Visiting the Watershed?

Water Shuttle tickets for Fri, Aug 30 – Sun, Sep 1 have SOLD OUT.
The Watershed is open from 11 AM – 5 PM through Mon, Sep 2 and is accessible via MBTA.
No ticket is required for entry to the Watershed!

get tickets

Advance tickets are now available for visits through September. Book now

Over the past two decades, Ellen Gallagher has built a body of work that confronts the history of black representation. Gallagher rose to prominence as a painter of minimal paintings that toe the line between figuration and abstraction, works with which she sought to subtly undermine the perceived narrative limits of abstraction. Since the late 1990s, she has pivoted toward a more appropriative methodology, using historical vernacular imagery to explore how a history of representation manifests itself in the lived condition of blackness in America.

DeLuxe is a piercing visual investigation of the multivalent and complex role that hair, as both object and stand-in for the body, occupies in black culture. In this suite of sixty prints, Gallagher employs a panoply of mediums, techniques, and processes to alter magazine prints, incorporating collaged elements from popular black culture magazines such as Ebony and Black Digest dating from the 1930s to the 1970s. The images are sourced primarily from advertisements promoting cosmetic “improvements,” such as wigs, skin-whitening creams, hair straighteners, and hair pomades, that support the agenda of modifying black bodies to conform to white archetypes of beauty. Gallagher alters the form and content of these images through a laborious process that involves drawing and redrawing, cutting and layering, and the addition of exaggerated features, text, and non-art materials such as modeling clay, glitter, toy eyeballs, and coconut oil. These manipulations reveal the elusiveness and misguided purposes of the advertisements.

One of the most ambitious works by this important artist, DeLuxe is a central piece in the ICA/Boston’s collection of works on paper and is in dialogue with collage-based works by artists such as Arturo Herrera, Gilbert and George, and Wangechi Mutu. Moreover, it accompanies others by such artists as Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, and Lorna Simpson in the ICA’s ever-growing collection of works that directly acknowledge and investigate the history of race in America.

2015.24.1–60

Sherrie Levine is known for her strategy of naked appropriation. Since 1983, she has used photography, drawing, painting, and sculpture to reproduce in full the work of canonical male modernists. A member of the so-called Pictures Generation, Levine employs what Douglas Crimp called “processes of quotation, excerptation, framing, and staging” in layered works emblematic of a critical style of postmodernism.

In After Henri Matisse, one of many similar works made from the eponymous artist’s work, Levine constructs her re-creation with ink and graphite. Here, the contours of a woman’s face, abstracted by Matisse, are copied exactly by Levine, the repetition bringing the work into a new context to illustrate how art accumulates meanings and interpretations over time.

Though Levine is best known for her photographs and multimedia pieces, this work on paper adds a dimension to the ICA/Boston’s holdings of her oeuvre. Taken together with works in the collection by Louise Lawler and Cindy Sherman, Levine’s works are representative of a late 20th-century paradigm in artistic production that has both historical and contemporary relevance.

2015.20

Andy Warhol began his career as an illustrator for advertisements and magazines, and by the 1960s had become one of the most prominent figures in pop art. Warhol experimented with a wide range of media—from filmmaking and video to painting, printmaking, and performance, often carried out in his vaunted Factory. Perhaps more than any other medium, he is known for his experimentation with screenprinting, a technique that, like the artist himself, challenged the boundaries between popular culture and fine art.

Warhol’s Electric Chair prints depict an unoccupied electric chair in an empty room. The image was appropriated from a press photograph from January 13, 1953, of the execution room at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York State. The room and chair, devoid of human presence and utterly still, convey a sense of death and absence. Warhol had already explored these themes in his Death and Disaster series of paintings and prints, which he began in the 1960s, screenprinting reproductions of car crashes, suicides, and other tragedies illustrated in newspapers. Unlike the subdued colors of silver, gray, and black he often used in these earlier images, the ten Electric Chair prints are rendered in the bright colors of pop: orange, purple, pink, red, and blue. The combination of jubilant colors and difficult subject matter registers Warhol’s notorious deadpan persona, which enabled him to avoid being pinned down.

These prints join another work by this canonical pop artist in the ICA/Boston collection—a photobook of Polaroids the artist took on Long Island (Red Book Prefix F158, 1972)—enabling the museum to better showcase Warhol’s pioneering appropriations.

2015.32.1–10

The drawings and paintings of Latvian-born, Indianapolis-based Vija Celmins are meticulous copies of photographs she has made. Her labor-intensive technique results in highly detailed photorealistic drawings of natural subjects such as the sea, desert, and constellations. Initially, Celmins began working in this exhaustive, repetitive manner as a way “to get to some other place that was a little more primitive, maybe more old-fashioned, without really thinking.”

