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Faith Wilding is a multidisciplinary artist whose works often focus on the sociopolitical history of the body. Born in Paraguay, Wilding emigrated to the United States in 1961. Her life and work have been influenced by the political and cultural movements of the 1960s and ’70s. Frequently discussed in relation to feminist art, Wilding’s sculptures can also be seen as an exploration of the expanded possibilities of drawing through her deployment of linear thread.

Crocheted Environment is a sculptural installation referred to as “womb room.” This piece was originally part of the 1972 exhibition Womanhouse, organized by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, co-founders of the California Institute of the Arts Feminist Art Program. The exhibition was staged in an abandoned mansion in Hollywood and one of the rooms included Wilding’s Crocheted Environment. At the ICA/Boston, the viewer experiences this piece in a small chamber with black walls. Suspended from the ceiling and enveloping the space is a large crocheted, weblike composition. The threads are simultaneously dense and open. Viewers may stand or sit in this enclosure, suggesting contradictory sensations of security, entrapment, serenity, and danger. About this work, the artist says: “Our female ancestors first build themselves and their families round-shaped shelters. These were protective environments, often woven out of grasses, braches, or weeds. I think of my environment as linked in form and feeling with those primitive womb-shelters, but with the added freedom of not being functional.”

Crocheted Environment is an important installation in the ICA’s collection of fiber works, including pieces by artists such as Eva Hesse, Françoise Grossen, and Sheila Hicks, and marks the museum’s commitment to examining the relationships between craft-based media and contemporary art.

2012.20

Andy Warhol, a leading figure in the 1960s pop art movement, began his career as a successful magazine and ad illustrator and later pioneered a wide variety of art forms, including performance art, filmmaking, video installations, and writing. His work uniquely challenged preconceived notions about the nature of art and erased traditional distinctions between fine art and popular culture.

From 1969 to 1975, Warhol created a series of Red Books, which were culled from over one hundred small red Holson Polaroid albums. Each book contains thirteen to twenty-two unique Polaroid Type 107 black-and-white, or Polacolor 108, photographs selected and organized by Warhol. The Red Books provide 203 intimate, snapshot-style images of the eclectic world of Hollywood movie and TV personalities, rock stars, art celebrities, and wealthy socialites. Each album is themed around a certain event, location, or a particular personality. Unlike Warhol’s silkscreen portraits, these images were spontaneous and affectionate. The photographs playfully depict subjects in different locations, including Warhol’s Factory, his summer retreat in Montauk, overseas, and during casual gatherings. Many of the images are signed and dedicated “To Andy Love,” “For Andy, a Great Talent,” or “To Andy Peace.”

Red Book Prefix F158 depicts a series of photographs taken during a weekend in Montauk with the Kennedy and Radziwill offspring (John Kennedy, Jr., Jed Johnson, and Anthony Radziwill). The photos are candid portraits of Warhol with the children, and the children playing on the beach or wrestling in the bedroom. There is a freshness and intimacy in the snapshots uncharacteristic of Warhol’s work. He gives special attention to the subjects’ clothing and hairstyles, not only offering insight into their personalities and rank in society, but also creating an offhand portrait of American culture at the time. The use of the Polaroid camera combines two of Warhol’s interests: the tendency toward disposability in modern consumerism and the photograph as readymade. The near-instant capacity of the Polaroid process meant that the photographs could be passed around, admired, and written on moments after the event or individual had been captured.

As an important influence on and precursor to art of the 1980s, Red Book Prefix F158 provides an addition to other series of portraits in the ICA/Boston’s collection, such as those by Rineke Dijkstra, Nan Goldin, Nicholas Nixon, and Collier Schorr.

2014.01.1–21

Charline von Heyl was a central figure of the thriving 1980s art scene in Cologne before moving to New York in the mid-1990s. A multifaceted artist experimenting with printmaking, drawing, and collage, she is best known for fostering contemporary dialogues between painting and abstraction. Heyl’s paintings are not depictions based on objects or figures; instead, she is interested in creating images conjured from the mind and investigating the material properties of the painting medium.

Guitar Gangster is a large-scale painting that juxtaposes fields of colors, gestural lines, geometrical shapes, and a loose grid. The painting embodies an intentional contradiction between foreground and background, creating a dynamic energy through its combination of architectural and organic forms. About her work, Heyl says: “It is about the feeling that a painting can give— when you can’t stop looking because there is something that you want to find out, that you want to understand… . Good paintings have this tantalizing quality. They leave a hole in the mind, a longing.”

This painting joins works in the museum’s collection by Matthew Ritchie and Amy Sillman, which also explore the history of abstraction and complements another work by Heyl in the collection, Untitled, 2003.

