sheer weight of rope and its response to gravity, Grossen aligned her work with broader artistic debates taking place in New York in the 1960s and ’70s.

Inchworm’s insistent horizontality is related to avant-garde dance, which during this period was moving from the stage to the floor, as well as to contemporaneous installations of scattered scraps of industrial felt and thread. While experimenting with scale, orientation, and composition, Grossen maintained two constants: her medium and her process. She has worked almost exclusively in rope, knotting and braiding it throughout her career; rather than inhibiting her, this self-imposed limitation has facilitated her sustained contemplation of rope’s material properties.

Inchworm is a classic example of fiber art, a movement the ICA/Boston has sought to bring to critical attention and recognition, in part through the major exhibition Fiber: Sculpture 1960—present (2014), and it joins other works in fiber in the collection, such as Josh Faught’s Untitled, 2009, and Faith Wilding’s Crocheted Environment, 1972/2005.

2015.05

Gilbert Prousch and George Passmore, better known as Gilbert and George, have worked together since the mid-1960s. They have described their relationship in life and work by saying, “It’s not a collaboration… . We are two people, but one artist.” In the late 1960s and ’70s, they performed what they called Living Sculpture, documenting their life as art through the creation of small cards printed with captioned drawings of themselves. Always attired in three-button suits, their sartorial formality contrasts with their cheeky, avant-garde work. Their signature works from the 1970s and ’80s consist of composite photographic images assembled in a large grid and overlaid with bright flat colors. Influenced in equal parts by pop and conceptual art, these collage works blend the logic of the billboard with that of the stained-glass window to make an iconic and unique contribution to twentieth-century art.

Sky Blue World is from the series 25 Worlds. In each work in the series, dozens of identical postcards are arranged in concentric patterned fields that measure about 8 by 6 feet. Nearly every work includes the image of a handsome young man’s face multiplied to kaleidoscopic effect. In Sky Blue World more than one hundred identical postcards of Indian Bollywood screen idol Govinda alternate with postcards featuring the dome of St. John’s Cathedral in London and an architectural roofline. The intense repetition of the movie star’s face gives the montage the aura of an altar, presenting him as both a pop culture icon and a quasi-religious personage, while also gesturing to homoerotic desire in a mode akin to the work of Andy Warhol. At the same time, the mosaic pattern created by the arrangement of the postcards places the individual images in service to the pulsating, almost cinematic overall composition.

This work brings into the collection two new artists while also adding an important piece from the 1980s. Its deployment of the readymade, reference to pop culture, and photographic basis enrich the ICA/Boston’s holdings of work by artists such as Dara Birnbaum, Louise Lawler, Cindy Sherman, and Meyer Vaisman.

2013.07

By blurring the line between documentary photography and portraiture, LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photographs and videos address issues of propaganda, politics, and the importance of individual identity and agency. Over the course of the last decade, Frazier’s practice has manifested as an investigation of the social, economic, and environmental deterioration of her home town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, experienced through the tangible and psychological effects of these circumstances on her immediate family. Once a center of the American steel belt, Braddock experienced a massive downturn following the recession of the 1980s, when many of the mills vital to the local economy were either closed or downsized. The resulting economic instability drove many to flee the region, causing urban blight and widespread underemployment. The residents that remained, including Frazier and her family, witnessed their community fall into disrepair.

Momme is one in a series of collaborations between Frazier and her mother. The title, a conjunction of “mom” and “me,” references both the collaborative nature of the project and the seemingly conjoined appearance of the sitters in the photograph. Frazier’s mother appears in the foreground, peering downward, her profile parallel with the frame; LaToya’s face is split by her mother’s profile as she looks out sternly toward the viewer. With both sitters dressed casually and sporting matching hairnets, the dual portrait highlights the similarities between two generations of women living through the travails of impoverished communities. However, the photograph also serves as a personal meditation on the relationship between mother and daughter—one that appears to be fraught with tension as well as mutual admiration.

Along with other works in the ICA/Boston’s strong and ever-expanding collection of photography, including those by Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, Roe Ethridge, Ragnar Kjartansson, and Thomas Ruff, Momme examines the complexity of identity by referencing the tradition of portraiture.

2014.06

Josh Faught’s sculptures are layered with seemingly contradictory elements that exist side by side: abstraction and representation, high art and kitsch, embarrassment and pride, and activism and disengagement. He invokes tensions by juxtaposing such incongruous materials as yarn, hemp, wool, linen, sequins, pins, and cast-off items ranging from self-help books to ceramic casts. He works these media using techniques that include crochet, collage, weaving, dyeing, and painting. The resulting assemblages offer critical commentary on the complexity of human relationships in the domestic sphere in which many of their components originate. His labor-intensive work draws on histories of gender and sexual politics, precariously balancing an urgent sense of anxiety with a nostalgic view of the present.

