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Photographer Jimmy De Sana was part of the countercultural “punk” community of artists and musicians living in New York’s East Village in the 1970s and ’80s. Among his best-known works are portraits of important figures from that scene, including Debbie Harry and Billy Idol, though these constitute only a small part of his practice. With work that is personal, surrealistic, and often shocking in its treatment of sexuality, De Sana helped raise the standing of photography in the art world and increased critical respect for the medium.

101 Nudes comprises 56 halftone black-and-white photographs of nude and partially nude figures posing inside or just outside homes. The artist was 20 years old and attending college in Atlanta when he first printed the series in 1972. The figures, which include De Sana’s friends as well as himself, are photographed from a variety of viewpoints. Although the series shows the influence of “grainy” pornography from the 1950s, the postures of the figures do not seem to suggest or invite sexual engagement; the artist noted that they are “without eroticism.” Sometimes the photographs feature only a fragment of the body, such as the pelvic area or buttocks. De Sana’s engagement with the history of surrealism has been noted, and these partial views in particular recall the surrealist photography of artists such as Man Ray, who in the 1920s photographed the body parts of friends and lovers in ways that removed them from their context and made them into almost abstract images.

101 Nudes speaks to other pieces in the ICA/Boston’s strong and ever-expanding collection of photography and the art of the 1980s, including works by Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, Willie Doherty, and Roe Ethridge. It is also part of the ICA’s collection of photographic works in series, joining Dijkstra’s Almerisa series and Nan Goldin’s From Here to Maternity.

2014.05.1–56

Doris Salcedo distorts the familiarity of everyday objects, transforming domestic furniture into menacing statements of violence, mourning, and trauma. The artist has made powerful sculptures and installations since the mid-1980s that build on the memories and testimonies of victims of political persecution during the civil war in her native Colombia.

In Untitled, 2004–05, Salcedo displaces the imagery of household chairs, modifying their form and function while adding new layers of significance. This work is part of a larger series in which she evokes the violence of state interrogation techniques practiced by corrupt governments. To produce these works, Salcedo made wax models of the sculpture and collaborated with a New York-based factory to create the stainless steel models. The chair, once a support for the body, is presented as a disabled form—missing backs and battered corners—that speak to brutal and violent actions.

Untitled, 2004–05, joins a number of sculptures by Salcedo in the ICA/Boston’s collection. It augments the museum’s holdings of works that investigate themes of war and violence by such artists as Mona Hatoum, Willie Doherty, and Yasumasa Morimura.

2014.36

2012.21

Richard Prince is one of the most influential American photographers of his time, having come of age during the 1970s and the heyday of appropriation. While the artist also creates paintings, sculpture, and installation, his photography has made the most lasting contribution to contemporary art history. By the early 1990s, Richard Prince and his iconic Marlboro Man images had become synonymous with the genre of appropriated photography and the problems of artistic authorship. During the mid to late ’90s, the artist moved from New York City to upstate New York, and his focus turned to more personal and immediate subject matter.

Upstate comes from a series Prince made to document an environment and lifestyle completely separate from the locus of the art world and excesses of New York City. These stark images of above-ground swimming pools, abandoned cars, and grassy fields highlight an isolated yet strikingly common vision of rural America. Prince finds moments of beauty in these overlooked and undervalued features of the landscape. For instance, the single-story, personal storage facility has a row of orange roll top doors—their serial quality evoking Minimalism—and sits within a bleak landscape. While Prince’s photos of his environs draw on a long history of photographers locating decisive scenes in unremarkable places (i.e., Walker Evans and William Eggleston), Prince’s focus on the rougher aspects of rural life distinguishes his work.

This work joins the ICA/Boston’s strong collection of photographs by artists such as Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, Nan Goldin, Catherine Opie, Thomas Ruff, and Collier Schorr. As an artist, Prince represents an important piece of the history of appropriation, bringing his work into conversation with that of Dara Birnbaum, Lorna Simpson, and Cindy Sherman.

