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Since the mid-1980s, Colombian artist Doris Salcedo has addressed the themes of loss and mourning in works that evoke criminal and political violence. Her sculptures and installations are informed by her research and fieldwork in rural communities in Colombia, particularly the testimonies she collects from survivors of political abduction who were presumed dead, as well as the families of those who did not return. Her work both honors the memory of lives lost and contemplates the frequently unspoken results of trauma.

In 1989, Salcedo began to make works in which she buried, covered, brushed, and fused domestic wooden furniture with cement. By distorting the familiar, she transforms our perception of home from a place of comfort and safety to one of disorienting dislocation. In Untitled, a chair has been almost entirely encased in a block of cement, with only its wooden frame and hints of red cushion peeking through. Metal spikes pierce the object, acting as both a form of support and an instrument of violence. When pouring the cement, Salcedo took care to preserve its rough and haphazard surface. Combining the impenetrable materials of cement and metal and the humble delicacy of the chair, Salcedo creates a strong sense of physical tension. Typically, we arrange wooden chairs in relation to a table or desk, but here the sculpture faces the wall, and at an uncomfortably close distance. For Salcedo, the installation of the work is as important as the materials from which it is made. The placement of the chair suggests confinement and punishment, both for the viewer, who cannot neither sit down nor fully view the sculpture, and for an imaginary detainee undergoing interrogation.

This work adds to the ICA/Boston’s strong and ever-expanding collection of sculpture, and of works in all mediums by artists who explore the subjects of war and sociopolitical violence, including Kader Attia, Louise Bourgeois, Willie Doherty, Mona Hatoum, and Yasumasa Morimura.

2014.35

Since the mid-1980s, Colombian artist Doris Salcedo has made works that attest to the human consequences of criminal and political violence. Salcedo’s sculptures and installations are informed by her extensive research and fieldwork in rural communities in her native Colombia, particularly the testimonies of victims of political persecution. Her work both honors the memory of lives lost and contemplates the frequently unspoken and lingering effects of trauma. Her unorthodox medium is a combination of domestic furniture and unyielding building materials such as concrete and steel. By distorting the familiar, she transforms our perception of home from a place of comfort and safety to one of disorienting dislocation. Instead of engaging the traditional methods of sculpture such as carving or molding, she realizes her work through acts of physical and symbolic violence: filing, scratching, bending, beating, fusing, melting, and burying.

Atrabiliarios is one of Salcedo’s earliest and most powerful depictions of violence, suffering, and loss. The title references the Latin expression atra bilis, which describes the melancholy associated with mourning. Worn shoes are inserted into a cavity in the gallery wall that is then covered with stretched cow bladder. This skin-like membrane is coarsely sewn to the wall with surgical thread, creating a milky layer between the viewer and the discarded footwear. Salcedo collected the shoes from the families of desaparecidos: the people, mainly women, who have mysteriously “disappeared” from their homes, a method of social control commonly practiced in Colombia during the internal conflict between paramilitary and guerilla forces in the 1980s. Now discarded, the once-lived-in shoes offer a metaphor for the body’s absence, a specter of loss and death summoned further by the sewn “skin” that encloses them, calling to mind post-autopsy stitching.

This work adds to the ICA/Boston’s strong and ever-expanding collection of sculpture and of works in all mediums by artists who explore the subject of war and sociopolitical violence, including Kader Attia, Louise Bourgeois, Willie Doherty, Mona Hatoum, and Yasumasa Morimura.

2014.33

Known for her spectacular adaptation of existing materials, Cornelia Parker poetically transforms objects through conceptual and physical processes. She brings an elegant sculptural hand to the evocative metaphors she conjures in deeply compelling works.

Wedding Ring Drawing (Circumference of a Living Room) captures the conceptual richness and visual delight of much of Parker’s work. In this case, she quite literally draws the symbolic found elements, two wedding rings, into new metaphorical forms. The gold was melted into an ingot and drawn into a single thread approximately 40 feet long. Its lengthening suggested to the artist the dimensions of a living room, an association that added a note of domesticity to the unfolding narrative. She then trapped the thread between two sheets of glass, creating a “drawing” that lyrically winds around and over itself, delicately describing loops and turns, knots and kinks. Parker simultaneously evokes the history of these two abandoned rings and the possibility of renewed connection, both fragile and beautiful.

In 2000, Cornelia Parker’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States was organized by the ICA/Boston and traveled nationally. This exhibition, a landmark for both the artist and the museum, received critical acclaim as well as popular interest in Boston and beyond. This important moment in the ICA’s history is marked by the presence of two Parker works in the collection, including Wedding Ring Drawing.

2006.6

Cornelia Parker is known for her poetic transformation of existing materials, which she achieves through processes that are both physical and conceptual. With an elegant sculptural hand she constructs works that function as richly evocative metaphors.

