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Wu Tsang (Born 1982 in Worcester, MA) is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker who combines narrative and documentary techniques to explore fluid identities, marginalized histories, and whimsical worlds. After first presenting her work in Art in the Age of the Internet: 1989 to Today (2018), the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston organized Wu Tsang: Of Whales (2024), Tsang’s first solo exhibition in her home state of Massachusetts

Across Tsang’s practice, she frequently features a recurring cast of friends from her expansive artistic community, which is true of her 2015 film Girl Talk. In the video, Tsang captures the poet and scholar Fred Moten dancing and twirling in a meadow in soft drag, or a subtle performance in traditionally feminine clothing and makeup. Moten’s performance is accompanied by Josiah Wise’s (a.k.a. serpentwithfeet) rendition of “Girl Talk,” a 1960s jazz standard composed and written by Neal Hefti and Bobby Troup (respectively) for the biopic Harlow (1965). Troup’s original lyrics perpetuate a misogynistic view of women and their interpersonal talk with each other (hence the pejorative “girl talk”), belittling such as mere gossip and frivolity. Moten, however, specifically choose Betty Carter’s 1969 version of the song, in which she rewrites the lyrics to empower women’s performance of the piece (e.g., referring to women: from “the weaker sex, the speaker sex” to “we, the weaker sex; we, the speaker sex”). With open arms, Moten improvisationally dances to the subversive rendition while wearing white ribbons, studded jewelry, and a purple velvet cloak. Playfully unsettling traditional categories of gender norms, Tsang is also interested in pushing the conventions of filmmaking media writ large. Tsang recorded Girl Talk on an iPhone, which was a radical act for a filmmaker in 2015, only six years after iPhones were video-compatible. The four-minute video embraces imperfect resolution and the instability of the handheld iPhone camera. In Girl Talk, Tsang choreographs a blurred reality by pushing the boundaries of traditional gender tropes and between the role of camera, subject, and viewer.

Zoe Pettijohn Schade (Born 1973 in Boston, Massachusetts) creates heavily detailed, labor-intensive, geometric gouache paintings by repeating imagery. Drawing from her own life, memories, and direct observation, Pettijohn Schade creates complex patterns from everyday images to produce layered and dizzying optical experiences. Pettijohn Schade’s work was included in the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston’s exhibition Less is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design (2019).

Attempts at Self Organization: Prevailing Bonds is the culmination of two years of work in which Pettijohn Schade meticulously draws from life using mirror devices that generate internally repeated structures and patterns. The foundational layer of the painting is a marbled pattern that the artist creates using traditional techniques, swirling pigment suspended on a liquid surface and laying paper on the liquid to absorb the patterned color. The artist then paints in gouache the shapes and patterns she observes by placing plants, rocks, a feather, and other materials inside a mirrored polyhedron. As the artist describes, “Mirror symmetry differs from other forms of tiling in that the symmetry—the tiles facing each other as they repeat, has an element of self-regard as well as self-replication.” Her approach lends the work an all-over composition in which no single element stands out, but each tile is entirely unique. In this work, she has paid particular attention to moments when long edges align—or bond. Among these precisely rendered shapes, there are blotches that break up the image’s geometric perfection. Reminiscent of Hermann Rorschach’s psychological tests—during which patients are asked to interpret various inkblots, with their responses being analyzed by the tester to better understand an individual’s subconscious—these shapes interrupt the patterning, inviting viewers to form their own images. Pettijohn Schade outlines the distinct polygons with thin, gilded metallic lines, which create a lattice-like layer that appears and disappears as a viewer moves around the work. Through this series of works, the artist draws upon texts by classical philosophers and theologians, such as Plato and St. Augustine, seeking to explore fundamental questions about the organization of matter and the self.

Guadalupe Maravilla (Born 1976 in San Salvador, El Salvador) grounds his sculpture, painting, performance, and large-scale installation in activism and healing, informed by his personal story of migration, illness, and recovery. Through powerful and symbolic objects and images Maravilla collects while retracing his own migration route from El Salvador to the United States, his work mixes Latin American and Indigenous crafts, medicinal materials and plants, and readymade goods.

Mariposa Relámpago Retablo recounts the creation of the artist’s largest sculpture to date, Mariposa Relámpago, commissioned by ICA/Boston for the ICA Watershed in 2023 and currently touring the United States. Building on the tradition of retablos—devotional paintings often placed in a church, chapel, or one’s home—Maravilla began his Retablo series in 2019 after a trip to Mexico retracing his own migration route. During the trip, he met traditional retablo painters (retableros) Daniel Alonso Vilchis Hernandez and his father Alfredo Vilchis Roque. Maravilla began an ongoing collaboration with the painters in which he creates a digital sketch and writes the accompanying text, and then Daniel and his father paint them in oil on tin. In Mariposa Relámpago Retablo, he adapts this folk art form to chronicle his own life story and express gratitude for notable events. Maravilla depicts the creation of the monumental work Mariposa Relámpago, which began as a school bus in the United States, had a second life transporting workers in El Salvador and Mexico, and was transformed by Maravilla into a sculpture and musical instrument for vibrational therapy. He depicts details such as the gongs and enormous feather serpent that adorn the bus and significant moments from this process, including sound ceremonies performed by healers in El Salvador. Around the painting, Maravilla constructs a sculptural frame and embeds objects he has collected that relate to broader themes in the artist’s practice, including a copper bird representing freedom and squash-shaped coin purses referencing one of the foods that Maravilla ate following his chemotherapy treatments.

