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Ruth Root’s inventive painting practice is a playful take on the legacy of abstraction that reconfigures the medium’s traditional methods and modes of presentation through her use of irregularly shaped supports and digital printing processes.

Untitled is from a recent body of shaped, two-part works made with a painted Plexiglas panel attached to, and suspended from, a digitally-printed fabric support. Root designs each of the fabrics in Photoshop—which she employs as an “image-making device,” as she has said—from a range of found imagery. In Untitled, a repeating pattern of geometric and biomorphic forms made from found images of 20th-century design is printed on a garish yellow textile. The fabric element is affixed to the wall with grommets, folded, looped, and stitched through an opening in a Plexiglas panel adorned with an off-register array of spray-painted polka dots. Swatches of dots are overpainted with solid triangular blocks of enamel that emphasize the curvatures of the oddly shaped panel. Untitled playfully upends the traditional relationship between canvas and stretcher by making the fabric function as a literal support, beyond being solely a material support for paint. The result is a hybrid object with an unresolved sense of tension and a productive interplay between hard and soft materials, digital and analog processes, and the fine and applied arts.

The addition of Untitled builds on a developing strength of the ICA’s holdings in painting, complementing works by Charline von Heyl, Amy Sillman, and Laura Owens, and joins textile-based works by Charles LeDray, Kevin Beasley, and others.

2018.08

Steve Locke’s practice spans painting, drawing, photography, and installation and explores ambivalent relationships between masculinity, homosexuality, and public memory. His work also acknowledges contemporary anxieties around terrorism, war, and torture, themes which grounded his 2013 solo exhibition at the ICA, Steve Locke: there is no one left to blame. The titular work of that exhibition, represented here, exemplifies how Locke challenges the authority and power typically endowed to painting and portraiture.

For more than a decade, Locke has explore ideas of the gaze and modes of looking exchanged between and among men. For this work, he returned to his long-standing practice of painting men’s faces with their tongues hanging out of their open mouths. These faces often float disembodied within the canvas; their enigmatic expressions suggest disgust or dislike as much as they do teasing or flirting. Rather than displaying the painting in a traditional manner, Locke uses a painted wood panel affixed to a sculptural support to anchor There is no one left to blame directly on the floor, bringing the portrait off of the wall and into the space of the gallery, inviting engagement and interaction. This gesture draws the viewer into a direct relationship to the work, interrogating the conventions, experience, and representational limits of contemporary portraiture.

2018.17

The work of New York–based painter Caitlin Keogh considers the history of gender and representation, the articulation of personal style, and the construction of artistic identity. With a background in technical illustration and an interest in clothing design, interior decoration, and art history, Keogh’s vivid and exacting painterly style combines the graphic lines of hand-drawn commercial illustration with the bold, flat colors of the applied arts.

The fragmented and idealized female body—often appearing sculptural or mannequin-like—is a loaded political metaphor in Keogh’s figuration, symptomatic of the violence against women in a patriarchal culture that influences representations of women in art history and popular culture. In Blank Melody, Old Wall, which the artist conceived as part of a group of works for her 2018 ICA exhibition, we perceive a portion of a limp, statuesque arm bound with a knotted rope. This arm extends across an indeterminate interior space decorated with a purple and black checkerboard pattern. Inspired by illuminated medieval manuscripts, a length of ornamental fabric embellished with natural motifs unravels and comes alive, as a jet black tress protrudes from a cartoonishly rendered hole at the top of the canvas. Peeled away passages of paint, modeled on degraded frescoes, disrupt the immediacy of the image and reinforce the idea that the surface of the painting is an imaginary space in which a seemingly indiscernible drama unfolds. Even as the female body appears fragmented and bound, pointing to a sense of violence inherent in representations of women, the figures in Keogh’s paintings decisively evade easy identification, exploring indeterminacy as a form of resistance.

The ICA presented Keogh’s first solo museum presentation in 2018. This work builds on a developing strength of the ICA’s holdings in painting, joining recently added works from artists such as Sadie Benning, Laura Owens, Dana Schutz, and Henry Taylor.

2018.05

Through textured use of digital and found images collected from print media and the Internet, Deborah Roberts creates figural collages that examine constructions of race, gender, and Black childhood in the United States. Her work negotiates between the real and the possible forms of representations of Black children (particularly girls), while also seeking out what modes of self-representation, agency, and self-making are available and accessible to Black youth.

For Roberts, collage is a practice of envisioning new and liberating forms of social life, especially for Black Americans. She employs found media to contend with dominant portrayals and narratives of Black youth, narratives that she teases out, challenges, and subverts through her use of collage. In works like Ulysses, Roberts combines cutout images with drawings, painted addendums, and detailed patterns over a blank background. Each component to the collage draws from different source material, transforming the figure into a layered assemblage of images, histories, and ideals that compose the character, as though wrapped in and by imagery. This connotation doubles the symbolic meaning of Roberts’s works, which reference and honor the particular social and political conditions under which Black youth struggle to retain their humanity and agency over their own futures. In Ulysses, Roberts fashions the figure of a young Black boy who stands demurely to the left of the canvas, appearing to be held back or in place by an unknown white hand. This presence of the white figure, even fragmented and disembodied, is an important illustration of Roberts’s interest in how representations of Black youth are often filtered through a dominant white gaze.

