![A color photograph shows a collage of two white figures crouching together holding long sticks in the bottom left of a horizontal image with the face of a woman overlaid with the projection of a world map in the center background.](https://www.icaboston.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/gp-2036-my-hope-last-breath-my-hope-first-battle.jpg)
Nalini Malani, My Hope Is the Last Breath. My Hope Is the First Battle, 2015. Pigmented inkjet print, 26 × 43 3/8 inches (66 × 110.2 cm). General Acquisition Fund. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Lelong, New York. © Nalini Malani
See The Two Americas—That Is I for series description.
2016.27
See The Two Americas—That Is I for series description.
2016.28
See The Two Americas—That Is I for series description.
2016.22
DYLANN (profile), 2017
License plate (Brewer’s truck), 2017
Officer Daniel Pantaleo, 2017
Officer Darren Wilson (interview), 2017
Carolyn Bryant (studio photo), 2018
Acquired through the generosity of Steve Corkin and Dan Maddalena, Marlene and David Persky, and General Acquisition Fund
Officer Timothy Loehmann (fishing), 2017
George Zimmerman (vacation selfie), 2018
Promised gifts of Alexandra Cherubini and Camilo Alvarez
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, and has recently employed portraiture to explore the racial violence against people of color, particularly at the hands of the police. Locke intervenes in the history of representations of racial violence by portraying the mostly white individuals or institutions who with very few exceptions are its perpetrators. #Killers, Locke’s recent series of studied graphite drawings on white paper, feature large areas of negative space, using absence and scale as a major structuring device in the representation of portraits of men and women who played a role in the slaying of African Americans. The precise renderings of their faces are recognizable, whether depicting police officer Darren Wilson, who shot and killed Michael Brown in 2014, or Carolyn Bryant, whose grotesquely false statements led to the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955. Their faces, made from images sourced from a variety of online sources, float in a stark field of white paper, compositionally referencing the layout of a newspaper and symbolically “adrift in the lie of whiteness,” according to the artist. In their sparse and highly mediated quality, #Killers inverts methods of portraiture to visualize the source, rather than the effects, of systemic racial violence.
Wangechi Mutu’s multidisciplinary practice addresses issues of gender, race, power, and survival. Born in 1972 in Nairobi, Kenya, Mutu moved to the United States in 1992 to study art, and now works between Nairobi and New York City. Her maximalist aesthetic defies strict classification and is rooted in feminism and Afro-futurism. First gaining attention for hybridized collages of figures set in otherworldly landscapes, Mutu has developed a wide-ranging visual language that merges African and Western idioms, foregrounds materiality and sensuality, and touches on such issues as colonialism, violence, ecology, and mythology. Untitled (Tumor) resembles a fleshy tumor with sprouting hair or a floating ball of earth with tangled roots. This work embodies Mutu’s widespread interest in sampling liberally from existing textual sources. Here, she samples from medical illustrations, nature magazines, and high fashion to produce an otherworldly landscape that merges nature and the human body.
2018.07
Toyin Ojih Odutola’s drawing practice stages a dynamic interplay between line, form, and color to create sensuous and probing portraits. Working in charcoal, ink, pastel, and pencil, she first gained attention for developing a new approach to constructing figures and rendering black skin through densely interwoven lines, initially working in ballpoint pen. Since 2016 the artist has focused on a series that imagines the private lives of two fictional, aristocratic Nigerian families joined by marriage.
Each drawing from Ojih Odutola’s speculative narrative offers a vignette—most often of a well-dressed individual posed in an elegant domestic setting. Heir Apparent comes from the series’ final installment and features the nephew of Lord Jideofor Emeka and Lord Temitope Omodele, the presumed heir of their joint wealth. The portrait of the young man relaxing in a bath and surrounded by artwork, captures a private moment but speaks to self-possession and privilege. The framed work behind him, picturing two smartly dressed figures, is a direct quotation of an earlier work by Ojih Odutola portraying Lord Emeka and Lord Omodele on their honeymoon. This inclusion creates a kind of family portrait and signals self-fulfilling operations of wealth and inheritance, while also picturing Nigerian nobility through a gay union. The artist’s unfolding narrative, reiterated across five exhibitions since 2016, serves as an important conceptual frame of a black imaginary that transcends the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism. Heir Apparent exemplifies Ojih Odutola’s unique handling of surfaces, skin, and interiors, as well as her inventive narrative conceit of a reimagined Nigeria, whose portrayal challenges those often constructed by and seen in the West.
Heir Apparent brings into the ICA’s collection an emerging artist who belongs to a generation of artists known for reinvigorating figurative painting and drawing through pointed examinations of race and representation. As a major work on paper, it expands the museum’s modest drawing collection, while also sharing themes of family, selfhood, and race with the work of Robert Pruitt, Henry Taylor, and Lorna Simpson.
2019.02
Working across mediums of painting, sculpture, drawing, and installation, Dominican-American artist Firelei Báez delves into the fluid identities and historical narratives of the Atlantic Basin. She draws on the disciplines of anthropology, geography, folklore, fantasy, science fiction, and social history to unsettle categories of race, gender, and nationality in her work.
