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Since the mid-1970s, Cindy Sherman has been photographing herself in staged environments, transforming her appearance with costumes, makeup, and wigs. She began the series Untitled Film Stills in 1977 and continued it until 1980, by which time it comprised sixty-nine black-and-white photographic images that construct and reiterate stereotypes of postwar femininity. The series marks Sherman’s seminal foray into her now-signature practice, in which she reimagines the genre of portraiture by playing the roles of actor, director, and photographer herself. Sherman and her cohort in New York in the 1980s, including Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, and Robert Longo, formed what has been called the “Pictures Generation” on account of their critical appropriation of images of consumer and media culture.

Untitled Film Still #48 shows a woman standing at the roadside with a suitcase beside her, presumably waiting for a car to round the bend and pick her up. The scene is infused with foreboding. Turned away from the camera with her arms crossed behind her back, dressed in a plaid skirt and sneakers, the woman exudes a schoolgirl innocence and naiveté that only heightens the uncertainty about her fate. A network of unseen gazes––the subject’s, the photographer’s, and the viewer’s––all situate the female figure as passive object. As in many of the Untitled Film Stills, here Sherman exploits a host of narrative tropes familiar from Hollywood movies to trigger the viewer’s imagination.

The ICA/Boston possesses a number of Sherman’s photographs, including an expanding selection from the Untitled Film Stills series. Untitled Film Still #48 enhances the ICA’s holdings of work by important contemporary photographers, including Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, and Nan Goldin, whose works likewise generate questions about the meaning of the staged portrait.

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Cindy Sherman is known for identity-morphing “self-portraits” that explore female character types. Since her days as a student in Buffalo in the mid-1970s, Sherman has been taking increasingly flamboyant photographs of herself in staged environments, transforming her appearance with costumes, makeup, wigs, and props. She began the black-and-white photographic series Untitled Film Stills, 1977–80, shortly after moving to New York City. Ultimately comprising sixty-nine images, Untitled Film Stills presents images that reiterate stereotypes of postwar femininity. In this reimagining of the genre of portraiture, Sherman plays the dual roles of director and actor, viewer and viewed, maker and subject. In the 1980s, Sherman and her cohort in New York, including Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, and Robert Longo, formed what has been called the “Pictures Generation” on account of their critical appropriation of everyday images of consumer and media culture.

Untitled Film Still #44 shows a woman standing expectantly on the platform of a train station. Leaning against a wall with her head turned over her right shoulder, she appears to be awaiting the arrival of a train and its passengers. She is smartly dressed in a pencil skirt and a scarf, an outfit that recalls, as does the train station, a previous era. One quickly envisions the person she awaits and what will come of their reunion. As in many of the Untitled Film Stills, Sherman’s use of familiar narrative tropes from Hollywood movies leads the viewer to complete the narrative as if filling in the next frame of a film.

The ICA/Boston possesses a number of Sherman’s photographs, including an expanding set of examples of the Untitled Film Stills series. Untitled Film Still #44 enhances the museum’s holdings of work by the most important contemporary photographers, including Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, and Nan Goldin, whose works continue to generate questions about the truth of the staged portrait.

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Ana Mendieta came to prominence in the 1970s for her fusion of performance, feminist, and land art. She used her own body in interaction with the landscape to make connections between nature and the femme body. Mendieta documented many of her performances in photographs and films. Despite an abbreviated career (she died in 1985 at the age of 36), she continues to be an influential artist within histories and contemporary practices of land art, feminist art, and performance.

Mendieta came to the United States from Cuba as a teenager in 1961, in forced exile. This difficult cultural and familial separation left an indelible mark on her work, which often explored themes of transience and mortality. Mendieta began the Silueta series in 1973 while on a trip to pre-Columbian sites in Oaxaca, Mexico, with fellow intermedia MFA students at the University of Iowa.

She visited pre-Columbian sites and became interested in Indigenous Central American and Caribbean culture and rituals, incorporating ancient goddess archetypes and notions of feminine life force in her work. For her first Silueta work, Mendieta lay nude in a Zapotec tomb with white flowers strewn over her body. She went on to create many more Siluetas in Mexico and Iowa, covering her body with a wide range of substances, including rocks, blood, sticks, and cloth. She also carved her figure directly into the earth, with arms overhead to represent the merger of earth and sky, or sometimes imprinting the silhouette of her body on the landscape.

Captivated by the natural landscape, Mendieta’s ephemeral sculptures interact directly with the landscape. The photographic and filmic documents of these ephemeral works suggest the fragility of the human being in relation to the forces of nature. While photographs from the Silueta Series are often presented individually, seen together, they suggest Mendieta’s sustained interest in various female archetypes and the cycles of nature and life.

