An icon of contemporary art, Yayoi Kusama has interwoven ideas of pop art, minimalism, and psychedelia throughout her work in paintings, performances, room-size presentations, outdoor sculptural installations, literary works, films, design, and architectural interventions. Kusama came to New York City from Japan in 1957, joined the downtown avant-garde art community, and developed a style that embraced repetitive mark-making and organic patterns and forms on canvas, ultimately expanding to environmental creations after 1962. Her first mirrored environment, entitled Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field (1965), signaled a commitment to materially and socially immersive work as her traditional studio practice slowed in favor of protest events, performances, and happenings. Uniquely, her art-making broadens and evolves in tandem with the cultural, political, and visual revolutions of the psychedelic sixties. She returned to Japan in 1973 and for the next 25 years focused on writing and publishing poems and novels. In 2000, Kusama constructed Fireflies on the Water, her first darkened infinity room, and in 2013 she premiered LOVE IS CALLING in Japan.

LOVE IS CALLING is one of Kusama’s most immersive, kaleidoscopic environments and represents the culmination of her artistic achievements. It exemplifies the breadth of the artists’ visual vocabulary—from her signature polka dots and soft sculptures to brilliant colors, the spoken word, and most importantly, endless reflections and the illusion of space. It is composed of a darkened, mirrored room illuminated by inflatable, tentacle-like forms—covered in the artist’s characteristic polka dots—that extend from the floor and ceiling, gradually changing colors. A sound recording of Kusama reciting a love poem in Japanese plays continuously. Written by the artist, the poem’s title translates to Residing in a Castle of Shed Tears in English. Exploring enduring themes including life and death, the poem poignantly expresses Kusama’s hope to spread a universal message of love through her art.

The largest of the 20 existing infinity rooms, LOVE IS CALLING is the first infinity room held in the permanent collection of a New England museum. In 1966, the ICA exhibited an Infinity Mirror Room, now titled Endless Love Show, in the exhibition Multiplicity, and the museum also owns a 1953 drawing by the artist.

Simone Leigh’s work in sculpture, video, installation, and social practice addresses tensions of visibility and agency for Black women. As a sculptor trained in complex techniques—such as salt-fired stoneware and lost-wax casting—Leigh works predominantly in ceramics, drawing on vernacular traditions of the American South, Caribbean, and African continent. Her work harnesses what she calls a “creolization of forms,” combining a variety of references from the architectonic forms of western Africa to the ceramic art of so-called face jugs, which were produced by Black artisans in Edgefield County, South Carolina, roughly between the late 1850s and the 1880s.

To realize large-scale sculptures such as Cupboard IX, Leigh handworks raw material at life-size scale, fusing elements of the body with domestic tools such as jugs or pots. The figure in Cupboard IX—a faceless head and detailed torso with outstretched arms, posed in a gesture of care or address to the viewer—sits atop a steel support covered by raffia (a fiber harvested from raffia palm trees that Leigh cuts by hand). This raffia skirt and its voluminous structure riffs on notions of femininity, motherhood, and fashion, as well as gathering spaces or dwellings. With these numerous formal and historical references, Leigh, who names Black women and femmes as her audience, invests her work in what she sees as “a tradition of thinking about the status of women by associating the body with the idea of a dwelling, refuge, container, tool, even a loophole of retreat.”

2020.01

Los Angeles-based artist Carolina Caycedo’s interdisciplinary work questions the nature of asymmetrical power relations, dispossession, the extraction of resources, and environmental justice. Begun in 2012, Be Dammed is a series that examines the wide-reaching impacts of dams built along waterways, particularly those in Latin American countries such as Brazil or Colombia (where Caycedo was raised and frequently returns). Be Dammed takes several forms—sourced from the workshops and collective actions that she refers to as “geochoreographies,” to installations of sculpture, video, or handmade books—many of which incorporate Indigenous forms of knowledge.

One component of Be Dammed is a series of hanging sculptures titled Cosmotarrayas that are assembled with handmade fishing nets and other objects collected during the artist’s field research in different riverine communities. “Cosmotarraya” combines the words “cosmos” and “atarraya” (Spanish for casting net to form a compound that conveys the centrality of the net in the life of those who fish. Each Cosmotarraya is linked to specific people, rivers, traditions, and cultures. Likewise, each net is made to the thickness of an individual fisherperson’s fingers. The material qualities of the fishing net—they are porous, malleable, handmade, and embody ancestral knowledge—offer a potent counterpoint to the brute-force infrastructure of dams, which dispossess people of their homes, threaten their way of life, and disrupt the natural flow of waterways.

For Currents, Fire and Blood, one component of the Cosmotarrayas series, Caycedo combined two nets to make a single, large-scale work. The two colorful nets each function as a canvas for Caycedo’s embroidery. One net is illustrated with symbols used in cartography to depict water currents, and the other depicts a hand with drops of blood on its palm and flames coming from its fingertips. Through this evocative symbolism, the artist considers Currents, Fire and Blood “a call to action” in the struggle for environmental justice. Like other of the Cosmotarrayas, Currents, Fire and Blood embodies the continued resistance to corporations and governments seeking to control the flow of water and works to create visual narratives that counter the supposed neutrality of dams.

800.20.01

Based in Roxbury, Massachusetts, Lavaughan Jenkins builds his human figures by layering oil paint over an armature of wire, molding paste, and foam. His work can be seen as part of the reinvigoration of figurative painting in recent years, where issues of identity and representation have underpinned formal exploration.