Concentric Bearings D brings together on a single sheet of paper three images made from separate plates. On the left is a mezzotint of a falling plane, a recurring motif in Celmins’s work. The soft gray of the print as well as the surface scratches recall the material qualities of the original photograph. In the center is an aquatint of a night sky. The third print is a photogravure Celmins made from a photograph of Marcel Duchamp’s kinetic sculpture Rotary Glass Plates (Precision Optics). Taken together, the images encapsulate the range of subject matter and techniques found in Celmins’s oeuvre. Each of them marks a moment of arrested movement—of a plane, the night sky, and a kinetic sculpture. Through Celmins’s intensive process, she brings the subjects “back to life by putting them in a real space that you confront.”

Concentric Bearings D introduces into the ICA/Boston collection an artist who offers an important precedent for younger artists engaged with the history and use of photography, such as Thomas Ruff and Sara VanDerBeek, both represented in the collection. It also complements a recently acquired suite of prints by Tacita Dean that features found historical photographs.

2017.21 

See The Two Americas—That Is I for series description.

2016.26

Robert Pruitt creates sculpture, drawings, video, and installation works about the African-American experience in the United States and the global impact of black cultural production. He is perhaps best-known for large-scale, multimedia drawings on paper featuring portraits of African-Americans. His careful and sensitive treatment of the subjects—from their features to dress and comportment—combines with a wide array of references to traditional cultures, hip-hop music, science, technology, and political struggles. Pruitt describes his work as attempting “to string together the breadth of the black experience and diaspora to create a sense of commonality and humanity … lacking in many forms of black representation.”

Woman with X-Patterned Dress (After Bill Traylor) features a female figure standing in profile, her arms behind her back, and her feet slightly apart. Everything about the woman conveys a sense of strength and resolve—from her grounded stance to the sharp outlines of her face. One quickly notices that behind her back she clasps a box cutter, razor extended. This disarming detail imbues the portrait with a sense of pending violence. Pruitt used black crayon on brown butcher paper, allowing the paper to provide the underlying hue of the figure’s skin. The figure’s clothing is quite distinctive: a highly patterned, quilt-like dress combined with a pair of sneakers, both drawn in high contrast white crayon against black. The artwork’s title makes reference to Bill Traylor, a celebrated, prolific, and self-taught African-American artist who first began to draw at the age of eighty-five in 1939. Pruitt’s interest in Traylor speaks to his interest in diverse African-American histories as a means of forming new representations of black experience.

This work builds on the ICA/Boston’s already strong collection of portraiture and interest in racial diversity. Pruitt’s work invites productive dialogue with works by other artists who address identity and narrative, including LaToya Ruby Frazier, Cindy Sherman, and Kara Walker.

2016.20

See The Two Americas—That Is I for series description.

2016.23

Nalini Malani is one of the most prominent artists of India’s postpartition generation who is engaged with the reexamination of tradition, cultural nationalism, and globalization. Initially trained as a painter in the Sir J. J. School of Art in Bombay, Malani became more invested in photography and filmmaking in the 1960s and ’70s, creating her first interactive film sculptures and immersive theatrical environments that often embody a phantasmagorical quality. Her audiovisual installations are arresting works of art that build on shadow plays, overlapping narrative, text, and music. Malani’s works highlight the traumas of partition and religious fanaticism, as well as issues related to feminism, identity, and violence.

Echoing the artist’s early training and expert draftsmanship, the imagery in the eight prints in the ICA/Boston’s collection originate from the immersive multimedia work, In Search of Vanished Blood. The installation features a strong female protagonist named Cassandra, a figure of Greek mythology whose prophecies—first gifted and later cursed by the spurned Apollo—were disbelieved by the fated Agamemnon; and is inspired by East German writer and critic Christa Wolf’s 1984 novel Cassandra, about a struggling female artist and visionary. Like this installation, the prints weave together mythology, historical events, and literary references to address female suffering during and after partition. Malani hand draws directly onto the prints in ghostly white ink, analogous to the mesmerizing moving images in the original installation, and compiles a range of complex narratives bringing together the past and present.

Following Malani’s recent solo exhibition at the ICA/Boston, these works strengthen the collection’s global purview. Along with the works of Louise Bourgeois and Nancy Spero, this new series of prints respond to the legacies of feminism and merge a wide array of cultural influences, as with Haegue Yang’s sculptural work, all in the museum’s permanent collection.

2016.29

See The Two Americas—That Is I for series description.

2016.25

See The Two Americas—That Is I for series description.

2016.24