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Louise Lawler explores the contexts in which works of art are viewed and circulated. Working primarily in photography, since the late 1970s she has recorded art in collectors’ homes, museums, auction houses, commercial galleries, and corporate offices, whether installed above copier machines or piled on loading docks and in storage closets. In documenting these sites, she frames the strategies of display—from the labels that accompany the art objects to their location—to bring attention to the ways these spaces shape the meaning and reception of art after it leaves the artist’s studio. Her work is often associated with institutional critique for its exposure of art world machinations and with the “Pictures Generation,” a group of artists that includes Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, and others known for their strategies of appropriation. Witty and trenchant, her photographs are more than mirrors in which the art world sees itself; they reposition the viewer to engage critically and affectively with art’s presentationand dissemination.

In Untitled, Andy Warhol’s 70 S & H Green Stamps, 1962, is seen installed on a wall at Christie’s. Warhol’s work showcases his fascination with readymade, reproducible imagery, here the banal motif of Sperry & Hutchinson (S&H) company trading stamps, which Warhol has, rather ironically, hand-stamped on the paper. Lawler’s choice of this work as a focus at the auction house initiates a dialogue between Warhol’s own interest in consumer society and the metamorphosis of an artwork into a commodity. The second label to the left underscores that Warhol’s work is one among many objects being sold at auction, as multiple as the subjects he depicted.

Lawler’s Untitled builds on the ICA/Boston’s collection of work by contemporary photographers, especially those who came of age artistically in the 1980s, including Nan Goldin, Richard Prince, and Cindy Sherman. Furthermore, it strengthens a burgeoning specialization in conceptual and text-based photography demonstrated by such artists as Sophie Calle and Lorna Simpson.

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Nan Goldin makes her art from her life. For over thirty years, she has photographed her friends and her scene with an eye that is part documentarian, part poète maudit. Her photographs from the late 1970s and ’80s capture a particularly lively moment in Boston’s past, when she and artists such as David Armstrong, Mark Morrisroe, and Jack Pierson lived and worked in the city, forming what is often referred to as the “Boston School.”

Matt and Lewis in the Tub Kissing, Cambridge captures a poignant encounter, picturing two of her friends tenderly embracing in a bathtub. As is often the case with Goldin’s photographs, one is left wondering how the artist gains such unencumbered access to others’ lives while conveying the impression that the subjects are unaware of her presence. The piece’s significance in relation to Boston extends beyond its maker and subject matter to its role in a notorious censorship controversy. In 1996, the photograph was selected for an exhibition of 325 works of art to be presented in the International Place building as part of ARTcetera, a benefit for Boston’s AIDS Action Committee. The owner of the building, the Chiofaro Company, ordered ten of the images draped and later removed because of their content. In the end, the company reversed its decision on all but two works, one being Matt and Lewis in the Tub Kissing, Cambridge. Both the censored works featured male couples.

In 1985, the ICA/Boston presented Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, making the museum one of the first to exhibit her work; since that time, Goldin has become one of the most influential photographers of her generation. Matt and Lewis in the Tub Kissing, Cambridge, then, marks both the ICA’s early recognition of Goldin and an important historical moment in the city of Boston.

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Based in London, over the past thirty years Palestinian Mona Hatoum has frequently used the body, including her own, in photographic, filmic, and performative work that explores issues related to identity. Since the 1990s, she has also transformed common household objects—rugs, cots, and kitchen utensils—into threatening large-scale sculptures. Items from the domestic territory become ambiguous and potentially dangerous, evoking themes of exile, displacement, and conflict.

In Van Gogh’s Back, the conversion of the ordinary (hair) into the extraordinary (art) is uncharacteristically playful. Throughout her career, Hatoum has used and referenced hair, applying strands to paper as a form of drawing and integrating the material into sculptural work. While hair is often associated with femininity and sensuality, once removed from the body it takes on an abject quality. In Van Gogh’s Back, Hatoum uses the biomaterial in yet another way. With what appears to be soap, the long hairs on a man’s back have been shaped into curls that reprise Vincent van Gogh’s signature thick, swirling brushstrokes in his seminal Starry Night, 1889. As in Hatoum’s early performance work, the human body functions as canvas and sculpture, here to amusing effect.

Van Gogh’s Back is a valuable contribution to the ICA/Boston’s holdings of Hatoum’s work and makes a valuable contribution to the expanding collection of photography. In its humor and art-historical referencing it complements collection works by Yasumasa Morimura and Cindy Sherman.

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The sensitive and intensely personal self-portraits Francesca Woodman made during her brief life provide a unique and complex meditation on female subjectivity. Despite her youth, the prolific photographer’s striking oeuvre shows an artist simultaneously engaging and defining the politics of her time. In spare yet lush images, Woodman used own body to construct ambiguous portraits set in austere interior environments. The decaying architecture of Woodman’s studio, which served as background in many of her works, lends her photographs an air of isolation and experimentation. Subject to the anonymous gaze of the camera, she retains control of the mechanics of self-representation.

