Open Today 10 AM – 5 PM
The ICA is open and FREE for Labor Day.

Visiting the Watershed?

Water Shuttle tickets have SOLD OUT.
The Watershed is open from 11 AM – 5 PM through Mon, Sep 2 and is accessible via MBTA.
Admission to the Watershed is always free – no ticket is required for entry.

get tickets

Advance tickets are now available for visits through September. Book now

Since the early 1990s, multimedia artist and performer Nick Cave has been exploring the intersection of fine art, craft, performance, and material culture. He first gained widespread recognition in the art world for his Soundsuits—full-body costumes crafted from twigs, buttons, ceramic figurines, toys, and other objects he gathers from antique shops and flea markets. Cave first devised the Soundsuit as a protective “second skin” in 1991 in response to the racial profiling and beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers. More recently, he has expanded his artistic expression to include paintings and sculptures that adapt the material and formal applications invented for the Soundsuits.

Although he often displays Soundsuits as sculpture, Cave and others also wear them as sound-generating costumes for live performances, photographs, and videos. At the top of this appliquéd outfit is an elaborate chandelier structure containing dozens of ceramic birds and strings of plastic beads. The work epitomizes Cave’s lavish, baroque aesthetic, a mirror of our culture’s excess and a radical reinvention of contemporary sculpture and craft.

The presence of the work supports the museum’s critical examination of the role of craft in contemporary art as seen in other collection works by Josh Faught, Arlene Shechet, and Haegue Yang.

2016.32

Since the late 1970s, Sophie Calle has made work that explores the sphere of human relationships. Most closely associated with conceptual art, Calle employs provocative methods and a wide range of media, including books, photography, video, film, and performance, to investigate subjects such as identity and intimacy. She is well known for her voyeuristic and detective-like projects, which have featured others’, and, several times, her own, life  in its emotional and psychological dimensions. In her documentation and presentation of these performances, she often uses text and photography in ways that redefine notions of truth, fiction, and narrative.

The Doctor’s Daughter is a photograph from Calle’s larger project by of the same title that tells the story of a doctor’s daughter, a little girl named Sophie, who grows up to become a striptease artist. The black-and-white photograph print depicts a woman (presumably the character Sophie, who is played by Calle) lying on the floor on a bed of rumpled clothes and strewn belongings. Below the photograph is a text written in the first person recounting the subject’s work as a striptease artist, including a dramatic and violent encounter with a fellow stripper “on January 8, 1981” that led to her leaving the profession. The text functions as a caption, endowing the sexually charged and seedy scene with a degree of authenticity. Together, text and image construct the fictive protagonist who elides with the artist’s own biography.

This work forms part of the ICA/Boston’s strong collection of photography, especially work by artists who examine identity, such as Rineke Dijkstra, Nan Goldin, Ragnar Kjartansson, and Catherine Opie.

2014.04

Known for her singular body of small-scale paintings on paper, Massachusetts-based Laylah Ali often positions her subjects in odd poses, engaging with one another in curious ways. Her longest-running and best-known series depicts brown-skinned, gender-neutral human beings she calls Greenheads.

While reminiscent of the Greenheads, the figures in Untitled display new levels of detail and pattern. The scene is ambiguous and confounding. Framed by Ali’s signature sky-blue background, two figures lie at the bottom of the image, leaning against each other. As is characteristic of her oeuvre, the scene is one of implied violence; though we do not see the act itself, we witness its brutal aftermath. Yet, rendered in Ali’s cartoonlike style, the scene is simultaneously infused with absurdist humor. The figures, in matching striped pants, have no arms. Their flesh-colored heads suggest a helmet, hat, or bandage … or maybe have they been scalped? The mid-section of the figure on the left is covered with cuts or scars. A long, thin leg that rises from the stomach of the right-hand figure resembles an SOS flag.

Joining another work by Ali in the ICA/Boston collection, this powerful image provokes intense reflection and emotion. An excellent introduction to the artist’s distinctive style, the gouache builds the museum’s nascent collection of works on paper, which includes examples by such artists as Ambreen Butt and Yayoi Kusama.

2006.3

In her distinctive gouaches, Laylah Ali depicts abstracted human figures who assume odd poses as they interact with one another. Many of them are brown-skinned, androgynous creatures she calls Greenheads. The Greenheads, with their bug eyes, simplified bodies, and pointy black boots, are recalled in the figures in Untitled.