800.13.07

Sara VanDerBeek investigates the representation of three-dimensional sculpture through the two-dimensional lens of photography. She painstakingly builds sculptures in order to photograph them, disassembling the objects as soon as the documentation is complete. The sculptures thus quickly come to exist only as images. This process inserts VanDerBeek into ongoing debates about what is gained and lost when viewers experience sculpture through photographic images, and the play between the three-dimensionality of one medium versus the two-dimensionality of another.

Medusa is a photograph of an assemblage VanDerBeek created in her studio. The temporary sculpture is a totem of images of historical sculptures, ranging from classical statuary and friezes to a work by the turn-of-the-century Italian artist Medardo Rosso. At the bottom of the objects is a piece of contemporary jewelry. One key element is a red-tinted photograph of Medusa, a figure from Greek mythology who turns humans into stone with her gaze, a process that can be analogized with photography, especially photography of classical sculpture. The work registers VanDerBeek’s engagement with art-historical references and contemporary modes of image making.

The ICA/Boston has strong holdings in photography and sculpture, and VanDerBeek’s Medusa brings these two strengths together while adding a new artist to those represented in the growing collection.

2015.04

During the 1980s, Meyer Vaisman was associated with the Neo-Geo movement—along with other soon-to-be-famous artists such as Ashley Bickerton, Jeff Koons, and Haim Steinbach—and gained recognition for works that simultaneously critiqued and celebrated mechanization, consumer culture, and the art market. Vaisman founded the seminal East Village gallery International with Monument, which exhibited the work of his contemporaries. Vaisman’s works from this period show a sense of humor tinged with irony and cynicism.

Utilizing satire like a defense mechanism, in Untitled Vaisman presents cartoon portraits of himself and others. The “others” are old men and busty sex symbols seemingly appropriated from found comic strips or maybe skin magazines. The cigar-chomping figure with a protruding chin at the far left represents the artist. Itself an appropriation, the caricature was made by a street portraitist stationed near the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy—one of the oldest and most famous museums in the Western world. Using process inks and acrylic, Vaisman crafts a painting made of a number of smaller paintings that speak more to generic printing than painting.

The addition of Untitled introduces the work of an important artist new to the ICA/Boston collection, and reflects the ICA’s interest in the decade of the 1980s, as reflected in such memorable shows as the 2012 This Will Have Been: Art, Love, & Politics in the 1980s.

2012.19

Californian artist Kaari Upson uses found objects and narratives as starting points for her work. Upson is interested in issues of identity, familiarity, and domesticity. In 2007, she initiated the long-term Larry Project that involved the collection and rearrangement of abandoned objects, photographs, and personal ephemera she discovered at a burned-down house in her neighborhood. The project was an intimate and at times manic investigation into the life of a stranger, resulting in a large body of work that included video, drawings, paintings, sculptures, and performances.

For her 2011 installation at the Overduin and Kite gallery in Los Angeles, Upson recreated a cast figure of Larry, which she subsequently burned in a room-sized box. For this same exhibition, Upson presented a series of charcoal tablets that preserved her bodily motions. To produce these works, she mixed charcoal dust with resin and performed movements over flexible metal sheets, such as dragging, contracting, and pouring. The sheets were altered by the corporeal weight of the artist, capturing her gestural actions. In Charcoal Tablet 6, the artist pressed her fist into the material, transcribing the sexual act of fisting and creating a work that blurs the lines of performance, sculpture, and painting.

Upson’s Charcoal Tablet 6 enriches the ICA/Boston’s collection of works by artists, such as Mona Hatoum and Sophie Calle, who explore the intersection of sculpture and performance to examine issues of trust and intimacy.

800.13.06

Mickalene Thomas draws on art history and popular culture to create a contemporary vision of black female sexuality, beauty, and power. Combining the genres of portraiture and domestic interior, her stunning large-scale paintings depict African-American women posed within boldly patterned interiors, the picture surfaces often adorned with Swarovski rhinestones. Thomas starts her process by collaging staged photographs, sometimes taken from her family’s photo album, with patterns and styles frequently drawn from 1970s advertising. She then enlarges and transforms these source images into monumental paintings to explore such central artistic problems as the construction of space and the role of the female body.

The interior scene depicted in Monet’s Salon is made up of a dizzying array of fractured planes. In the foreground, Thomas places a white lounge chair with a floral motif made from green and pink rhinestones—a striking amalgamation of a nineteenth-century impressionist salon staple with a contemporary material twist. The rest of the scene is composed of areas depicting foliage seen through windowpanes, a window ledge with books and a houseplant, a salon-style hanging of monochromatic paintings, and sections of wallpaper and Oriental rugs. About her interest in fracture Thomas has said, “The process of collage allowed me to navigate the structure of an image: segmenting, deconstructing, pasting, and recontextualizing my ideas. I wanted to shift ways of seeing the image.” A set of brown stanchions in the foreground separate the viewer from the scene, as if it were a museum gallery or a room in a historic house.