Ulysses joins other works in the ICA’s collection by artists who employ novel approaches to race and representation, such as Toyin Ojih Odutola, Tschabalala Self, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya. This work enriches the ICA’s strong holdings of collage works and portraiture.

One of today’s most celebrated contemporary painters, Njideka Akunyili Crosby has developed a signature style of collaged paintings that feature photographic transfers (drawn from magazines, advertisements, and family albums) related to memories and imagery from her childhood in Nigeria. Often featuring interior scenes, her paintings represent multicultural spaces, immigrant spaces, or, as she says, spaces where more than one culture lives.

The series The Beautyful Ones (2014–ongoing) takes intergenerational memory and futures—both real and imagined—as its subject, incorporating images of Nigerian children from the artist’s family photographs or from snapshots taken on recent visits to Nigeria. Its title references The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968) by Ghanaian author Ayi Kwei Armah, a novel that laments the lost idealism for a better Africa that characterized many post-independence African countries in the 1960s. Crosby reinstates this optimism in her own and subsequent generations while offering a powerful perspective on the complexities of a contemporary diasporic experience. “The Beautyful Ones” Series #7 is unique in setting its subject in an exterior, rather than an interior space. In this energetic street scene, a girl stands, arms folded, beside a Peugeot 504 sedan—a vehicle strongly associated with the middle class in Nigeria, where it was assembled from 1975 until 2006. While the car stands as a cultural icon whose surface both reflects and contains other imagistic references from the artist’s archive, the girl stands strongly, directly regarding the viewer, in a composition that calls into question what one can know from a picture, and what one can know of childhood itself.

This work enriches the museum’s holdings of portraits and advances the museum’s commitment to building an inclusive permanent collection and its aspiration to introduce more global artists and practices. The work’s incorporation of appropriated imagery and collaged personal archives connects it to pieces by Carol Bove, Ellen Gallagher, Lorna Simpson, and Leslie Hewitt, among others.

Josephine Halvorson’s painting practice focuses on place and the careful acts of observation and transcription. Working outdoors, Halvorson selects a particular site, sets up her tools and materials and takes in her surroundings, translating what she sees in front of her into painted marks. The resulting paintings capture the heterogeneity and brilliance of the mundane, revealing each square inch of earth to hold countless colors, shapes, and textures.

Halvorson painted Ground View: Plank at an abandoned mine in Death Valley, California, which the artist has visited numerous times over the past decade. The landscape bears evidence of human intervention, the earth having been literally turned up by mining; this industrial past riddles the desert landscape and is the focus of Halvorson’s interest. The wooden board and attached metal bolt at the center of this painting reflect the wear and tear of the harsh landscape and speak to an inaccessible use in the industrial past. In this recent body of work, Halvorson further extends her exploration of place by collecting stones, soil, and debris from the sites where she paints. Grinding this material down and mixing it with pigment, she creates a subtly distinct frame or extension of the painting, which acts like a bridge between the site of creation and the viewing space of the gallery. Ground View: Plank registers Halvorson’s singular relation to a specific time and place as it was encountered, negotiated, and ultimately rendered in paint.

Numerous works by Boston-area artists have entered the collection through the ICA’s biennial Foster Prize exhibition, including works by Lucy Kim and Luther Price, and this acquisition marks the 2019 iteration of the exhibition and prize. Halvorson’s painting is a fascinating reinterpretation of landscape painting and the incorporation of found materials in contemporary art. It joins a number of works in the collection that integrate found objects by artists such as Nari Ward and Wangechi Mutu, and is in strong conversation with Mark Dion’s exploration of New England’s industrial past in his New Bedford Cabinet (2001).

One of today’s most celebrated contemporary painters, Njideka Akunyili Crosby has developed a signature style of collaged paintings with photographic transfers (sourced from magazines, advertisements, and family albums) focused on a cosmopolitan idea of Nigeria, where the artist was born and raised. Often featuring interior scenes, her works merge artistic practices to create what she calls “a new visual language that represents [her] experience—which at times feel paradoxically fractured and whole.”

Facets: Screen Wall, included in Akunyili Crosby’s solo exhibition Portals in 2016 at Victoria Miro, London, is a meditation on the mutable and open boundary between the private and the public. The painting depicts an interior decorative breezeway with a concrete lattice screen, an architectural motif and material common in many homes in warm climates. The work further accents this seemingly minimal surface with countless glimpses of small details and personal figures. Each gap in the latticework screen, for example, shows a different design, motif, or an image of a friend or family member. For Akunyili Crosby, these portals, functioning as embedded miniature visual gestures within the painting’s field, transform the scene from a quiet domestic interior to windows onto private memories. Color demarcates these various spaces, with solid, dark raspberry walls sharply contrasting with the electric red of the screen, behind which gray-blue patterned motifs and a faded pink family portrait peek through. Akunyili Crosby describes her interest in thresholds, doorways, and windows in private interior sites—as well as her use of collaged found imagery—as a fascination with how layered artistic compositions can create “openings that pull you into other worlds.”