Hanging Fire (Suspected Arson) is an outstanding example of Parker’s suspended sculptures. This major installation piece is constructed from the charred residue of an actual case of suspected arson. Here, Parker uses the materials as found, without transforming their physical nature. Yet in her hands, they constitute a spectacular explosion of form in space as the once-glowing, now-blackened embers are precisely hung to create a forest of charcoal fragments. Parker’s sculpture can be considered formally in relation to the rich tradition of recent British sculpture, by artists ranging from Richard Long to Tony Cragg. It also captures the forensic fascination evident in so much of Parker’s work, evoking through its title the malicious intent of an arsonist, making her sculpture the perfect vehicle for both dazzling visual experience and vivid imaginings.

Cornelia Parker’s major ICA/Boston show in 2000 proved to be a landmark exhibition for both the artist and the institution. Parker’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States, it won critical accolades and popular attention in Boston and reached still wider audiences on a national tour. Hanging Fire (Suspected Arson) marks this important moment in the ICA’s history.

2006.5

During an artistic career lasting only from the mid-1960s until her untimely death in 1977, Ree Morton produced work of remarkable breadth. While she achieved notable success in the 1970s, after her death she largely fell out of the art-historical purview, only to be “rediscovered” in recent years through her inclusion in such exhibitions as WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007). From delicate pencil drawings to expansive sculptural installations, her work forges unlikely partnerships between such aesthetic and political practices as minimalism, feminism, and regionalism. The modular units familiar from minimalism are not the clean products of industry, but ribbons, curtains, portraits, hand-painted logs, ladders, and other forms associated with craft and the decorative. In merging the formal concision and conceptual rigor of minimalism with kitsch and Americana, Morton makes it difficult to pin down interpretation of her work.

Completed toward the end of Morton’s life, Regional Piece is one of several works in which she stacked a horizontal painting depicting a sunset over water above another showing a tropical fish underwater. Despite their disparate imagery and spatial disjunctiveness, the paintings in Regional Piece have striking parallels, starting with a shared palette: in both, a bright orange contrasts with a brushy blue and green. A red rectangle—comparable in proportions to the canvas—interrupts each scene, floating on top with no apparent connection to the subject. A curtain-like length of green celastic draped over the two canvases makes reference to the theater and the domestic realm, amplifying the paintings’ kitsch character.

Regional Piece contributes to the ICA/Boston’s expanding collection of paintings, especially those that demonstrate transformations in the medium since the 1970s. It joins works by Jason Middlebrook and Matthew Ritchie that play with framing devices and the relationships between abstraction and representation. And, like works in the collection by Ambreen Butt, Louise Bourgeois, and Cindy Sherman, it supports the effort to examine and redirect the position of women in art and art history.

2014.32

Since the 1960s, Annette Messager has used photography, knitting, drawing, collage/assemblage, and other techniques to engage issues of the body, gender, and identity. With imagery that is poetic, humorous, and morbid, she interrogates assumptions around femininity and exposes the cultural forces that shape our ideas about what it means to be a woman.

​In the series The Story of Dresses, Messager inserts dresses into shallow wooden cases covered with glass. Along with the clothing, she includes such items as small photographs of body parts, painted images, and printed words. Because of the nature of their contents, the cases conjure coffins—they seem to allude to the body and life of a woman who is no longer present. The work’s title suggests that the real story does not concern the person herself but rather the objects and images that surround her. 

As part of her work, Messager has created a number of roles for herself, including those of “the trickster,” “the practical woman,” and “the peddler.” Like the personas she assumes, the dresses and images in the cases suggest that identity is something unfixed, that it can be “worn” like an item of clothing. The objects also evoke relics and votive images (images of saints or body parts given to churches during the Middle Ages), in line with Messager’s frequent invocation of religious imagery. During her childhood, her father exposed her to the stained glass windows and altarpieces of medieval churches, and she often draws on these aesthetic experiences in her work.

​Messager has become a key figure in postwar art, and The Story of Dresses augments the ICA/Boston’s collection of works by important female artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

2014.31

Ana Mendieta came to prominence in the 1970s for her fusion of performance, feminist, and land art. She used her own body in interaction with the landscape to make connections between nature and the femme body. Mendieta documented many of her performances in photographs and films. Despite an abbreviated career (she died in 1985 at the age of 36), she continues to be an influential artist within histories and contemporary practices of land art, feminist art, and performance.

Mendieta came to the United States from Cuba as a teenager in 1961, in forced exile. This difficult cultural and familial separation left an indelible mark on her work, which often explored themes of transience and mortality. Mendieta began the Silueta series in 1973 while on a trip to pre-Columbian sites in Oaxaca, Mexico, with fellow intermedia MFA students at the University of Iowa.

She visited pre-Columbian sites and became interested in Indigenous Central American and Caribbean culture and rituals, incorporating ancient goddess archetypes and notions of feminine life force in her work. For her first Silueta work, Mendieta lay nude in a Zapotec tomb with white flowers strewn over her body. She went on to create many more Siluetas in Mexico and Iowa, covering her body with a wide range of substances, including rocks, blood, sticks, and cloth. She also carved her figure directly into the earth, with arms overhead to represent the merger of earth and sky, or sometimes imprinting the silhouette of her body on the landscape.