​In Untitled, New York, Woodman leans against a rustic, weathered wall, left of center, with her back to the camera. Resting her head on her raised left arm, she holds a fish spine up to her exposed back with her right hand, echoing the line of her own spine. The layering of the artist’s body with that of the spindly fish bones creates a feeling of exposure and intimacy, as if both had been stripped to internal and essential qualities. The peeling of the decaying plaster wall reveals its inner structure, echoing the effect created by the fragile fish spine. Denying viewers a conventional likeness, Woodman’s self-portrait instead inspires rumination on the genre’s ability to reveal the unseen.

​Untitled, York is a stunning photograph that bolsters the ICA/Boston’s collection of contemporary photography. Moreover, it enhances the photography collection’s strength in self-portraiture as a vehicle for artistic experimentation and identity politics. This work is in dialogue with that of other photographers in the collection, including Jimmy DeSana, Rineke Dijkstra, Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman, and others.

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The photographs of Shellburne Thurber most frequently show unpopulated houses and rooms. Although the interiors are devoid of people, Thurber is interested in the ways they bear the presence of their occupants. “I became intrigued,” she says, “by the uncanny way in which inhabited spaces take on the energy of those who live and work in them.” Thurber first created this kind of image soon after her mother died, when photographing her mother’s spaces was a way to process her life and death on a deeper level. In addition to the homes of loved ones, Thurber has photographed spaces such as motel rooms and abandoned houses in the southern United States. Many of these images take on a funereal quality, evoking memory and loss.

Aunt Anna’s House—Stripped: The Pink Study shows a room in the New Hampshire house owned by Thurber’s aunt Anna. After Anna died, Thurber took a series of photographs of the house’s empty rooms, the sites of numerous childhood memories. The only visual traces of Aunt Anna are the pink wallpaper and gilded mirror. What is most visible in the photograph are the absences: of the furniture Anna once owned, the pictures that lined her walls, and Anna herself. One small patch of light appears on the right wall. Thurber has said of this series, “These photographs, more than any of my other work, were an act of commemoration. It was all about color and light, and [Aunt Anna] was in the light.”

Thurber belongs to a group of artists often referenced as the “Boston School,” which also includes Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Nan Goldin, and Mark Morrisoe. The histories of the Boston School and the ICA/Boston are deeply intertwined, as the ICA in 1995 staged the first exhibition of these artists as a coherent group. The museum has developed a strong collection of their works, strengthened by this addition.

2014.50

Lorna Simpson began to create text-and-image works in the mid-1980s in response to the assumptions about race, culture, and gender that viewers made when encountering her photographs in galleries and museums. By combining words with faceless portraits or photographs of body parts, Simpson calls our attention to the unconscious ways in which people are classified based on physical and cultural attributes.

In ID, Simpson mounts a plaque engraved with the word “identity” over the photograph of a woman with her back turned to the camera, and another bearing the word “identify” below the image of what appears to be a section of her hair. Just one letter different, the two words cue a process of racial recognition and naming. The alignment of these words with the images conveys the commonplace and racially motivated act of drawing conclusions about black women from visual cues such as hair or skin color.

This work augments the ICA/Boston’s strong and expanding collection of photography, which also includes Simpson’s May June July August ’57/09, 2009. The ICA holds a number of works that deal with issues of race and racism, by artists such as Ragnar Kjartansson, Glenn Ligon, and Kerry James Marshall. These works examine the complexity of identity, particularly in relation to racial stereotyping in the United States.

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Roe Ethridge often focuses his camera on mundane subjects, ranging from a kitchen counter in a suburban home to shopping mall signs and barren winter landscapes. With the eerie drama of a David Lynch film, Ethridge’s photographs uncover the unusual in the ordinary.

In Holly at Marlow and Sons, the subject is a young woman who stands behind the counter at a nondescript café, perhaps Marlow and Sons in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The photographer inserts the viewer into a position that is familiar, considering options at a local shop while the staff waits to take the order. The appealing composition of this portrait is reinforced by the repetition of forms—the folded dollar bills in the tip jar, the black-and-white stripes on Holly’s turtleneck, the items filling the shelves behind the counter. Ethridge’s masterful use of shallow depth of field and soft focus calls to mind his commercial and product photography experience.

As the third work by Ethridge acquired by the ICA/Boston, Holly at Marlow and Sons helps suggest the breadth of his practice. This work joins a strong collection of photographic portraits by such artists as Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, and Nan Goldin, and, in representing an art image drawn from everyday experience, has a connection with the video works of Christian Jankowski and Rachel Perry.

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