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Xaviera Simmons, Sundown (Number Twelve), 2018. Chromogenic color print, 60 x 45 inches (152.4 x 114.3 cm). Jeanne L. Wasserman Art Acquisition Fund and Anonymous Acquisition Fund. © Xaviera Simmons
New York-based artist Xaviera Simmons pursues a multimodal, research-based practice that spans photography, performance, video, sound, sculpture, and installation, and is grounded in an investigation of the experiences, memories, and histories of African diasporas.
Sundown (Number Twelve) is part of Simmons’s Sundown series (2018–ongoing), an encyclopedic exploration of contemporary American life as shaped by the legacies of slavery, colonialism, segregation, and migration. The series draws its name from so-called sundown towns—places known to be unsafe, especially at night, for black people—and is shaped by her archival study of records of life in the Jim Crow era. In Sundown (Number Twelve), the artist appears frocked in a floral cotton dress and against a midcentury botanical backdrop that references the landscapes and products associated with exploitative systems of labor, from colonialism to American slavery. She holds a black-and-white photograph of migrants on the Great Migration, when an estimated 1.8 million African Americans moved first from the rural South to the urban South, and later to the North and the Midwest between 1890 and 1930 (this was followed by the Second Great Migration, from 1940 to 1970, during which time over five million African Americans migrated to the North, the Midwest, and the West). She also holds a mask of indeterminate origin over her face, suggesting a form of mediated looking—perhaps revealing views of the slave trade’s legacy and new visions for the future—and referencing the mask’s currency as a collectible signifier of the Western idea of Africa, sold and traded as a commodity. Through such performative staging, Simmons’s work embeds heavy visual metaphors within a lush aesthetic to point to the still-precarious circumstances of people of color in America.
Sundown (Number Twelve) strengthens the ICA/Boston’s holdings in photography and speaks to the highly composed and historically allusive studio photographs of Leslie Hewitt and the performative photography of Laurie Simmons and Jimmy DeSana. Simmons’s work advances the museum’s priority and commitment to include underrepresented voices and stories in the permanent collection.
2019.07
Los Angeles-based artist Paul Mpagi Sepuya is an emerging voice in photography. His studio practice combines formal rigor with socially conscious explorations of intimacy, queerness, and race in beguiling representations of the body and space.
Sepuya’s photographs—meticulously framed and often shot in mirror reflections—are collected into series, the titles of which reference the space of the photographic studio (i.e., Darkroom; Exposures; Figures; and Mirror Studies, among others). The photos themselves, however, channel the intimacy between the photographer and the sitter, as Sepuya poses his subjects—himself included—in physically or optically entangled arrangements. He regularly affixes printed photos, sliced or torn, onto mirrors that he then photographs, creating complex and confounding representational spaces. The crevices through which the body or device appear become metaphoric apertures for the homoerotic, the abstract, and interpersonal intimacy. In Mirror Study (0X5A7431), Sepuya has mounted two pieces of a sliced, printed photograph onto a mirror with black tape. The camera tripod—but not the camera—is visible in the mirror’s reflection, and Sepuya’s hands and camera lens—though not his head—are visible in the cut photograph. The mirror is an essential element of analog photography, allowing photographers to see their subjects as they would appear through the lens. Its externalization in Sepuya’s work highlights the materiality of photographic technology and underscores the psychological and metaphorical power of the mirror as a device for knowing the self and the world.
This work joins the ICA’s strong holdings in photography (particularly in the genre of portraiture and subgenre of self-portraiture), including works by Catherine Opie, Jimmy DeSana, and Cindy Sherman, as well as studio-based photographers such as Sara VanDerBeek and Leslie Hewitt.
2019.05
Lorraine O’Grady is an artist and critic who employs strategies of conceptual art, performance, and installation to address issues related to gender and sexuality, class, cultural hybridity, and race, and their relationship to art history. The artist was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts. Her work has explored her middle-class upbringing in New England and her experience as the daughter of Caribbean immigrant parents. O’Grady received her BA from Wellesley College in 1955 and worked as an intelligence analyst for the US government, a literary translator, a rock music critic, and an independent writer before pursuing a career as a visual artist in the 1970s at the age of 40. She describes her practice as a form of “writing in space,” deeply informed by early 20th-century surrealist and futurist manifestos.
