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Over the course of her thirty-year career, London-based Palestinian Mona Hatoum has produced a powerfully visceral body of work. She came to notice in the 1980s for video and performance work in which her body served as the vehicle for an exploration of political and personal identity. During the 1990s, she turned her focus to ordinary household objects such as furnishings and tools, transforming them into monumental sculptures that arouse a sense of threat. With these uncanny sculptures, Hatoum divests domestic territory of its comfort and safety. As the objects that initially evoke “home” become ominous, the process inspires reflection on the global themes of exile, displacement, and conflict.

Natura Morta (Edwardian Vitrine) consists of beautifully crafted, colorful Murano glass objects arranged inside an Edwardian wooden cabinet. At first glance, the seductive mirrored-glass objects resemble crystal fruits—a pomegranate, a pineapple, or perhaps a lemon. However, these jewel-colored objects are blown and hand-shaped to resemble hand grenades, small bombs that disperse lethal fragments on detonation. By using a particularly seductive mirrored glass as the objects’ material and placing them inside a common domestic cabinet, Hatoum converts the appealing and familiar into the threatening and deadly. Her alienating treatment of the home arouses feelings of displacement that respond to the reality of many who live in the midst of constant war and violence.

This powerful work, along with others by Mona Hatoum, complements holdings in the ICA/Boston’s growing sculpture collection and in works that investigate themes of conflict and violence by artists such as Kader Attia, Louise Bourgeois, Willie Doherty, and Yasumasa Morimura.

2014.19

For thirty years, London-based Palestinian Mona Hatoum has produced work that treads the line between the familiar and the uncanny via the body and the objects it comes into contact with. During the late 1980s, she moved from performance and video to large-scale sculptures and installations in which household items—kitchen utensils, rugs, cots, and tools—become threatening and aggressive. Objects that initially remind one of the comforts of “home” turn ominous, an alienation evoking the experience of exile, displacement, and conflict.

Do unto others… is a polished metal boomerang put on formal display in the gallery context. The boomerang originated in Australia as a tool for hunting as well as sport and entertainment. Hatoum’s gleaming sculpture eschews the warm organic wood typical of boomerangs in favor of surgical stainless steel, a material change that lends the object the appearance of a blade, scalpel, or scythe. The title refers to the golden rule “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” When thrown, a boomerang performs the operation detailed by the maxim by returning to the thrower’s hand. However, to catch this blade-like version of the boomerang would undoubtedly cause harm to the wielder. With Do unto others… Hatoum seems to suggest a negative invocation of the “golden rule,” a reading more akin to “an eye for an eye,” in which violent acts, and not good deeds, are reciprocated.

This work forms part of the ICA/Boston’s strong and growing collection of sculpture, as well as the constellation of works that investigate themes of war and violence, including examples by artists such as Kader Attia, Louise Bourgeois, Willie Doherty, and Yasumasa Morimura.

2014.18

In performances, sculptures, installations, and photographs, Mona Hatoum investigates the layered issues of cultural and physical displacement, gender and ethnic identity, and the physical and social body. She is perhaps best known for her sculptures of ordinary yet emotionally charged domestic objects—kitchen implements, cribs, welcome mats. Blown up to gigantic proportions or made with unexpected materials such as rubber, steel, or pins, her sculptures evoke a shifting sense of danger and familiarity, as they are both physically enticing and a bit sinister.

This dynamic is at play in Dormeuse, a chaise longue made with steel tread plate. The chaise has been a key prop throughout art history, appearing in many well-known paintings––notably Jacques-Louis David’s Portrait de Mme Récamier, 1800––as a symbol of feminine leisure, relaxation, and economic privilege. Hatoum removes these associations from her sculpture, as well as the recumbent figure. While viewers cannot “complete” the work by lounging on it, it is apparent that it is not a place of rest and comfort. Its unforgiving surface paints a cold, hard portrait of domesticity. Hatoum transforms the chaise into the kind of sturdy utilitarian fixture that could be found in a subway station. The sculpture is archetypal Mona Hatoum, as it elegantly and subtly unravels the stereotype of the home as a refuge.

Dormeuse contributes to the representation of Hatoum’s work donated to the ICA/Boston by Barbara Lee, and augments the museum’s holdings of sculpture by important women artists.

2006.9

Lisa Yuskavage paints hyper-sexualized images of women, assigning them poses that seem to be taken from pornography and giving them traditionally desirable qualities such as large breasts. Yet she undermines the usual relationship between pornographic subject and object by distorting aspects of the figures’ bodies in bizarre and unappealing ways. A figure might have an exaggerated belly, an oddly shaped backside, or any number of other malformations. This results in images that are at once tantalizing and revolting. By mirroring, but also disrupting, the ways in which women are presented in our culture, she calls attention to the misogyny with which the female figure is habitually treated.

