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Known for her singular body of small-scale paintings on paper, Massachusetts-based Laylah Ali often positions her subjects in odd poses, engaging with one another in curious ways. Her longest-running and best-known series depicts brown-skinned, gender-neutral human beings she calls Greenheads.

While reminiscent of the Greenheads, the figures in Untitled display new levels of detail and pattern. The scene is ambiguous and confounding. Framed by Ali’s signature sky-blue background, two figures lie at the bottom of the image, leaning against each other. As is characteristic of her oeuvre, the scene is one of implied violence; though we do not see the act itself, we witness its brutal aftermath. Yet, rendered in Ali’s cartoonlike style, the scene is simultaneously infused with absurdist humor. The figures, in matching striped pants, have no arms. Their flesh-colored heads suggest a helmet, hat, or bandage … or maybe have they been scalped? The mid-section of the figure on the left is covered with cuts or scars. A long, thin leg that rises from the stomach of the right-hand figure resembles an SOS flag.

Joining another work by Ali in the ICA/Boston collection, this powerful image provokes intense reflection and emotion. An excellent introduction to the artist’s distinctive style, the gouache builds the museum’s nascent collection of works on paper, which includes examples by such artists as Ambreen Butt and Yayoi Kusama.

2006.3

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

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

Pope.L is an artist and educator who over the past twenty-five years has made a career out of contraries. Drawing inspiration from the absurd and idiosyncratic nature of American culture, Pope.L’s provocative and often humorous performances, paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, and writings reveal and resound with the ironies inherent in our contemporary existence.

Although Pope.L is often categorized as a performance artist, his work in sculpture, video, drawing, photography, and painting evince an oeuvre that is universally prescient, poignant, and committed to highlighting political, social, cultural, and economic contradictions.

Part of a series of twenty-four oil-on-linen works, AKA Fuschia Ending buries text in a garish allover abstract expressionist composition. The series unites a misspelling of “fuchsia” with words offered by a rhyme generator, creating irreverent and nonsensical pairings such as “Fuschia Ebola,” “Fuschia Larva,” and “Fuschia Mañana.” Pope.L considers the repetition of the word “fuschia” as a performance taking place within the space of the canvas; each utterance of the word creates new meaning, as each pairing changes the way the viewer considers the visual landscape of the painting. In his own words: “Like performance, writing durates; an act of enduring; want to make it more physical, more ham-fisted lyrical—there are things to be done with words that have nothing to do with paint. It’s like crawling when you can walk …” Pope.L’s “mistreatment” of the word, along with the clumsiness of the mechanized pairings and the stridency of the palette, challenges what is considered “good” taste and thus subtly undermines the dominant power structures that sustain and propagate it.

Inhabiting the realm of various disciplines at once, AKA Fuschia Ending joins comparable works by Charline von Heyl, Dana Schutz, and Amy Sillman in the ICA/Boston’s strong holdings in paintings, as well as text-based works such as those by Roni Horn, Kerry James Marshall, and Lorna Simpson.

800.15.02

Cady Noland’s work engages the iconography of what could be described as the American underbelly. She draws inspiration from mass-media images, particularly advertisements, pairing them with a sculptural practice that repurposes the detritus of a uniquely American commercial landscape. Noland’s stark and provocative body of work questions America’s self-image as a place of unity, justice, and democratic freedom. Her work is often compared with that of artists such as Robert Gober, David Hammonds, Mike Kelley, and Richard Prince, all of whom are interested in the American psyche and its fascination with celebrity, violence, and wealth.

In Untitled, Noland silkscreens on an aluminum panel three dramatically contrasting images of femininity appropriated from the mass media. In the upper right is a group of young women adorned with flowers; at the lower left, a doubled and mirrored image of a shotgun-wielding couple walking astride; and at the lower right, the infamous newspaper heiress-turned-guerilla Patty Hearst posed, rifle in hand, in front of the seven-headed-cobra symbol of her “captors,” the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). The three images Noland juxtaposes offer three distinct constructions of identity formulated in relation to circulated images of idealized feminine subjectivity: the chastity and virtue of the young girls, the conservative domesticity of the couple, and the fallen antihero embodied by Patti Hearst’s transformation from debutante to revolutionary. The polished aluminum onto which the images have been silkscreened reflects the viewers’ presence, transposing their own image into this triumvirate of female archetypes.

Noland’s provocative exploration of the more nefarious aspects of American culture, and more specifically her unique approach to mass-media images and repurposing of vernacular objects, paved the way for a generation of artists who also use these methods in their pointed critique.

2015.23

Though a product of the early twentieth century, Alice Neel defined herself in opposition to the traditional expectations of her gender at that time. The honest and intimate representations of women she produced throughout her career carved out a space for feminist engagement with a genre that is often defined by the male gaze. In her works, she openly displays her empathy for her subjects, often people in her social circle, creating portraits that are tender, humorous, and frank.

Vera Beckerhoff belongs to a series of portraits that document the lively community of artists and activists with whom Neel consorted during the late 1960s and early ’70s. Beckerhoff, an artist who settled in Vermont, possesses a self-assured pose, deadpan facial expression, and direct gaze, all of which suggest confidence and a comfortable relationship with the portraitist. Beckerhoff’s manner of dress and self-presentation epitomize the bold unconventionality that emerged during the period.

Vera Beckerhoff contributes to the ICA/Boston’s holdings of works by female painters who employ expressive figuration, such as Marlene Dumas, Dana Schutz, Amy Sillman, and Lisa Yuskavage. In addition, this work forms part of the ICA’s collection of work by female artists responding to second-wave feminism, such as Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Ana Mendieta, Ree Morton, Faith Wilding, and Cindy Sherman.