O’Grady’s first public performance, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, which premiered in 1980 at Just Above Midtown Gallery in New York, remains a pivotal work of race, gender, and class critique. These photographs document the sequence of events as O’Grady’s persona, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (Mademoiselle Black Middle-Class), crashes an opening reception of the exhibition Persona at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, which featured artists working with alter egos—all of whom were white. Dressed in a handmade costume of 180 pairs of white gloves and carrying a cat-o’-nine-tails (in her words, “the-whip-that-made-plantations-move”) made from sail rope studded with white chrysanthemums, O’Grady made other uninvited appearances in art spaces throughout New York as her persona, demanding attention for black artists. Furthermore, through this persona she explores her own background as part of the black middle class in Boston.
This iconic work, along with O’Grady’s costume, was on view in We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 at the ICA in summer 2018. O’Grady is an artist with local origins, and this work strengthens our photographic holdings and works in portraiture as it joins the Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women. Mlle Bourgeoise Noire engages with the performative, like artists such as Nick Cave and Ana Mendieta, and is in dialogue with works by artists in the ICA’s collection exploring issues related to race and representation, such as Howardena Pindell and Lorna Simpson.
2018.10
Robert Mapplethorpe is celebrated for his black-and-white photographs of still life subjects as well as his intimate and provocative portraits of celebrities, nudes, and the artist himself. He received his BFA in 1970 from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. His images of subjects in New York’s S & M scene and homoerotic images of friends, lovers, and others in his community sparked a national conversation around erotic representation, obscenity, and free speech. In 1990, the ICA presented Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment amidst the culture wars. A nationwide controversy arose around the artist’s work and engendered critical dialogue, amongst many issues, around censorship and institutional responsibility. Facing an AIDS diagnosis in 1986, at the height of the AIDS crisis, the artist broadened his photographic practice. The year before his death, Mapplethorpe established the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation to “protect his work, to advance his creative vision, and to promote the causes he cared about,” including supporting AIDS and HIV medical research as well as photography.
Belly Button demonstrates Mapplethorpe’s interest in the body, particularly the fragmented as well as idealized male body. By cropping the image, the artist brings close attention to the musculature of the torso—evocative of classical sculpture—highlighted by the undulating shadows and glistening light over the abdomen of this anonymous body. The navel is the central focus and alludes to Mapplethorpe’s Catholic faith, as the belly button symbolizes life and birth. In a related work, Belly Button Cross (1986), the artist silk-screened a red cross with the belly button in the center over a similar photograph.
As a critical figure in the history of art, the politics of identity, and as an artist whose work has been part of the ICA’s exhibition program in the past, Mapplethorpe is an important addition to the museum’s collection. Additionally, this work will also expound upon the ICA’s strong holdings of photography, in dialogue with artists exploring identity and the body such as Jimmy DeSana, Nan Goldin, and Collier Schorr in the collection.
2018.09
“I see photographs as visual testimonies,” says Brooklyn-based artist Deana Lawson. “Familial relationships, sexuality, and life cycles are repeated motifs. I’m also interested in black aesthetics and how that is described in a picture.” Lawson’s photographic works are highly staged, frequently take place within domestic settings, and depict black women, men, gender nonconforming individuals, and children whom she meets in her neighborhood; the American South; Jamaica; Haiti; and South Africa. Inspired by the family album, Lawson’s intimate and powerful images are true collaborations with her subjects, or as she has called them, her “family.” Her work questions and expounds upon the fraught tradition of portraiture and documentary-style photography, addressing the complexities of representation, notions of beauty, spirituality, and the multifaceted visions of black identity.
Lawson met mother and daughter pair, the subjects of Barbara and Mother, in a dollar store in Charleston, South Carolina. During their first encounter, the mother’s brown prosthetic limb, complete with polished toenails, fascinated Lawson. The artist explains, “Skin is so important in this work.” Here, the prosthetic foot resembles black skin, and in this image, both women are proud to present themselves and their space. The featured objects framing Barbara and her mother, including stereo equipment, a tape-patched wall, a fluted vase of artificial flowers, a Bible, a box fan: provide rich, though incomplete, autobiographical context of these women’s lives. In the midst of their belongings, Barbara stands closely behind her mother; both hold radiant expressions, their hands on their hips. At this particular vantage point, their bodies seem to merge, and their paralleling gestures reveal the loving relationship between the two women.
Barbara and Mother introduces a compelling artist to our collection, expanding the ICA’s robust photographic holdings and strength in portraiture. Lawson is in dialogue with artists in our collection examining black subjectivity and representation—particularly black women’s—such as LaToya Ruby Frazier, Ellen Gallagher, and Lorna Simpson.