​​Motherfucking Rock epitomizes this operation of both eroticizing and warping the female body. Yuskavage depicts the head and torso of a female figure, who peers through her blond bangs. The figure’s gigantic breasts point upward in an idealized fashion. The lower part of her torso, however, is unidealized, its rounded, uneven form reminiscent of an eggplant. The artist also attaches a number of spheres on the figure’s upper torso, decreasing its appeal further still. The seductive and the repellent combine in the painting to a confusing, almost humorous effect.

​Motherfucking Rock adds to the ICA/Boston’s recently expanding collection of paintings. This work was included in the ICA’s exhibition Expanding the Field of Painting, an exploration of the ways in which painting has been transformed since the 1970s. It joins works by Louise Bourgeios, Ambreen Butt, and Cindy Sherman that examine and undermine art-historical representations of women.

2014.52

The sensitive and intensely personal self-portraits Francesca Woodman made during her brief life provide a unique and complex meditation on female subjectivity. Despite her youth, the prolific photographer’s striking oeuvre shows an artist simultaneously engaging and defining the politics of her time. In spare yet lush images, Woodman used own body to construct ambiguous portraits set in austere interior environments. The decaying architecture of Woodman’s studio, which served as background in many of her works, lends her photographs an air of isolation and experimentation. Subject to the anonymous gaze of the camera, she retains control of the mechanics of self-representation.

​In Untitled, New York, Woodman leans against a rustic, weathered wall, left of center, with her back to the camera. Resting her head on her raised left arm, she holds a fish spine up to her exposed back with her right hand, echoing the line of her own spine. The layering of the artist’s body with that of the spindly fish bones creates a feeling of exposure and intimacy, as if both had been stripped to internal and essential qualities. The peeling of the decaying plaster wall reveals its inner structure, echoing the effect created by the fragile fish spine. Denying viewers a conventional likeness, Woodman’s self-portrait instead inspires rumination on the genre’s ability to reveal the unseen.

​Untitled, York is a stunning photograph that bolsters the ICA/Boston’s collection of contemporary photography. Moreover, it enhances the photography collection’s strength in self-portraiture as a vehicle for artistic experimentation and identity politics. This work is in dialogue with that of other photographers in the collection, including Jimmy DeSana, Rineke Dijkstra, Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman, and others.

2014.51

The photographs of Shellburne Thurber most frequently show unpopulated houses and rooms. Although the interiors are devoid of people, Thurber is interested in the ways they bear the presence of their occupants. “I became intrigued,” she says, “by the uncanny way in which inhabited spaces take on the energy of those who live and work in them.” Thurber first created this kind of image soon after her mother died, when photographing her mother’s spaces was a way to process her life and death on a deeper level. In addition to the homes of loved ones, Thurber has photographed spaces such as motel rooms and abandoned houses in the southern United States. Many of these images take on a funereal quality, evoking memory and loss.

Aunt Anna’s House—Stripped: The Pink Study shows a room in the New Hampshire house owned by Thurber’s aunt Anna. After Anna died, Thurber took a series of photographs of the house’s empty rooms, the sites of numerous childhood memories. The only visual traces of Aunt Anna are the pink wallpaper and gilded mirror. What is most visible in the photograph are the absences: of the furniture Anna once owned, the pictures that lined her walls, and Anna herself. One small patch of light appears on the right wall. Thurber has said of this series, “These photographs, more than any of my other work, were an act of commemoration. It was all about color and light, and [Aunt Anna] was in the light.”

Thurber belongs to a group of artists often referenced as the “Boston School,” which also includes Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Nan Goldin, and Mark Morrisoe. The histories of the Boston School and the ICA/Boston are deeply intertwined, as the ICA in 1995 staged the first exhibition of these artists as a coherent group. The museum has developed a strong collection of their works, strengthened by this addition.

2014.50

Throughout her more than sixty years as an artist, Nancy Spero maintained a commitment to socially and politically engaged art. In her paintings, collages, prints, drawings, and murals, she expressed stances that were antiwar, antiviolence, and most notably, feminist. Spero was a member of a number of artist-activist groups, including the Art Workers Coalition, Women Artists in Revolution, and the A.I.R. Gallery, dedicated to art by women. She consistently sought to meet what she considered to be the societal obligations of the artist.

Female Bomb belongs to Spero’s War series, 1966–69, in which she personified weapons and wartime horrors in response to the conflict in Vietnam. The work shows several vicious-looking heads extending from a female body, blood seeming to spout from each as well as from the figure’s breasts and vagina. In Female Bomb, Spero collapses depictions of a weapon and the body that has been destroyed by it, highlighting the devastation caused by tools of warfare. Spero was fiercely committed to the representation of women in art and portrayed them as both victims and as sources of violence. The strokes of red extending from the heads in Female Bomb have been read as tongues as well as blood, giving form to Spero’s rebelliousness. She said of her work at the time, “I was literally sticking my tongue out at the world—a woman silenced, victimized, and brutalized.”