Rania Matar (Born 1964 in Beirut, Lebanon) grapples with issues of personal and collective identity in her work. Born in Lebanon, Matar has lived in the United States since 1984. Drawing on her cultural background, cross-cultural experiences, and personal narrative, she has produced photographic series focused on womanhood, adolescence, and periods of individual evolution.

Since 2005, Matar has collaborated with Samira, a third-generation Palestinian refugee who Matar met at the Bourj El-Barajneh Camp on the outskirts of Beirut. While the earliest images are taken inside the refugee camp, later images record Samira and Matar on ventures outside Bourg El-Barajneh, taking photographs near the sea and in other areas around Beirut. Taken across almost twenty years, Matar’s poetic photographs capture Samira growing up. The moments Matar and Samira share in these photographs are contemplative and tender, capturing states of being and transformation.

Samira at 13, Bourj El-Barajneh Refugee Camp, Beirut was taken eight years after Matar first photographed Samira. This portrait captures Samira’s growth and development, her emergence into adolescence, and the progression of her identity. Viewers are drawn to the image through striking details, such as the colorful interior environment, the interplay of different hues of blue, and the visual rhyme between the bedazzled bow on the subject’s shirt and the textiles beside her. Most significant, perhaps, is the sitter’s penetrating gaze, which suggests self-possession and confidence as she meets the eyes of her viewers. This photograph serves as a bridge between two other images of Samira in the ICA’s collection, creating a formal echo with how Samira herself spans childhood and adulthood.

Rania Matar (Born 1964 in Beirut, Lebanon) grapples with issues of personal and collective identity in her work. Born in Lebanon, Matar has lived in the United States since 1984. Drawing on her cultural background, cross-cultural experiences, and personal narrative, she has produced photographic series focused on womanhood, adolescence, and periods of individual evolution.

Since 2005, Matar has collaborated with Samira, a third-generation Palestinian refugee who Matar met at the Bourj El-Barajneh Camp on the outskirts of Beirut. While the earliest images are taken inside the refugee camp, later images record Samira and Matar on ventures outside Bourg El-Barajneh, taking photographs near the sea and in other areas around Beirut. Taken across almost twenty years, Matar’s poetic photographs capture Samira growing up. The moments Matar and Samira share in these photographs are contemplative and tender, capturing states of being and transformation.

Samira, Hasna, and Wafa’a, Bourj El-Barajneh Refugee Camp, Beirut is the first image in this body of work, taken when Matar first met Samira. In the photograph, Samira is flanked by family members as her mother extends a tray with tea and snacks. More than just marking the beginning of Matar and Samira’s extensive relationship, the image centers themes of hospitality and hope within difficult material circumstances. It also speaks to the relationships among daughters, sisters, and mothers—a long-running theme in Matar’s practice.

Rania Matar (Born 1964 in Beirut, Lebanon) grapples with issues of personal and collective identity in her work. Born in Lebanon, Matar has lived in the United States since 1984. Drawing on her cultural background, cross-cultural experiences, and personal narrative, she has produced photographic series focused on womanhood, adolescence, and periods of individual evolution.

Since 2005, Matar has collaborated with Samira, a third-generation Palestinian refugee who Matar met at the Bourj El-Barajneh Camp on the outskirts of Beirut. While the earliest images are taken inside the refugee camp, later images record Samira and Matar on ventures outside Bourg El-Barajneh, taking photographs near the sea and in other areas around Beirut. Taken across almost twenty years, Matar’s poetic photographs capture Samira growing up. The moments Matar and Samira share in these photographs are contemplative and tender, capturing states of being and transformation.

Samira, Jnah, Beirut, Lebanon reflects Matar and Samira’s travels outside the refugee camp to create portraits. Here, Samira is centered and set within a field of tall grasses and budding wildflowers, the Mediterranean Sea just barely visible in the background. The natural setting’s sense of freedom and openness is undercut by tangled rings of razor wire. This image, taken by peering through these barriers, raises central questions of freedom and movement as they shape Samira and Matar’s lives.

Yu-Wen Wu (Born in Taipei, Taiwan) is a Boston-based, Taiwanese-American artist whose work examines issues of displacement, arrival, and assimilation. At the crossroads of art, science, politics, and social issues, her practice includes drawing, sculpture, site-specific video installations, community engaged practices, and public art. 