Untitled exemplifies Faught’s nonobjective work, generating visual interest primarily through shape, color, textural variation, and spatial effects. Segments of gray hemp are sewn together to form an approximate square, broken up by a swatch of woven indigo yarn in the upper right corner and a vertical band of burgundy sequins along the left edge. Crocheted barnacles line the bottom border and punctuate the center, and loose strands of yarn drip haphazardly across the surface. The entire textile is stretched over a wooden garden trellis like a canvas on an easel, inviting analogies with painting. The dangling, gestural threads subtly suggest the expressive brushstrokes of abstract expressionism, while the roughly rectilinear monochrome grid recalls the color field movement. For Faught, abstraction and activism are not mutually exclusive. He describes his artistic process as “constantly jamming together material histories until they become simultaneously abstract and narrative,” and notes that the evocative nature of his media enables his art to be simultaneously abstract and referential. Rather than illustrating his ideas, his work implies his agenda through playful puns on the materials. For example, the trellises that hold up Untitled symbolize social support systems, while their pointed posts suggest the idea of staking a claim or position. In some cases, Faught lashes together his own wooden armatures with survival knots—a metaphor for urgency and resilience. However, the allusions in his work are not always so direct. Sequins, for instance, suggest the performative nature of gender identity in general, and drag costuming in particular. Sequins, pins, and other memorabilia indirectly invoke gay countercultures and communities.

Untitled is a major work by this critically important yet under-recognized artist. The relation to works by Tara Donovan, Mona Hatoum, Sheila Hicks, and Faith Wilding in the ICA/Boston collection illustrates a way of making sculpture far outside the conventional trajectories of the medium’s history.

2014.02

Leonardo Drew captures the tensions between order and chaos in abstract sculptural artworks that range from the intimate to the monumental in scale. Composed of accumulated found objects, paper, wood, and fabric, his work evokes the cycles of life, from creation and destruction, to fecundity and decay. Drew cast paper to form the gridded square panels of Untitled (2005–06). The process lends the work its varied surface with gaps and breaks revealing the hollow core, while the overall composition is dominated by the regularity of the grid. This piece highlights Drew’s hallmark merging of the abstract and non-representational with process-oriented works that reveal the labor of the artist’s hand.

2013.11

Since the early 1980s Willie Doherty has made photographs and video installations that meditate on the political Troubles in Northern Ireland. Having witnessed the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre of unarmed nationalist civilians by British paratroopers, he began taking black-and-white photographs of his home town of Derry, with which he sought to counteract the images of political violence prevalent in the press. Doherty’s photographs and videos address issues surrounding the representation of landscape, territory, history, and the expression of identity. His work navigates the relationship between memory and subjectivity and presents them as sites of contestation and conflict. While Doherty’s work often focuses directly on the political impasse in Northern Ireland, he also makes work that is more metaphorical.

Factory III depicts an industrial yard filled with debris—segments of twisted metal pipes and broken fragments of wood—with the front of a dilapidated factory in the background. Cropped so only the yard, front windows, and roll top door of the factory are visible, the landscape gives off an eerie feeling that some sort of violence or devastation has taken place. As with many of Doherty’s works, Factory III stands as an archetypal scene of terrorism and political violence. The work activates universal emotions by playing off of the paranoia, anger, and desperation that rises to the surface when one encounters the detritus and broken windows of abandoned buildings. Yet the ambiguity of the photograph leaves the work open for multiple interpretations.

The addition of Factory III to the ICA/Boston’s collection expands the museum’s strong holdings in photography. Doherty’s work combines landscape photography with images that deal with terrorism and political violence. Alongside work in the collection by Paul Chan, Nan Goldin, and Mona Hatoum, Doherty’s Factory III will add to the diverse ways in which artists are dealing with issues of violence in their work.

2012.27

Willie Doherty has been a pioneer in contemporary photography since the 1980s. Born in Northern Ireland, the traumatic history of the region has been a major focus of his work. Doherty’s photographs explore post-conflict settings that suggest a troubled past, addressing issues of collective trauma, memory, and subjectivity. The scenes of isolated or abandoned places are often from his hometown of Derry, a city that was deeply divided by religious and political partisanship in the 1960s and ’70s.

Suspicious Vehicle depicts a red car that has been abandoned on the side of a darkened road. It is unclear if the vehicle was intentionally abandoned by its driver, whether the driver was taken from the car against their will, or if the car itself is a weapon. Regardless, through the combination of the title, darkness of night, and lack of human presence, the image conveys an unsettling scene that suggests some sort of unfortunate incident has (or will) occur.

The addition of Suspicious Vehicle to the ICA/Boston’s collection expands the museum’s strong holdings in photography, joining another photograph by Doherty (Factory III, 1994) as well as photographs by Cindy Sherman and Nan Goldin that suggest a pregnant narrative moment.