2013.10

Luther Price is Boston-based filmmaker and video artist who constructs his pieces by using found footage drawn from a vast array of sources, including documentaries, pornography, and Hollywood features. His practice involves physically manipulating film, exposing the medium to extreme conditions by scratching, painting, and distressing the surface, or even burying it underground to collect dust, insects, and mold.

In Number 9, the artist produced four hundred slides projected by five carrousels in an evenly spaced row and simultaneously looped, an arrangement that connects his work with animation and early cinema. For each slide, Price has combined recycled imagery with film he has shot himself and overlaid this visual imagery with hair, ink, and organic materials. He exposed the film to conditions so that it would rot and develop mold to distort and abstract the imagery. The individual slides vary vastly from silhouettes of monstrous insects to abstract patterns, from earthy tones to brilliant reds and oranges, resulting in a visually arresting experience. The artist has said about this work: “With Number 9, I feel I move to a visceral context very familiar to me in an autobiographical sense. I have a physical background in sculpture. So this work in particular is very 3-D.”

Number 9 was exhibited in the ICA/Boston’s 2013 Foster Prize exhibition and this piece contributes to the museum’s ongoing support of Boston artists, joining works by artists such as Taylor Davis, Kelly Sherman, and Andrew Witkin, among others. A strong addition to the collection, it broadens the conversation around painterly abstraction in photography and film by artists such as Kader Attia, Noriko Furunishi, and Pipilotti Rist.

2013.13

Luther Price is known for his work with Super-8 and 16mm film, particularly for constructing films out of discarded prints of documentaries, snippets of Hollywood features, and other fragments of cinema. He frequently physically manipulates this found footage by scratching, distressing, and painting the film surface, or even by burying it in the earth so that natural processes such as rotting and mold growth begin to change the film. In recent years, Price has begun to experiment with handmade slides. Again, he begins with found film that he painstakingly cuts up, reassembles, and alters. He also sandwiches detritus and found materials—from insects to dirt, dust, and glue—between two glass plates and then projects the resulting image onto the gallery wall. Through his reuse of analogue photographic materials, Price produces beautiful, abstracted images connected to histories of appropriation, abstraction, and experimental film.

Light Fracture is one of two slide works Price made in 2013 that are now held by the ICA/Boston (the other being Number 9, acquired from that year’s Foster Prize exhibition at the museum). Using slide projectors, he presents the handmade slides as a cycle of moving still images, an arrangement that connects his work to animation and early cinematic tropes. The individual images vary dramatically—from the microscopic to the macroscopic, from silhouettes of monstrous insects to beautiful abstract patterns, from dark earthy tones to brilliant reds and oranges—but taken as a whole, the series consistently captures light as it is projected, refracted, and splintered through the materials. The result is a visually arresting experience that evokes entropy, mortality, and otherworldly visions.

This piece contributes to the ICA/Boston’s ongoing support of Boston artists, joining works by artists such as Taylor Davis, Kelly Sherman, and others. Additionally, it makes a strong addition to the collection by broadening the conversation around painterly abstraction in photography and film by artists such as Kader Attia, Noriko Furunishi, and Pipilotti Rist.

2014.09

Jack Pierson is a multidisciplinary artist who addresses the tragedy and comedy of the struggle for public recognition and fame. Using photography, drawing, painting, installation, and sculpture, he engages symbols that communicate the folly and artifice of glamour. Often trafficking in clichés and hackneyed aphorisms, Pierson’s ironic oeuvre draws attention to both the fleeting nature of fame and the perception that one must die young and beautiful in its service. The artist is perhaps most recognized for his public “signs”—large-scale, brightly lit words such as “paradise,” “maybe,” or “lust” created from a hodgepodge of discarded building signage of varying typefaces and styles—that could equally be concrete poetry or ransom note.

The small sculptural work Applause is a re-creation of the sign used in television studios to direct audiences to clap at predetermined moments during tapings of a show. With the deadpan, satirizing gesture of transforming the mechanism into art, Pierson skewers the manipulation intended to heighten the secondary audience’s enjoyment. By editioning the re-created sign, he further vitiates its original on-site function and hence its meaning. The electric sign flashes on and off in a slow rhythm that mimics the pulsing adulation associated with the entertainment industry.

