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.”

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    Steve Locke has established himself as a critical artistic voice in the representation of race and visual culture. Versed in the mediums of painting, drawing, installation, and sculpture, Locke examines subjects of race, sexuality, gender, and history, with a focus on cultural discussions of masculinity.

    A notable departure from his more renowned portraiture and figurative paintings, and responding to Josef Albers’s series Homage to the Square in particular, Locke’s Homage to the Auction Block #15 is part of a series of paintings Locke created to challenge modernist forms and their assumed neutrality. Like Albers’s series, Locke’s paintings focus on the concentric meeting of line, color, and shape. Unlike Albers, Locke substitutes the visual search for the square with another form. Here, encased within a painted purple square within a burgundy square within a red square, is a yellow rectangle-like shape—Locke’s auction block motif. This cross-section schematic of the auction block, the public site where enslaved persons were sold as property, becomes the organizing principle around which the painting is structured. By placing the auction block at the core of his composition, Locke connects the history of chattel slavery and the slave trade with the origin of global capitalism and the invention of race and racial hierarchies. As Locke explains: “The use of the ‘auction block’ motif literally organizes these modernist relations around the central symbol of chattel slavery in the Americas. The work reframes the work of modernism around the shape that made it possible.” This significant body of work continues Locke’s interest in contending with the form of the auction block and its visual history, as well as its influence in cultural memory.

    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.

    Arcmanoro Niles is a New York-based artist whose brightly hued paintings offer views of his daily life. He introduces little elements of hallucinatory surrealism into otherwise realist paintings through a dramatic play with color, texture, and light, as well as the integration of marginal characters he calls “seekers,” who reflect subliminal urges and desires. Often incorporating reflective paints and glitter to enliven the surface of his canvases and those depicted, Niles infuses his quietly mundane scenes with an electrifying vulnerability. “A lot of it is pretty intuitive, especially when it comes to the color, the construction of the composition, and how I want it to feel,” shares the artist. “But I think that, at the end of the day, I am a painter who is interested in color and stories that talk about who we are. Little moments that give us a glimpse into what life feels like.”

    I Look Just Like My Mama With My Father’s Eyes (Can Time Heal The Guilty) depicts the artist standing in front of his kitchen sink, dressed in patterned lounge pants as he returns our gaze. Over a neon pink ground, the oil paints accentuate Niles’s features—in particular, his eyes—with a luminescent glow, a pinkish tint that recurs in the artist’s work, highlighting golden brown skin, glittery pink hair, and the bold, matte colors of the interior setting. The so-called seeker characters here include a strange little doll-like figure located in the bottom right corner, while an unfinished stick figure haunts the left edge of the canvas. These elements, along with the work’s personal title, move this self-portrait away from an exact representation and into a dreamlike scene, expanding the register of figurative painting and self-portraiture today.

    One of the foremost painters of her generation, New York-based Avery Singer investigates the visual relationships between the digital and the analog in her complex, large-scale paintings. Singer believes that “the main goal of an artist is to test, explore, and go beyond the existing boundaries” of one’s medium. To accomplish this, she begins each painting with a three-dimensional architectural rendering of her subject matter using the program SketchUp, which allows the artist to experiment with perspective and planar relationships. Singer then transfers these drawings by hand onto her canvas via projection and applies paint with an airbrush, using paper stencils to layer tints and tones. In 2018, Singer began using an Art Robo, a computer-controlled robot most commonly used in the transport industry to apply paint to trucks and aircrafts. With these inventive techniques, Singer foregrounds her own interest in digital and internet cultures and technologies, and she achieves highly layered and crisp compositions that recall numerous art historical languages, including the angular forms of cubism and the mechanomorphic approach of constructivism.

    In Technique, Singer presents a doubled self-portrait within a dynamic play of light, shadow, and pattern. Both figures appear encased and abstracted within and between geometric grayscale forms, while also being the surface onto which the abstracted shapes are projected. This complex shadow play demonstrates the artist’s close attention to the diffusion of her airbrushed paint, articulation of spatial relationships, and the graphic flatness to her intricate technique, building moments of density across her canvas, marking boundaries between forms and colors as well as confusing such distinctions. Altogether, Singer’s technique effectively blurs painterly grounds and generates a distinctive sense of depth and space through her singular union of digital and analog technologies.

    Katherine Bradford is a painter and visual artist whose work fuses color-rich textures with abstract figuration in dreamy landscapes. Her subject matter is diverse, from depictions of water scenes and the night sky to obliquely rendered portraits of athletes and superheroes. Not formally trained in visual art, Bradford began working professionally as a painter later in life and now divides her time between New York and Maine.

    Bradford’s approach to figurative painting eschews traditional portraiture in favor of an atmospheric treatment that leaves the work’s references and composition open. As the artist explains: “I’m interested in making paintings that are about something bigger than everyday life—something very universal.” In Motherhood, bold blocks of color create the everyday scene of a figure sitting on a blue sofa with two smaller figures. From the title, one understands these figures as a mother and two children, one seated on the mother’s lap, and the mother’s arms outstretched between them. The artist does not add details to their faces or clothing, but renders her characters in a loose treatment; here, the effect transforms this painting into a work that explores the feeling of motherhood, rather than a narrative event. Overall, Bradford uses luminous color and gestural brushwork to make “paintings about enchantment,” infusing her canvases with feelings of both tenderness and care, as well as melancholy and ambivalence.

    One of the foremost American painters of our time, Amy Sillman pushes gestural abstract painting into new realms to examine the full range of human emotions. Known for active brushwork, improvisation, and riotous colors, Sillman’s work has been part of a reinvigoration of abstract painting alongside artists such as Laura Owens and Julie Mehretu. In addition to being a committed and skilled painter, Sillman is known for her mentorship of younger artists, her engagement with political criticism, and her three-decades-long career as a working artist. In 2013, the ICA presented Amy Sillman: one lump or two, Sillman’s first major survey exhibition.

    Layered and supercharged, Split is a recent work by Sillman, painted during the summer of 2020 amid the Covid-19 pandemic and stay-at-home advisories. Predominantly goldenrod yellow with white, black, green, and deep purples, the painting displays many of Sillman’s distinctive moves, especially her use of visible gestures and scraping, to build up and then remove elements from the composition. Unique to this recent body of work is the presence of flowers, a motif the artist recounts as the subject of recent daily drawings made at her kitchen table. A purple blossom in the top left of Split gives way to vertical lines suggestive of stems. Describing the energy she hopes to capture through this body of work, Sillman writes: “The world’s ground was shifting, so I started concentrating on the fields behind the figures—patterns, plaids, and confusing figure-to-grounds, a purposefully destabilized signal-to-noise ratio.” Split appears to be bifurcated at an angle: the left side is marked with a certain clarity of dark horizontal lines painted with a wide brush, while the right side is obscured by a murky collection of shapes not yet or no longer visible. The two sides suggest differing views of the same scene, perhaps indicative of the divisiveness that marks our political sphere. The painting holds a feeling of being unfinished, with Sillman leaving parts highly detailed and yet abruptly cut off, as if she had thought to complete it but then decided against it. This sense of being in process or improvising a yet fully realized scene is perhaps one of Sillman’s most unique contributions to expressive painting today.