2015.21

Born in 1900, Alice Neel reacted against the traditional expectations of gender in her turn-of-the-century upbringing. She is perhaps best known for her bold, unsentimental, yet empathetic portraits of the people in her social circle during a period of diminishing interest in figurative painting––the late 1960s and early ’70s. Employing humor and insight to create portraits that are both tender and unromanticizing, Neel carved out a space for feminist engagement with a genre whose history is often defined by the male gaze.

Between 1964 and 1978, Neel painted a series of seven pregnant nudes, a subject previously avoided in Western art. When asked about the subject, Neel responded: “People out of false modesty, or being sissies, never showed it, but it’s a basic fact of life… . Something the primitives did, but modern painters have shied away from because women were always done as sex objects. A pregnant woman has a claim staked out; she is not for sale.” Margaret Evans Pregnant depicts the wife of artist John Evans sitting uncomfortably on a small stool. Her figure, altered by pregnancy, is further distorted in the mirror behind her. Neel’s portrayal of Evans captures the transformative experience and physical demands of childbearing. It reorients the eroticism of the female nude, asserting the female body as a site of multiple, even conflicting, accounts of sexual identity.

This portrait buoys the ICA/Boston’s holdings by female painters engaged in expressive figuration, including Marlene Dumas, Dana Schutz, Amy Sillman, and Lisa Yuskavage. Together with Neel’s Vera Beckerhoff, 1972, and other works of the period by such artists as Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Ana Mendieta, Ree Morton, Faith Ringgold, and Cindy Sherman, Margaret Evans Pregnant adds to a robust account of art history’s intersections with second-wave feminism.

2015.22

The figurative works of Chantal Joffe reveal the artist’s keen observation of everyday life and her active engagement with the medium of painting. Often large in scale and boldly colored, her paintings depict female figures in a wide range of poses and couplings. Joffe culls her subjects from photographs and fashion magazines, isolating and intensifying aspects of the images—from the textures of the clothing and details of the accessories to the poses of the models—through the process of painting. Constructed with blocks of brilliant color in thick, wet paint and quick strokes, her paintings appear both carefully composed and rapidly executed, exuding the immediacy of daily life.

Self-Portrait with Esme combines two staples in Joffe’s production: the self-portrait and the subject of mother and child. In this painting, a mother leans over and tightly embraces a small child. The two bodies—dressed identically in simple white underwear and painted in the same pink-tinged cream—appear to become one, an effect deepened by the strong outline around the figures posed against an indistinct background. The focus is on the intimacy of this quotidian scene, an intimacy conveyed not only through the subject matter but also through the proximity and visual unity of the two bodies in space.

Self-Portrait with Esme contributes to the ICA/Boston’s strong collection of portraits of women by women, including important examples by Marlene Dumas, Alice Neel, Dana Schutz, and Lisa Yuskavage, and extends an inquiry into the subjectivity of identity by artists such as LaToya Ruby Frazier and Cindy Sherman. Joffe’s major painting also corresponds with the ICA’s collection of Nan Goldin photographs, which Joffe has frequently cited as a major inspiration for her work.

2015.08

Henry Taylor depicts contemporary life in bold and direct acrylic paintings. Taylor has described his paintings—mostly portraits of people—as landscapes of his social scene, encompassing his immediate community in Los Angeles, his family, and famous African-American icons. Vitally connected to real time and space, his artwork also possesses a deep, universal humanism. Taylor received a B.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts while he was also working as a psychiatric technician at Camarillo State Mental Hospital. Many of Taylor’s first sitters were patients from the hospital, and the experience instilled in him a deep empathy for others.

Taylor’s painting, i’m yours, depicts the artist and his two grown children, staggered in space and tightly cropped within the confines of the square canvas. Each stares straight ahead, meeting the eyes of the viewer with a penetrating gaze. They convey a sense of resolve and solidarity—their lips are pursed, they are alert, and they form a line—but also a degree of weariness. A blue smudge and painterly drips of pink and white stain Taylor’s own face, in the foreground, taking on the character of wounds or bruises. Made in 2015—a year of public revelations of police brutality against African-Americans—the family portrait stages a confrontation that reflects a sense of determination on the part of the subjects.

The acquisition of i’m yours introduces one of the foremost painters working today into the museum’s collection. While the ICA/Boston has a strong group of artworks that feature the human figure and address identity, Taylor’s painting is an important and timely addition as it diversifies these holdings by introducing an image of African-American male subjects. Finally, it joins two recent and major acquisitions of works by Kara Walker and Steve McQueen that directly address race and violence.

2016.13

Sadie Benning has been an important and original voice in the worlds of contemporary art, film, and music since the 1990s. Benning first came to prominence from their PixelVision videos, made on an early, toy version of a digital video camera. Raw, formally innovative, and autobiographical, these videos, shot in the intimate space of the artist’s bedroom, were confessional works that explored identity. In the early 2000s, Benning turned to painting and drawing, creating geometric abstractions that contained explicit and implicit references to the body and coupling.

Crowd, drawn from an image of an audience at a rock concert, presents ghostly white figures amassed together in a collective following. Benning makes individual pieces separate and then assembles the composition like a jigsaw puzzle—a process that points to the individuals that constitute a crowd. The artist covers each wooden piece with aqua resin, a water-based sculpting material, to give it a dimensional presence and then uses casein, a medium made from milk protein, to create a lustrous and smooth surface. While the white surface of Crowd appears to homogenize the image, its uniformity is interrupted by the glow of acid greens and pinks that Benning has applied to the edges of the figures, which gives them dimension.

Crowd joins other paintings in the ICA/Boston’ s collection that engage material experimentation and questions of identity by Amy Sillman, Alice Neel, and Joan Semmel, as well as works by Eva Hesse, Ana Mendieta, and Taylor Davis that abstract recognizable scenes to probe subjective experience.

2016.14