This significant painting by one of the most prominent young voices in contemporary art today greatly enhances the ICA/Boston’s small collection of painting and marks the museum’s solo exhibition of Thomas’s work in 2012. It joins significant paintings in the collection by Alice Neel, Dana Schutz, Amy Sillman, and Lisa Yuskavage, diversifying these holdings while reflecting a continued and prevalent interest in representation and abstraction.

800.12.4

Keith Sonnier’s work debuted in Lucy Lippard’s famous 1966 exhibition Eccentric Abstraction, a pointed response to the end-game strategies of minimalist sculpture. Minimalism’s geometric, machine-made, and unified forms were countered by Sonnier and other so-called postminimalist artists working in downtown New York in the late 1960s—including Eva Hesse, Barry Le Va, Richard Tuttle, and Jackie Winsor—with diffuse forms, a process-oriented approach, and performative elements. Though Sonnier studied painting, early on he moved into three dimensions, the use of neon, and the integration of movement in the form of video art and performance.

Depose II is one of Sonnier’s rare inflatable sculptures. Using the unlikely combination of neon lighting, metal, and nylon sailcloth, Sonnier balances a readymade aesthetic with painted geometric elements. The metal forms that pinch the inflatable are based on extruded found material, such as the rebar commonly used to build cement structures. The gestural neon shapes derive from the artist’s drawings. The inflatable assumes an anthropomorphic form that, when filled with air from the blower, suggests a living being. Initially a limp sack, the sculpture must breathe and expand to assume its final form. The title references the act of being deposed, wherein a person is required to give oral out-of-court testimony. The person being deposed is often asked exceedingly personal questions. Perhaps the pinched or pressed inflatable alludes to the feeling of duress that might arise from having to tell the truth in a compromising situation.

Depose II is the first work by Sonnier to enter the ICA/Boston collection. It is a unique postminimalist sculpture that integrates fabric, a medium the ICA collects and exhibits in depth. It joins a number of important sculptures made of repurposed materials by such artists as Tara Donovan and Rachel Harrison.

2013.12

Kelly Sherman’s video- and text-based work reveals the dynamics of family and social relationships through carefully constructed charts, graphs, diagrams, and picture sequences. Sherman derives her source materials from her own experiences and those of strangers as gleaned from online searches and personal interviews. In elegantly restrained visual statements that speak to shared humanity, the artist considers the emotive power of a single word, the strategic placement of a symbol, the weight of a demarcating line, and the precise shade of a particular color.

In Wish Lists, Sherman presents forty such lists, taken from the Internet, each on a separate sheet of paper. The lists offer a powerful, suggestive glimpse into the lives of their authors, with hints about their age, gender, and circumstances. The items requested range from the most broad and basic, such as “School,” to the minutely specific, such as “VideoNow Color Disks 3-Pack: Monster Garage 2.”  Individually and collectively, the wish lists reveal how we are shaped by the things we live with and long for—both necessary and not.

Wish Lists, winning Sherman the 2006 James and Audrey Foster Prize, is the first fully text-based work acquired by the ICA/Boston. Though unique in its genre within the collection, it is in dialogue with a range of other works that incorporate found materials and deal with the issue of domesticity, such as those by Alexandre da Cunha, Ellen Gallagher, and Charles LeDray.

2007.3

Since the mid-1980s, Lorna Simpson has examined the interplay between fact and fiction, and identity and history, in photographic works that often combine text and image. Using both found images and studio photography, Simpson undermines assumptions about race and gender within American culture, subjecting these ideas to insightful reexamination.

The twelve parts shown here are a selection of works from Simpson’s series, May June July August ’57/’09, a body of work that, according to the artist, “critiques photography but also the power of imagery, and also the power of race and sexuality.” Made of 123 pairs of photographs, the series brings together two kinds of images: found pin-up images of young Black women (whom the artist identifies as aspiring actresses or models) in Los Angeles from 1957 and the artist’s recreation of these images that she made in 2009. The juxtaposition of the original photographs with Simpson’s mirrored own blurs the lines between history and art, creating a fictionalized narrative within which the depicted characters take part. Key to Simpson is the artifice inherent to the performances in these photographic pairs, and how performing, or posing, for the camera requires playing to notions of identity and the expectation of being seen. Part archival exploration and part performance, May June July August ’57/’09 is a complex investigation of history, femininity, and race.

800.13.04