As in all of Ali’s work, the cartoon style initially charms and disarms, but then discloses a world fraught with tension and mystery. The drawing shows a somber child being scolded by someone (perhaps his mother?). They both have strange headpieces—the boy’s is yellow with five small feet sticking out of it, and the woman’s is reddish, hairy, and horned. What do these symbolize—their tribes? A superpower? A disease? The piece has a looser technique than most of Ali’s paintings, which are customarily painstakingly composed and executed. While it is a bit less serious in tone, it retains her characteristic open-endedness. Ali allows viewers to interpret and complete her ambiguous scenes, as if they were comic-book pages with empty captions.

Joining another work by Ali in the ICA/Boston collection, this drawing provides an excellent introduction to the artist’s distinctive style and unforgettable world. It joins a nucleus of works on paper by such artists as Ambreen Butt and Yayoi Kusama.

800.06.5

Conceptually driven, Andrew Witkin’s artistic approach is both inspired by and nearly indistinguishable from his deliberate approach to life, work, and relationships. Witkin explains that his work “is and is not art, is and is not finished.” Though his projects have taken a wide range of formats, from large installations to more discrete objects, they all show his interest in repetition and open-endedness.

Untitled consists of 144 white T-shirts hung on hangers. The scene is a familiar one: a sea of mass-produced shirts, as you might see in a clothing store. Written in black on each shirt are short texts—quotes from authors and artists, a single word, or a terse phrase. They range from provocative (“something must happen”), ho-hum (“photos of friends”), and melancholic (“seeing a homeless man every day for weeks on beacon hill and then from one time on, he is gone”) to jovial (“hahahahahahaahahahahahahahah”). As viewers walk through the installation, their upper bodies are obscured by the hanging T-shirts and only their legs are visible, as if their individuality were masked by the shirts. The listing of collaborators, who include colleagues, friends, family, artists, and various cultural figures, is integral to Witkin’s work and further blurs the distinction between his artistic practice and his everyday life.

Witkin was the recipient of the 2008 James and Audrey Foster Prize, and as such, his work was exhibited at the ICA/Boston that year alongside that of the three finalists. Untitled presents a significant large-scale work by a young, Boston-based artist and joins works in the collection by Laylah Ali, Ambreen Butt, Taylor Davis, Kelly Sherman, and Rachel Perry. Furthermore, the repetitive and transformative use of everyday materials in Witkin’s work has a counterpart in Tara Donovan’s sculptures in the ICA’s collection.

2010.4

Rachel Perry’s drawing, video, sculpture, and installation work celebrates the often-overlooked beauty and humor of everyday life. Living as a very young child with her family and two chanting monks in a temple in Kyoto impressed on the artist the wonder of paying close attention to all aspects of the quotidian. She says, “I will continue to thoroughly—some might say obsessively—examine all aspects of my life and try to make sense of them.” Traces of the everyday, the physical, the ephemeral, and the virtual are the building blocks of Perry’s work, which involves the artful accumulation of receipts, family medical records, produce stickers, grocery packaging, voice message recordings, and other materials that are usually discarded.

Karaoke Wrong Number evidences Perry’s highly inventive use of virtual material that most would delete without a second thought. She saved a series of messages left in error on her telephone answering machine, compelled by the urgency and expectation she detected in the recordings. Filming herself in the video in a frontal head-and-shoulders view, Perry lip-synchs the messages, with expert timing and facial expressions, maintaining a deadpan expression between messages. The video work revels in the simultaneous connections and disconnections of contemporary life, where technology both assists and impedes communication. The voicemail messages concern matters both businesslike and intimate, from tax filings to an attempt to repair an estranged relationship. The apparent trust these individuals have that their entreaties will reach the right ears is both heartbreaking and familiar.

When exhibited as part of the ICA/Boston’s 2006 Foster Prize exhibition, the work captured the imagination of visitors, and in the collection it joins other important video work by Kader Attia and Christian Jankowski.

2007.4

Using the potency of advertising media, Kelley Walker appropriates iconic cultural images and digitally alters them to highlight underlying issues of politics and consumerism. He often employs a “copy, cut, and reprint” technique via inkjet printing and screenprinting. As the artist has stated: “I am thinking of printed matter as raw material with traces of history. The logo has an aura of propaganda that interests me.”

In Lee Radziwill Interview March 1975, one of Walker’s so-called brick paintings, the text and images are taken from an old issue of Interview magazine in which pop artist Andy Warhol and his associate Fred Hughes interviewed Lee Radziwill (an American socialite and younger sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis). After printing various pages from the March 1975 issue of the magazine onto canvas, Walker added images of white bricks, disrupting, distancing, and obscuring the original source. The fragmented magazine content becomes the “mortar” that is laced throughout the composition, becoming a subtle anchor of meaning.