2018.04
Artist Gail Thacker is best known for using Polaroid film to capture her circle of friends and partners and New York City environs. Thacker experimented with the photographic process, printing from both the positive and negatives of Polaroid film, leaving film unwashed to allow the chemicals to continue to process, and marking the surface of her images. From 1978 to 1981, she attended The School of The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, studying video, photography, and painting alongside an influential cohort of students that included David Armstrong, Pat Hearn, Nan Goldin, Jack Pierson, and Mark Morrisroe. This group formed the so-called “Boston School,” and is celebrated for merging photography, film and video, and performance with the city’s punk music scene to explore identity, sexuality, and subcultures. The ICA presented an exhibition of the Boston School in 1995, which helped cement this loose group as an artistic movement. In 1982, Thacker relocated to New York, becoming involved with theater and LGBTQ communities and remaining close with Morrisroe and Hearn until their deaths.
Thacker made Mark Morrisroe in Bed the same year Morrisroe died of AIDS-related illnesses. The artist frequently relates her embrace of the fugitive qualities of the photographic medium to her experience of the AIDS epidemic, which took the lives of many of her friends and partners: “The only thing I [had] control over was my relationship to these Polaroids. This was the only way I could stop time from destroying the rest of my friends.” Shooting from a low angle with a 35mm camera, Thacker fills the lower half of the photograph with a terrain of blurry bedding and focuses on Morrisroe’s face and tousled hair. Compared to the surface and image manipulations present in much of Thacker’s work, this photograph appears relatively untouched. Here, the artist dedicates herself to the sensitive depiction of her community and to the primacy of personal and domestic spaces. Mark Morrisroe in Bed documents not only deep intimacy and friendship, but also the toll of HIV/AIDS on the lives of countless artists.
Mark Morrisroe in Bed introduces a new artist to the ICA’s collection. This work joins photographs by many of Thacker’s peers, including Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Nan Goldin, and Mark Morrisroe and expands the museum’s capacity to tell a more complete story of Boston School artists. Furthermore, it joins 1980s photographs by such artists as Jimmy De Sana, Ray Navarro, and Nicholas Nixon that also reflect the inventiveness and poignancy of art in the time of AIDS.
2018.02
See Tom Moran, Quincy, Massachusetts, July 1987 for series description.
2017.12
See Tom Moran, Quincy, Massachusetts, July 1987 for series description.
2017.14
Richard Mosse’s body of work is known for its varied uses of technical tools as well as its ability to wrestle with political and ethical issues. He employs uncommon photographic technologies, such as infrared film and military surveillance devices, to revise and challenge documentary forms. His major video installation, Incoming was part of the ICA’s traveling exhibition When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art, which opened in Boston in fall 2019.
Idomeni Camp, Greek-Macedonia Border is part of Mosse’s Heat Maps, a series of black-and-white panoramic photographs of refugee travel routes and encampments. This panorama features a refugee camp between the borders of Greece and North Macedonia built by migrants fleeing conflicts in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. To create these panoramas, Mosse stitches together hundreds of images captured through a midwave infrared camera, a military surveillance and tracking technology that registers contours in heat from up to eighteen miles away. His subversion of this technology produces crisp and detailed images of grayed landscapes populated by ghostly figures and scarce heat sources, emphasizing the harsh conditions of the camps while foregrounding the refugees’ universal human need for warmth. “My intention is not didactic,” says Mosse when describing the photojournalistic engagement of his work. “It is about compassion, which derives from the words ‘to suffer with.’ To feel the pain felt by another.” Mosse’s otherworldly images underscore the crisis of displacement and ask viewers to confront the humanity of refugees.
María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s wide-ranging works in photography, performance, painting, sculpture, and moving images investigate how aspects of history, memory, gender, and religion give shape to identity. Born in Cuba and raised on a sugar plantation in a family with Nigerian, Hispanic, and Chinese roots, Campos-Pons evokes narratives of the transatlantic slave trade, indigo and sugar plantations, Catholic and Santeria religious practices, and revolutionary uprisings in her poetic, often autobiographical works.
Campos-Pons says her work aims to “claim space for women’s issues, collecting and telling stories of forgotten people, in order to foster a dialogue to better understand and propose a poetic, compassionate reading of our time.” Among the artist’s most recognizable bodies of work are grids of large format Polaroid photographs of a variety of subjects that dynamically marry photography and performance. Classic Creole is a grid of nine photographs depicting a totemic body wrapped head-to-toe in a form-fitting, patterned fabric. Topped by a colorful bouquet of yellow and orange flowers, the body is concealed entirely and given shape only by the silhouette of the garment and the suggestion of body parts beneath. Set against a bright orange background and flanked by twin columns, the body enlivens the garment even as it is contained by it. The work’s title references Creole people, racially mixed ethnic groups categorized as such in the colonial era. Rather than give a face to a “classic Creole,” Campos-Pons allows for the fluidity of such identification by representing a body abstracted through framing, dress, and patterning.