Applause enhances the ICA/Boston’s growing collection of conceptual sculpture, which includes works by Thomas Hirschhorn, Roy McMakin, and Damian Ortega. The work joins other sculptural work in dialogue with the forms and symbols of popular culture.

2014.08

Trevor Paglen’s artwork draws on his long-time interest in investigative journalism and the social sciences, as well as his training as a geographer. His work seeks to show the hidden aesthetics of American surveillance and military systems, touching on espionage, the digital circulation of images, government development of weaponry, and secretly funded military projects. The artist has conducted extensive research on the subject and published a series of books and lectures about covert operations undertaken by the CIA and the Pentagon.

Since the 1990s, Paglen has photographed isolated military air bases located in Nevada and Utah using a telescopic camera lens. Untitled (Reaper Drone) reveals a miniature drone midflight against a luminous morning skyscape. The drone is nearly imperceptible, suggested only as a small black speck at the bottom of the image. The artist’s photographs are taken at such a distance that they abstract the scene and distort our capacity to make sense of the image. His work both exposes hidden secrets and challenges assumptions about what can be seen and fully understood.

Paglen’s Untitled (Reaper Drone) enriches the ICA/Boston’s collection of photography and is in productive conversation with works by such artists as Jenny Holzer and Hito Steyerl, which similarly deal with political and economic systems, secrecy, and surveillance.

800.13.05

Nicholas Nixon is a photographer known for his work in portraiture and documentary, his use of the 8-by-10-inch view camera, and his engagement with duration. In numerous series, Nixon gets to know his subjects while photographing them, making the role of time inherent to the medium of photography an integral part of the content and process of his work. His photographs possess a high degree of detail and often present closely cropped views of his subjects. Nixon came to Boston in the 1970s and has taught at the Massachusetts College of Art for more than thirty-five years, while making important documentation of his neighborhood and community.

For Nixon’s hallmark series People with AIDS, the artist followed fifteen men with the disease, sensitively conveying its uncompromisingly harsh progress during the years when the government and medical establishment’s neglect turned AIDS into a crisis of epic proportions. A portion of the series was included in Nixon’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1988. By the time the series was published as a book in 1991, all the subjects had passed away due to the disease. At the time of the exhibition, the works drew strongly opposed reactions from critics: while Douglas Crimp described them as perpetuating stereotypes about people with AIDS and as lacking social context, others characterized them as empathetic, humanistic, and corrective to moralizing judgments. This set of five prints depicts George Gannett from October 1987 until his death in February 1989. The photographs show Gannett in his home in Providence, Rhode Island, accompanied by his partner, petting his cat, and lying in a bed near the end of his battle with the disease. The ordinariness and domesticity of Gannett’s existence permeate the images.

This work contributes to the ICA/Boston’s strength in photography, especially by artists of the so-called Boston School, including Nan Goldin. It also joins a work that deals explicitly with the AIDS crisis by Ray Navarro and Zoe Leonard.

2013.09.1-5

Casting realistic, slightly under-life-size human figures in bronze, Spanish sculptor Juan Muñoz was interested in the transitory moments when the viewer contrasts what is recognizable from what is unknown to create, in his words “a wide distance between the spectator and the object.” During a four-week residency in 1995 at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Muñoz created a series of objects that responded to a work in the museum’s collection, the Gentile Bellini miniature Portrait of a Seated Turkish Scribe or Artist (1478–80). Muñoz’s Portrait of a Turkish Man, a larger representation of the seated scribe, draws from a speculative narrative developed in the drawing. Other works included in the Gardner exhibition was a sound installation that involved a stereo speaker floating in the Muddy River across the street from the museum. The speaker, visible from the second-story window of the Early Italian Room where Muñoz’s sculpture was installed, transmitted a voiceover from an Arabic speaker, transforming Muñoz’s sculpture into an open-mouthed vessel.

2014.07