The material conversations within Wu’s practice foreground the artist’s interest in navigating her subjectivity as an immigrant to the United States and a member of the Asian diaspora. Tea, gold, and red thread are significant and recurring forms in her work, operating as cultural and personal touchstones. Intentions (III), which is composed of three strands created for Wu’s presentation in the 2023 James and Audrey Foster Prize, brings together these materials in the form of wrapped, gilded orbs that approximate Wu’s grandmother’s Buddhist prayer beads. “I remember sitting on her lap as a young child and listening to her hushed voice recite prayers and intentions,” shares the artist, who, to make this work, fashioned knotted strands of 108 (referring to the number of prayers within Buddhism) or 88 (being an auspicious number within Chinese culture) orbs in groupings that refer to other numerical systems of value, such as binary code.

Each orb is made of brewed and dried Taiwanese tea, collected by her mother and aunt, and gilded with painted gold—a material notable both for its associations with preciousness and prosperity as well as a specific reference to the history of Chinese immigration to the United States at the height of the Gold Rush. The red thread recalls ideas of bloodlines, community, and family ties across generations, geographies, and lifetimes. “Unlike circular prayer beads,” explains Wu, here the arrangement of the strands “are suspended in space, resting in a spiral, referring to open possibilities and developing intentions.” 

Kathleen Ryan (Born 1984 in Santa Monica, California) is a sculptor who is best known for her three-dimensional sculptures of moldy fruit recalling vanitas and their reminder of the impermanence of life. In her practice, Ryan manipulates found and handmade forms with surprising materials—delicate grapes made of concrete, flower seed pods from a repurposed yellow showerhead, and mold using precious gemstones.  

Ryan’s series of larger-than-life, studded Bad Fruits harness the material and visual excess of gems to comment on how and why objects are valued. Fruit has long been a symbol of human consumption and decay in Western art—from Dutch Golden Age still life painting to the beaded fruit craft tradition of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s that influences her work. Playing on a genre of craft objects often given little monetary value and relegated to the shelves of thrift stores, Ryan’s work considers luxury and value.  

In Ryan’s Bad Lemon (Cameo), fake gems adorn the artificial lemon’s healthy yellow rind, while precious pearls and crystals are reserved for the moldy bacterial growths, a playful inversion of what is wanted or valued and what makes the lemon “bad.” The artist’s meticulous translation of a natural phenomenon like decay through the accumulation and arrangement of thousands of stones and beads renders the surfaces of her sculptures mesmerizing. This play between attraction and revulsion and the benefits of close looking are at the heart of Ryan’s singular practice. 

For more than two decades, acclaimed photographer An-My Lê (Born 1960 in Saigon, Vietnam) has created arresting, poetic photographic series that address the power and theater of war and politics. Informed by the histories of landscape photography, documentary reportage, and conflict journalism, Lê’s work offers a reflection on how reality and myth are portrayed and contested.  

Since 2015, Lê’s ongoing Silent General series documents a wide range of events marking the fever pitch of American political and social conflict, from the removal of Confederate monuments to immigration and gun control. Prompted by horrific mass shooting and murder in 2015 of nine Black churchgoers at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC, Lê embarked upon an extended road trip to record the complexity of the unfolding moment in the United States and its relationships to longer histories. 

In Fragment IX: Jefferson Davis Monument, Homeland Security Storage, New Orleans, Louisiana, from Silent General a bronze portrait of Jefferson Davis (1808–1889)—a vocal advocate of slavery and the first and only president of the Confederate States of America, which existed from 1861 to 1865—is shown wrapped, crated, and sequestered in storage. Here, the artist captures the intense contestation around monuments and history, their relationships to white supremacy and white Christian nationalism, and a widespread public reckoning of race and power in the United States. As Lê has done for years, she evokes layers of contested histories through her seemingly everyday scenes, posing questions about not only what is represented, but how and for whom. 

For more than two decades, acclaimed photographer An-My Lê (born 1960 in Saigon, Vietnam) has created arresting, poetic photographic series that address the power and theater of war and politics. Informed by the histories of landscape photography, documentary reportage, and conflict journalism, Lê’s work offers a reflection on how reality and myth are portrayed and contested.

Since 2015, Lê’s ongoing Silent General series documents a wide range of events marking the fever pitch of American political and social conflict, from the removal of Confederate monuments to immigration and gun control. Prompted by the horrific mass shooting and murder in 2015 of nine Black churchgoers at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC, Lê embarked upon an extended road trip to record the complexity of the unfolding moment in the United States and its relationships to longer histories.

Fragment IV: General Robert E. Lee Monument, New Orleans, Louisiana, from Silent General (2016) locates a monument of Confederate General Robert E. Lee (1807–1870) at the end of a tree-lined street partially under construction in New Orleans. The statue was later taken down by official order and moved to an undisclosed location in 2017. Lê’s photograph evokes the ideological shifts of this transitional moment, as the elegant street with its streetlamp of an earlier time undergoes reconstruction. Here, the artist captures the intense contestation around monuments and history, their relationships to white supremacy and white Christian nationalism, and a widespread public reckoning of race and power in the United States.