Captivated by the natural landscape, Mendieta’s ephemeral sculptures interact directly with the landscape. The photographic and filmic documents of these ephemeral works suggest the fragility of the human being in relation to the forces of nature. While photographs from the Silueta Series are often presented individually, seen together, they suggest Mendieta’s sustained interest in various female archetypes and the cycles of nature and life.

2014.30.1–12

Louise Lawler explores the contexts in which works of art are viewed and circulated. Working primarily in photography, since the late 1970s she has recorded art in collectors’ homes, museums, auction houses, commercial galleries, and corporate offices, whether installed above copier machines or piled on loading docks and in storage closets. In documenting these sites, she frames the strategies of display—from the labels that accompany the art objects to their location—to bring attention to the ways these spaces shape the meaning and reception of art after it leaves the artist’s studio. Her work is often associated with institutional critique for its exposure of art world machinations and with the “Pictures Generation,” a group of artists that includes Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, and others known for their strategies of appropriation. Witty and trenchant, her photographs are more than mirrors in which the art world sees itself; they reposition the viewer to engage critically and affectively with art’s presentationand dissemination.

In Untitled, Andy Warhol’s 70 S & H Green Stamps, 1962, is seen installed on a wall at Christie’s. Warhol’s work showcases his fascination with readymade, reproducible imagery, here the banal motif of Sperry & Hutchinson (S&H) company trading stamps, which Warhol has, rather ironically, hand-stamped on the paper. Lawler’s choice of this work as a focus at the auction house initiates a dialogue between Warhol’s own interest in consumer society and the metamorphosis of an artwork into a commodity. The second label to the left underscores that Warhol’s work is one among many objects being sold at auction, as multiple as the subjects he depicted.

Lawler’s Untitled builds on the ICA/Boston’s collection of work by contemporary photographers, especially those who came of age artistically in the 1980s, including Nan Goldin, Richard Prince, and Cindy Sherman. Furthermore, it strengthens a burgeoning specialization in conceptual and text-based photography demonstrated by such artists as Sophie Calle and Lorna Simpson.

2014.29

Working in sculpture, drawing, photography, and site-specific installation, Roni Horn explores the very nature of art, especially as it relates to site, environment, and identity. In an interview on Art21, Horn describes the importance of words to her process: “I move through language to arrive at the visual.” From this conceptual basis, she crafts objects and arrangements that often implicate the viewer, either through spatial structures or direct address. Frequently aligned with the aesthetics of minimalism, Horn uses repetition and doubling to invite viewers to look closely and to discover the subtle differences that constitute the world. Through her artistic practice, she seeks to activate the space between the perceptible and imperceptible. Since the 1980s, she has frequently visited Iceland, finding inspiration in its remarkable landscape and relative isolation.

Key and Cue, No. 288 forms part of a body of text-based sculpture that Horn began in the 1990s. In this work, an aluminum bar propped against the wall draws attention to the supports of both floor and wall. Having more than one face, the sculpture refuses to be seen or known all at once. From one vantage point, an abstract pattern of black lines resembles a barcode. From another, these embedded plastic bands cohere into a line of text, an extract from poem 288 by Emily Dickinson, whose writing has had a strong influence on Horn. As the viewer shifts from seeing to reading, the line of text, a statement and question—“I’m Nobody! Who Are You?”—moves the viewer beyond the physical object into a space of introspection.

Key and Cue, No. 288 adds to the ICA/Boston sculpture collection, especially works that engage with seriality, such as examples by Tara Donovan, Sheila Hicks, Charles LeDray, Josiah McElheny, and Andrew Witkin.

2014.27

Jenny Holzer’s medium is words and ideas, and she uses a variety of vehicles—from stickers, posters, and T-shirts to benches, bronze plaques, electronic displays, and the Internet—to disseminate her piercingly incisive phrases in public spaces. Holzer incorporates strategies from mass media and advertising to interrogate the effects of rhetoric. Rooted in conceptual art, semiotics, and feminism, her text-based works engage spectators in fundamental questions: Who is speaking? Where does this text come from? What does it mean? Answers, however, remain productively elusive. Her texts—whether directives, confessions, or observations—tend to elide authorship, unlocking a sort of societal subconscious from which hacked-up bits of ideology, desire, fear, humor, and hatred pour forth. Like many other artists who came of age in the 1980s, Holzer addresses such issues as violence, war, sex, power, and money, harnessing the power of text and public space to do so.

​Reminiscent of memorial benches found in public parks, this small marble sculpture has been etched with the phrase “HANDS ON YOUR BREAST CAN KEEP YOUR HEART BEATING,” taken from Holzer’s the Survival Series, 1983–85. The marble bench—a form typically associated with classical statuary, gravestones, and tombs—lends a weighty permanence to its epitaph-like inscription. Enigmatic, the phrase suggests both a sexual advance and a patriotic gesture. Like much of Holzer’s work, the sculpture raises questions about the many forms of desire and how they might intersect with nationalism, sex, and consumerism.

​This bench from the Survival Series adds to the ICA/Boston collection of sculpture, especially those that engage with seriality by artists such as Tara Donovan, Sheila Hicks, Roni Horn, Charles LeDray, Josiah McElheny, and Andrew Witkin.

2014.26