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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

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

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

Alighiero Boetti was one of the most important artists associated with the Italian Arte Povera movement. Boetti sought to subvert traditional notions of authorship, dubbing himself “Alighiero e Boetti” (implying a partnership by adding “and” between his first and last names), as well as pioneering collaborative relationships with the fabricators of his work. He is perhaps best known for making embroidered works that feature words, numbers, and maps. These works, which first emerged in the 1970s, addressed a new sense of internationalism and global systems of power and authority as represented by flags, symbols, national borders, and language.

Like many artists of his generation, Boetti was interested in the relationship between, on the one hand, control and rational thought and, on the other, chance and authorship. In the 1970s, Boetti traveled to Afghanistan, where he met women from an embroidery school who he commissioned to create his first map work, a series he would continue for a decade. The embroiderers chose the colors and patterns of the work, and Boetti embraced the chance element that resulted from their decisions. In the 1980s, Boetti expanded his imagery from maps to focus on language play and a kind of poetry of time and space. The resulting textile works, of which Today on the Seventh Day of the Seventh Month of the Year Nineteen Hundred Eighty-Eight … Giampaolo Prearo Editor is a superlative example, create fields of numbers and letters that forms words and even equations while also creating visually arresting patterns of color and form.

This acquisition brings into the museum’s collection a prominent twentieth-century artist, whose influence on contemporary art has been palpable in the last decade. Boetti’s original approach to conceptually driven textile work ties in with works in the collection by Françoise Grossen, Robert Rohm, and Josh Faught.

800.16.14

Jenny Holzer’s text-based works are rooted in conceptual art, semiotics, and feminism. Holzer emerged in the 1980s by harnessing the power of language in the public realm to interrogate such issues as violence, sex, and money. Rooted in conceptual art and feminism, Holzer’s artworks incorporate a wide range of statements, ideas, observations, and confessions, which she disseminates through media such as paintings, posters, benches, and electronic billboards. The identity of the speaker and the source and meaning of her works are rarely certain.

Enclosure (Deep Red) is one work in a series of paintings Holzer created for her Archive project, which drew on declassified documents obtained by George Washington University’s National Security Archive through the Freedom of Information Act. In detached and formal language, the document screen-printed on Enclosure outlines allegations against soldiers for incidents occurring during the Iraq War. Though we glean some of the gruesome details of maltreatment of prisoners of war—officers face multiple charges of “Cruelty and Maltreatment” and “Failure to Obey Order or Regulation”—all names and personal information are fully redacted and the outcomes withheld. By juxtaposing abstract painting with this authoritative and inaccessible document, Enclosure (Deep Red) creates a complex relationship between painting and politics.

This work joins a sculptural work by Holzer in the ICA/Boston’s collection and helps to convey the breadth of her prolific practice. It adds to the museum’s collection of painting and is in strong conversation with explicitly political works by artists such as Cady Noland and Kara Walker.

2016.18

Sanya Kantarovsky creates humorous and wistful paintings—from surreal portraits to abstract compositions—that are infused with social commentary. Incorporating memories of his childhood in Moscow and cultural references, Kantarovsky often uses the language of cartoons. Born in 1982, Kantarovsky received his M.F.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles, and B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design. This young, New York-based Russian artist works through figuration to arrive at paintings full of uncertainty and emotional energy.

Exemplary of the artist’s work, Violet pictures a man holding a dog and clutching a train pole. The man looks worn and sullen with a deeply creased brow, and the dog wears a red cone around its neck, perhaps following a recent medical procedure. Kantarovsky places the figures in a subway train; the window and strong rectangular shapes underscore the contained environment. While the canvas appears to capture a moment in time, the narrative and context are distinctly obscure. As Kantarovsky has said about his work, “it’s like a moment that never existed but that you feel you’ve seen before.” The artist employs a surreal, almost fauvist coloration, seen in the pale green face and hands, and in the bright red of the dog’s cone. This work was first presented as part of a 2016 exhibition titled Feral Neighbours about the concepts of privacy, impersonality, and anonymity of urban living.

This work expands the museum’s collection of paintings, joining figurative works by artists such as Alice Neel, Lisa Yuskavage, and Dana Schutz. With this new addition, the ICA/Boston introduces a new and important young voice to the museum’s collection.

800.16.16

For the past twenty years, artist Laura Owens has pursued an ambitious and experimental practice that expands painting’s methods and means of presentation. In collaboration with technicians and assistants, Owens researches and develops new viscosities of paint, new techniques to dye fabric, and methods for hybridizing screen printing and painting. Her earlier works initially employed decorative motifs from both Western and Eastern aesthetic vocabularies alongside references from high art painting traditions. More recently, she has attempted to reimagine the systems of contemporary image production, proposing a vital relationship between the physical process of painting and the circulation of digital images.

In Untitled, 2015, Owens uses computer software programs developed in the late 1990s to explore the equation of painterly brushstrokes and the pixel. To this, she adds images of birds—both painted and printed in low-resolution blurs—to create an allover composition. Much of Owen’s work is site specific, with size and subject matter influenced by the gallery’s architecture and context. Untitled, 2015, was designed based on an architectural frieze, creating an unbalance between the exaggeratedly lite subject matter and the permanence of architecture.

This work significantly augments the ICA/Boston’s painting collection while also building on strategies of artists such as Sherrie Levine and Cady Noland that introduce notions of the painterly, the decorative, and the use of digital circulation of images into their work.

2016.15