In Man Without a Country (aka anthropophagist wading in the Artibonite River), Báez uses two hundred and twenty-five pages sourced from late nineteenth-century texts on the history of Hispaniola—the Caribbean island that is divided between the Dominican Republic and Haiti—as supports for her hand-drawn illustrations. Her drawings depict chimeric organisms, femme figurations, and decorative embellishments, and introduce found media, such as maps of landscapes that are neither of Hispaniola nor of the Caribbean. The markings intervene across the text, fusing folkloric motifs with academic writing to offer new ways of reading history and culture, particularly of the Caribbean, African, and Latin American diasporas. Báez installs each page individually to form the wall-size installation, suggestive of island geographies and bodies of water, which viewers navigate according to their own trajectories. In resisting singular narratives in favor of multiple readings, Báez’s drawing and installation practice proposes an expansive understanding of place, heritage, and the circulation of knowledge between colonized and colonizer subjects, questioning the very possibility of bounded categories of identity.
800.20.02
Textile artist Billie Zangewa uses silk and found fabric to embroider portraits of herself, friends, family, and others in domestic interiors and urban cityscapes. Her subject matter centers on her own position and experiences as a Black African woman, touching on ideas of motherhood, femininity, and women’s labor. Drawing on a medium traditionally associated with women’s labor and with techniques learned from the women in her family, Zangewa reflects: “I wanted to use this dismissed cultural thing to speak against patriarchy by creating powerful images about the importance of another dismissed thing, domesticity and the ordinary but important aspects of women’s daily life and work in and around the home.”
With Self-Care Sunday, Zangewa creates a stitched fabric scene of a Black woman protagonist at home. Composed of irregular silk samples, her character wears a towel and appears to be gazing at her freshly manicured nails. She sits at a dresser covered with various bottles of nail polish, as well as a coffee mug and a bottle of sparkling mineral water. Quotidian scenes are a primary focus for Zangewa, whose recent work recasts the gendered labor of homemaking as a political act for Black mothers in a white supremacist culture. Fragments cut from the canvas and edges purposefully left unhemmed suggest the undervaluation of care work and, in particular, Black women’s labor in a patriarchal society. The play of finished and unfinished components also contributes to the quality of storytelling in her works. Zangewa wields each of these technical devices to emphasize healing and re-creation, particularly in the recovery of feminine self-expression. “Society teaches us as women to be ashamed about ourselves, to feel self-loathing,” explains the artist. “I’m reclaiming my identity, my feminine power, and my significance in society at large.”
Artist, filmmaker, and writer Renée Green is known for her densely layered artworks, from room-filling multimedia installations and essay films to sound-based works and photographs. Green’s restless approach is informed by what has been referred to as a “methodology of citation,” bringing her work into conversation with an ever-expanding group of artists, writers, architects, and more, as a way to situate her own life and experiences. In 2007, Green began making colorful hanging banners emblazoned with expressive designs, poetic phrases, and evocative names of people based on the visual language of lamppost advertisements. These Space Poems, as she calls them, are a way of organizing her thought processes at a given moment, combining her wide-ranging intellectual pursuits and patterns of associative thinking with her interest in printmaking, design, typography, and a conceptual approach to space.
The first in this series, as well as the most varied in its visual lexicon, Space Poem #1 cites cultural icons, such as musician Alice Coltrane and writer Octavia E. Butler; references artist On Kawara’s telegrammatic, text-based series I Am Still Alive; echoes political phrases, such as Human Shields or No Niche in the Megastore; and includes multiple references to Free Agent Media. Several of the banners memorialize people close to Green: the late New York gallerist Pat Hearn for instance, who attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and was an early exhibitor of Green’s work, and writer and editor Joe Wood Jr., Green’s friend who in 1999 went missing while hiking and birdwatching on Mount Rainier. Offering a diverse array of ideas with no prescribed order of display, Space Poem #1 comprises many of the hallmarks of Green’s expansive, multidisciplinary practice: it is a capacious consideration of language and color that transforms the viewer’s experience of architectural space.
Berlin-based artist Robin Rhode’s practice is multidisciplinary and spans photography, sculpture, installation, performance, and conceptual art. Rhode, whose formative years coincided with the postapartheid era in South Africa, has long been interested in the relationship between street and youth cultures and public art forms, particularly as an arena for cultivating individual and community agency. He is best known for serial photographic works or stop-motion animations that capture participants physically interacting with his colorful, geometric murals at various points in their illustrated formation. These works articulate the artist’s interest in the mingling of play and performance across perceived divisions of high and low art. “We use humor as a mode of survival,” explains Rhode, “and we use play as a means to destabilize various dominant structures.”
For decades, Rhode has explored ideas of play and popular culture in urban environments. Car on Bricks recalls one of the recurring forms in Rhode’s murals—everyday vehicles—through an instruction-based artwork that comprises a drawing of a car on a gallery wall with locally-sourced bricks standing in for the wheels, a tongue-in-cheek reference, perhaps, to structural immobility and arrested movement. Like other works in his signature style, Car on Bricks achieves its animating quality through the style of the drawing itself (the artist instructs broad strokes to mimic tire marks on asphalt, or a speeding car across a landscape), as well as an engagement with the wall. With its sense of narrative potential, this work invites viewers to engage imaginatively with the scene and the museum space.