Walker’s use of appropriation and investigation of the everyday in Lee Radziwill Interview March 1975 opens a dialogue with works by a number of other artists in the ICA/Boston collection, such as Andy Warhol, Dara Birnbaum, and a younger generation that includes Shannon Ebner, Leslie Hewitt, Klara Lidén, and Sara VanDerBeek.

800.11.3

Brooklyn-based artist Erin Shirreff examines how memory and photography may affect our perceptions and experiences of viewing art. Using a vocabulary of modernist forms, Shirreff manipulates objects to create temporary assemblages that she photographs. The artist often further manipulates the printed photographs, bending, folding, or breaking apart the images to create novel artistic forms.

In A.P. (no. 9), Shirreff made tabletop-scale compositions that evoke mid-twentieth-century modernist sculptures. For this series, she references the outdoor geometric works of artist Tony Smith and reflects on the different experiences of interacting with Smith’s sculptures in situ and seeing them reproduced in print. A.P. (no. 9) is a photographic image of a maquette made of foam core and plaster. The artist used photo-editing software to slice the picture in half and rearrange the composition. “In a way I don’t think of A.P. works so much as photographs as much as I think of them as pictures of sculptures that don’t exist. They have a strange physicality, they are images of sculptures but then the images themselves have these sculptural components. The pictures are folded down the center to reference this notion of book binding” says Shirreff.

This piece is a unique addition to the ICA/Boston’s permanent collection, which includes numerous photographs, and joins a large sculptural work by Erin Shirreff titled Catalogue, 39 parts (Value Lessons), 2015.

800.14.02

Erin Shirreff’s work in sculpture, photography, and video investigates the distorting effects of memory and perspective on the experience of viewing art. Shirreff mines the distance between the general and the specific, employing a pared-down vocabulary of modernist forms to inhabit the space between an art object and our recollection of it. Her works explore the problematic nature of the photographic index as well as the medium’s relationship to the mechanisms of vision and perception. Her investigation often assumes the form of manipulated photographs of objects that are created explicitly to be photographed and then destroyed. By bending, folding, or bifurcating the printed photograph, Shirreff creates new forms, challenging the perception of photography as static and objective.

Catalogue, 39 Parts (Value Lessons) exemplifies Shirreff’s ability to employ the essence of modernist sculpture to new effect. Comprised of an arrangement of smooth, gray geometric Hydro-Stone elements arranged atop a series of level surfaces, the sculpture alternately resembles a table, workbench, and desk. The “legs” of the horizontal planes are simplified geometric forms also culled from the visual lexicon of twentieth-century sculpture. The title references the ubiquitous nature of the forms in relation to the history of art: the objects strewn on multiple surfaces—arcs, cylinders, and cones—represent what Shirreff considers the building blocks or “blanks” of modernist sculpture. By bringing these modules together, Shirreff highlights their universality and interchangeability. Here Shirreff seeks not only to blur the line between our memory and the actuality of experience, but also to blur the divide between the functional and the aesthetic.

Catalogue, 39 parts (Value Lessons) is a singular addition to the ICA/Boston’s permanent collection, augmenting the museum’s holdings in twenty-first-century sculpture by female artists and accompanying other significant sculptural works of abstract sculpture by Taylor Davis, Tara Donovan, and Josiah McElheny.

2015.06

Photographer Jimmy DeSana was part of a countercultural punk community of artists and musicians living in New York’s East Village during the 1970s and ’80s. He made portraits of many important figures from that scene, including singers Debbie Harry and Billy Idol, as well as of his friends and lovers, who recur in his photographic work. He also played a definitive, though often under recognized role in the rise of photo-conceptualism in the 1980s—a genre that would question the very nature of photographic representation. DeSana specialized in staged tableaux where he photographed himself and others, usually naked and alone in color-saturated interiors. Striking unlikely poses with carefully chosen props, his body would oscillate androgynously and erotically between subject and object, person and fetish, enabling a visual association of the unconscious. Mediated through the lens of the camera, DeSana’s subjects, iconic and anonymous alike, become pliable forms that move within and among layers of culture and representation.

In Marker Cones, DeSana crouches laterally on all fours, his slender figure poised on inverted orange cones that cap his hands and feet. Photographed from behind, his body becomes a headless, unidentifiable creature comprised of triangles and parallelograms. The marker cones evoke a similar sexual indeterminacy, gendered feminine as makeshift stilettos and masculine as the detritus of roadside construction. Dramatic lighting cast his skin in a feverish and sexy glow. A glittering field of tinsel-like artificial grass adds to this surreal photographic composition.

This work is an important addition to the ICA/Boston’s strong collection of photography and art of the 1980s. Joining holdings of work by Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, Willie Doherty, and Roe Ethridge, Marker Cones adds to the debates surrounding photography and the idea of truth.

2013.06