2012.28

The artist Nathalie Djurberg and musician/composer Hans Berg frequently collaborate on projects that span the cinematic, the sculptural, and the performative to explore the deepest human emotions—desire, compassion, fear, love, pain, regret, and grief. The collaborators’ immersive sensorial environments are a mélange of claymation projections and sculptures by Djurberg and electronic soundscapes by Berg. As in dark folktales, visitors enter fictive worlds populated by human and animal archetypes whose sexual discovery, aggression, vulnerability, and pain expose the fragile and harsh realities of the world. Djurberg’s characters ignore and defy unwritten laws of social conduct with consequences that are simultaneously absurd, humorous, and horrific.

Bang Your Little Drums begins by presenting phrases like “stomp your little feet, snap your little finger” written in Day-Glo colors against a black background. The accompanying musical track seems to take a cue from the text; as the phrases describing banal actions repeat, it rises to orchestral heights. There is no unified narrative, but threads that seem to ravel and unravel: a chained brown bear scoops ice cream, a man unpeels a giant banana, a young boy emerges from a cocoon. The vignettes suggest a transformation and transfiguration of characters that hinges on the grotesque and humorous.

This video enriches the ICA/Boston’s small collection of moving-image works and distinguishes itself as the only piece using claymation as a technique. The addition of this work to the museum’s collection marks the artists’ 2014 exhibition at the ICA.

800.14.01

Tacita Dean’s explorations of the relationship between analogue media and the vicissitudes of time, history, and our natural world have made her one of the most influential artists of her generation. Film, photography, and drawing form the foundation of her practice, and in each instance the chosen medium amplifies her themes. At its heart, Dean’s work is grounded in the material, temporal, and associative qualities of 16mm film. In poetic works that luxuriate in slowness, concentration, and the soft colors and tones of film stock, she approaches iconic architecture, portraits of artists for whom time and movement are critical components of their work (Merce Cunningham, for instance), and the manufacture of film stock itself. Interspersed with these occasionally monumental pieces (she pioneered an almost three-story film projection in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall) are lyrical series of photographs, drawings, and prints that mine the historical presentation of place and history.

Dean’s The Russian Ending is a series of prints that depict the aftermath of an unspecified disaster. Explosions, shipwrecks, funerals, despoiled landscapes, and ambiguous events are annotated by the artist, suggesting possible scenarios. The series takes its title and theme from a tradition in early twentieth-century film production in Denmark (then a major generator of films) in which alternate endings for films bound for U.S. or Russian markets were offered. While the U.S. received films with happy endings, Russia received films that ended in disaster—one conclusion for the land of Disney and an entirely different one for the land of Dostoyevsky. In Dean’s series, the effects of industry, mechanized labor, and war play are rendered in deep, atmospheric tones, underscoring their ambiguity and suggesting history’s inherent subjectivity. The wry title both conjures the last century’s forking path of shared experience for the U.S. and Russia, and announces the end of the Soviet Union.

The Russian Ending is in dialogue with many works in the ICA/Boston collection. It makes an intriguing pair with Boris Mikhailov’s sardonic, sometimes bleak depictions of Ukrainian citizens, but also connects with serial investigations into the subjectivity of identity by artists such as LaToya Ruby Frazier and Cindy Sherman. The representation of war, conflict, and trauma are recurring themes in the works in the collection, ranging from Doris Salcedo’s poetic sculpture to Trevor Paglen’s depictions of twenty-first-century war.

2015.34

Alexandre da Cunha uses utilitarian objects to mimic and embellish the gestures of historical abstraction. Mops pose on pedestals to impersonate Constantin Brancusi’s columns, baking trays dangle from curtain hooks in imitation of Alexander Calder’s mobiles, and toilet plungers masquerade as precious vases that slyly wink at Marcel Duchamp’s urinal. The concept of the “assisted readymade” Duchamp pioneered in 1913 is the foundation for da Cunha’s playful elevation of prosaic products. As a student, da Cunha was influenced by the modernist architecture of Rio de Janeiro and was educated in the sensuous geometries of Neo-concretism in São Paulo. Although he emigrated to London to pursue graduate work at the Royal College of Art and the Chelsea College of Art, and has lived there ever since, he embraces Brazilian aesthetic strategies of recycling, reuse, and improvisation.

Of the many household items he repurposes—beach towels, skateboards, deck chairs, hockey sticks, canvas awnings, flowerpots, and straw hats—da Cunha works most extensively with mop heads. Bust XXXV is part of his first body of work based on the mop, the series Busts, 2008–12. In these works, long strands of dyed wool are knotted to the ends of upside-down mops, the handles of which are planted in concrete plinths. Da Cunha’s title for the series signals the figurative presence of the mops and links them to a classical genre of sculpture. Mops symbolize cleaning, a process that da Cunha considers meditative and reinvigorating, though their deployment also alludes critically to the labor conditions of domestic and janitorial workers worldwide.

Bust XXXV was acquired from the landmark exhibition Fiber: Sculpture 1960—present at the ICA/Boston, along with works by Josh Faught, Françoise Grossen, and Sheila Hicks, and inscribes the exhibition program within the collection. Bust XXXV has additional resonance with figurative works in the collection by Louise Bourgeois, Rachel Harrison, and Eva Hesse.

2016.12