Nancy Spero is a seminal female artist of the twentieth century. Female Bomb is a crucial addition to the ICA/Boston’s collection of works made by the pioneers of feminist art. In addition, this piece augments our holdings of artworks that investigate themes of war and violence, including those by Kader Attia, Louise Bourgeois, Willie Doherty, Mona Hatoum, and Yasumasa Morimura.

2014.49

Throughout her more than sixty years as an artist, Nancy Spero maintained a commitment to socially and politically engaged art. In her paintings, collages, prints, drawings, and murals, she expressed stances that were antiwar, antiviolence, and, most notably, feminist. Spero was a member of a number of artist-activist groups, including the Art Workers Coalition, Women Artists in Revolution, and the A.I.R. Gallery, which dedicated itself to art by women. She consistently sought to meet what she considered to be the social obligations of the artist.

Determined to advance the representation of female experience in art, by the mid-1970s Spero depicted only women. Birth portrays the quintessentially female act of childbirth, an event that had been systematically excluded from art history. Spero’s representation of the act does not resemble the reality of childbirth—the woman stands, raising the infant in the air and seeming to thrust him or her forward, as if to emphasize the power that the ability to give birth confers. The image is rendered exclusively in brown, black, and off-white, and the background is filled in with rough brushstrokes. These qualities give the work the appearance of a prehistoric artwork. Spero often utilized ancient motifs and symbols, drawing on figures from Egyptian, Greek, and Irish sources.

Nancy Spero is a seminal female artist of the twentieth century. Birth augments the ICA/Boston’s collection of work made by the pioneers of feminist art, including Ana Mendieta, Joan Semmel, and Faith Wilding.

2014.48

Kiki Smith has created a visceral oeuvre that positions the body as a site where history, identity, psychology, politics, and experience coalesce. Using a wide variety of organic materials and techniques, she often creates a dialogue between animal forms and fundamental human experience. Smith’s life-size figurative sculptures, frequently cast from live models, draw attention to human mortality by way of the systems (reproductive, excretory, vascular) whose vitality and decay are linked to life and death. While informed by the politics surrounding the AIDS epidemic, Smith’s practice also concerns feminist identity politics, as evidenced by her frequent use of the female form and reproductive system.

Throughout her oeuvre, Smith has often invoked bodily fluids, most notably blood and semen, to draw attention to the raw physicality as well as psychological pain, of human existence. The delicate paper sculpture Heart to Hand is an early work in which Smith externalizes internal processes, both psychic and physical. Red ink on gampi paper is manipulated to resemble wrinkled and bloodied viscera. The disembodied titular hand and heart hang freely on the wall, connected via a spindly red umbilical artery. While the sculpture makes self-referential allusion to channels of artistic creation, it also references Bruce Nauman’s From Hand to Mouth—a similar sculpture of a human arm and mouth that likewise seeks to represent the psychological divide between the manifest and the metaphoric.

The addition of From Heart to Hand broadens the reach of the ICA/Boston’s collection in several important ways: it adds to the growing numbers of sculptures produced by women, the cadre of works in dialogue with feminism and the female body, and, most specifically, to the genre of psychologically charged objects such as those by Louise Bourgeois, Tara Donovan, and Mona Hatoum.

2014.46

Kiki Smith positions the body as a site where history, identity, psychology, politics, and experience coalesce. Her visceral oeuvre, manifested in a variety of organic materials and techniques, often creates a dialogue between animal forms and the disturbing aspects of human experience. Life-size figurative sculptures, frequently cast from live models, draw attention to human mortality by way of the systems (reproductive, excretory, vascular) responsible for sustaining life. Smith’s practice is informed by the bodily politics associated with the AIDS epidemic, yet her work is also closely associated with feminist identity politics, a connection that is often made due to her frequent use of the female form and reproductive system.  

​Smith’s Untitled (Breast Jar) traffics in the psychologically charged potential of the uncanny. The beaker-like jar recalls both scientific and medical inquiry, sterility, and experimentation. However, the presence of the contour of a breast in the bottom of the blown-glass jar introduces an association with female sexuality and challenges the hard and clinical nature of the device. The breast juts into the negative space of the volume from which water is poured when the sculpture is displayed. Smith often draws attention to the liquids associated with bodily functions. In the case of the Untitled (Breast Jar), she inverts the relationship of interior and exterior, submerging in liquid an empty breast, itself usually the generator and dispenser of liquid. 

​The addition of Untitled (Breast Jar) broadens the ICA/Boston’s growing collection of sculptures that are produced by women, that are in dialogue with feminism and the female body, and that represent, more specifically, the genre of psychologically charged, seemingly ready-made objects, such as the work of Louise Bourgeois, Tara Donovan, and Mona Hatoum.  

2014.47