800.20.03

David Antonio Cruz explores the visibility and intersections of Black, brown, and queer subjects through painting, sculpture, and performance. Focusing on queer, trans, and gender-fluid communities of color, Cruz examines both the violence perpetrated against these individuals as well as their dignity and beauty. His portraits, rendered in lush colors with dramatic compositions and within elaborate environments, evoke the cycles of exaltation and suffering experienced by queer people of color.

Cruz’s thosebutterflyboys is part of the series returnofthedirtyboys/girls, begun in 2016 during the artist’s residency at Project for Empty Space in New York. In this series, Cruz portrays queer activists and members of the artist’s social circle in compositions that playfully engage art history and notions of desire, intimacy, role-play, and the gaze. Cruz created this painting in response to Rigoberto González’s memoir, Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa, which describes the author’s coming-of-age in relation to race, class, and sexuality. Used within Latinx communities, the term “mariposa” (Spanish for butterfly) is a derogatory term for men who are perceived to deviate from heteronormative and stereotypical masculine roles. Cruz follows González’s reclamation of the term by including the word “butterfly” in the title of this painting. In so doing, the artist plays with the stereotype invoked by the term, as González describes, that gay men are “light on their feet.” In thosebutterflyboys, the likeness of the artist’s longtime friend Richard appears to have slipped from a velvet ottoman and fallen onto the side of his face. As in other paintings in the series, Cruz situates the figure on a stage in an ambiguous space populated with markers of domestic luxury. The figures from this series are also accompanied by organic, phallic forms, as visible under the ottoman in this painting and which the artist understands as duendes (mischievous spirits, goblins, and sprites of folklore) and as materializations of the cismale gaze. Embracing the sensual through the figures’ graceful and contorted poses, and their exposed flesh, Cruz brings together pleasure and precariousness to express the dynamic complexities of life as experienced by queer people of color.

Marlon Forrester is an artist and educator who frequently addresses the representations and uses of the Black masculine body in his paintings, photographs, and performances, often exploring the instability of identity and homelands. StTrayvonGeorge23 is from a series of monumental paintings called If Black Saints Could Fly 23: si volare posset nigra XXIII sanctorum, which Forrester made for the ICA’s 2021 James and Audrey Foster Prize exhibition. If Black Saints Could Fly 23 draws on themes of resistance and freedom in legends of enslaved Africans who liberate themselves by flying home, here expanded upon through Forrester’s notion of a “psychic homeland,” a multilayered sense of identity, belonging, and disequilibrium. Each painting in the series features a frontally posed figure rendered with graphic flatness over an intricate, allover pattern referencing the geometric shapes found on basketball courts. These figures take their iconic poses and trappings of saints largely from sculptures that decorate the ornate portals on the Cathedral of Our Lady of Chartres in France. Forrester also includes architectural details and finery from the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, as well as references to the overlapping colonial histories of Guyana—from architectural fragments of a Dutch fortress to abstracted elements of Queen Elizabeth II’s crown. StTrayvonGeorge23 is dedicated to Trayvon Martin and George Floyd, whose racially motivated murders inspired uprisings against enduring legacies of anti-Black racial violence and injustice. Each painting in this series aims to counter historical exclusions by centering the Black masculine body as a site of celebration, commemoration, and transformation.

Working in a variety of media, Taylor Davis explores the relationship between object and viewer through precise manipulations of form. Often constructed of wood and industrial materials, her work investigates issues of orientation, space, identity, and perception. At the center of Davis’s text-based works, which have been an important part of her practice for several years, is an insistence on the unique sense of presence and attention a viewer brings to a work of art when asked to read it.

Be Attentive is from an ongoing series of paintings that take the form of the American flag. These works explore the capacity of ancient texts to address our present moment in the form of a recognizable symbol. The text in Be Attentive—which Davis painstakingly paints from above using a brush on a three-foot-long stick—conflates two different translations of Psalms 54 and 55, whose imagistic language the artist combines to create a vivid description of contemporary experience. To make the flag, Davis fills the negative space in between the painted letters with cut shapes of flat color, in red and blue sections. Through a unique combination of the written word with the image of the flag, Davis creates an experience in which the viewer is seeing and reading simultaneously, the text representing the form of a charged symbol with which they are confronted. According to the artist, Be Attentive was made in response to “the atrocities at the U.S. border, of children being taken from their families, the violence and ensuing grief, the collective trauma.” The intensity of the language drawn from sacred songs speaks to an emotional experience, in this case evoking the desire to escape the onslaught of those disagreeable actions sometimes done in the name of the flag.