Jenkins describes his works as “three-dimensional paintings,” and he is centrally invested in the effects of color and light. He continuously reworks his surfaces, adding and scraping paint until his figures emerge. His figures assume a range of poses and often lack certain features that typically define the human form, resulting in distinctive emotional and psychological registers. Missing arms, the standing figure in Untitled (2018), appears to be rendered mute or even emasculated. Kneeling with upturned hands in Untitled (2019), the figure evokes humility, supplication, or spiritual openness. Jenkins’s engagement in gesture as a form of nonverbal communication, combined with his abstract treatment of surface, distinguishes his approach. While swirling, bright colors—often influenced by the artist’s study of high fashion—cover most of the surface, the figures’ heads and hands are emphatically black. Jenkins combines a roughness of form and paint application with the delicacy of color built up slowly over time.

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 these acquisitions mark the 2019 iteration of the exhibition and prize. Jenkins’s works offer unique approaches to figurative painting and portraiture, two strengths of the ICA’s permanent collection. Furthermore, this acquisition bolsters the institution’s commitments to racial diversity, to collecting works by artists of color, and to representing individuals of color through artworks.

Based in Roxbury, Massachusetts, Lavaughan Jenkins builds his human figures by layering oil paint over an armature of wire, molding paste, and foam. His work can be seen as part of the reinvigoration of figurative painting in recent years, where issues of identity and representation have underpinned formal exploration.

Jenkins describes his works as “three-dimensional paintings,” and he is centrally invested in the effects of color and light. He continuously reworks his surfaces, adding and scraping paint until his figures emerge. His figures assume a range of poses and often lack certain features that typically define the human form, resulting in distinctive emotional and psychological registers. Missing arms, the standing figure in Untitled (2018), appears to be rendered mute or even emasculated. Kneeling with upturned hands in Untitled (2019), the figure evokes humility, supplication, or spiritual openness. Jenkins’s engagement in gesture as a form of nonverbal communication, combined with his abstract treatment of surface, distinguishes his approach. While swirling, bright colors—often influenced by the artist’s study of high fashion—cover most of the surface, the figures’ heads and hands are emphatically black. Jenkins combines a roughness of form and paint application with the delicacy of color built up slowly over time.

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 these acquisitions mark the 2019 iteration of the exhibition and prize. Jenkins’s works offer unique approaches to figurative painting and portraiture, two strengths of the ICA’s permanent collection. Furthermore, this acquisition bolsters the institution’s commitments to racial diversity, to collecting works by artists of color, and to representing individuals of color through artworks.

Tracey Emin draws inspiration from candid details of her personal life for works ranging from drawings and sculptures to tapestries and needlework. Emin rose to prominence in the 1990s as a member of the so-called Young British Artists. Her 1998 work My Bed, is widely considered to be one of the groups defining works.

Among her most iconic works, Emin’s wall-mounted neons reimagine handwritten, evocative texts as luminous drawings in space. She Lay down Deep Beneath The Sea was first presented in an exhibition of the same name in Margate, England, the seaside town where Emin grew up that has provided source material for many of her well-known works. Inspired by the neon signage of her childhood in Margate, Emin began working with neon lights in the 1990s. She employs the industrial medium to convey deeply personal ruminations on the subject of love and the symbolism of language. The phrase, “She lay down deep beneath the sea,” calls to mind an intimate, confessional note that conveys intense feeling. In Emin’s signature scrawl, and lit in a glowing blue, the work and phrase take on an otherworldly quality. The written word is central to all of Emin’s creative output. “Writing is my friend and companion,” says Emin, “and where my thoughts go.” The neons transform Emin’s words into images, and language into an illuminated sculptural form that resonates as both deeply personal and universally felt.

She Lay down Deep Beneath The Sea introduces an important artist to the collection who has made significant contributions to the history of postwar contemporary art. Emin’s neon joins other text-based works in the collection by Jenny Holzer, Roni Horn, Sophie Calle, and Shannon Ebner.

Jessica Jackson Hutchins’s hybrid objects transform everyday life into art, creating sculptural installations, collages, paintings, and ceramics that evince the presence of human use. “Transformation, evidence of work, accidents, the time contained in the humanity of the objects,” says Hutchins, “all that stuff is crucial to get at what I’m trying to get at, which is ways of connecting to the world, ways of knowing ourselves through the things we encounter.”

A key early work, and one of Hutchins’s first major sculptures to incorporate her own ceramics, Convivium combines slumping, hand-worked ceramic vessels and a sinuous papier-mâché armature on top of a kitchen table. The organic papier-mâché form—adorned with a collage of flower imagery that echoes the tablecloth’s embroidery—holds Hutchins’s ceramics in a delicate balance. The work’s title refers to a Roman feast modeled off an Etruscan custom, which itself was a version of the Greek symposium. The convivium emphasized living together and was embedded in social and familial structures. It differed from earlier Greek prototypes in marked ways, for instance, by including women citizens. Hutchins is deeply invested in mythologizing the everyday, and given the near-ubiquitous presence of ceramics in everyday life in ancient Greece and Rome, she says that her use of the medium gives her a type of access to those ancient cultural traditions. Importantly, working with ceramics allows Hutchins to think about vases, cups, and other vessels as simultaneously both sculptures and objects of common use, productively blurring the line between life and art. Similarly, the family’s kitchen table is reimagined as a pedestal, still charged with sentiment and marked from daily use. A unique assembly of handmade and found objects, Convivium commemorates the central role of ritual in everyday life.

Hutchins had her first solo museum presentation at the ICA in 2011. Building on the collection’s strength in diverse forms of craft, Convivium joins works by Liz Larner and Ron Nagle as part of a developing interest in works made by key artists working with ceramics.

Working at the intersection of sculpture and video, New York-based artist Josh Kline raises salient questions about the impact of technological innovations on human bodies, while confronting issues of labor, corporate culture, and the politics of privilege and control. Saving Money with Subcontractors (FedEx Worker’s Head) is part of a group of sculptures in which 3-D printed body parts of FedEx workers are displayed in a FedEx box filled with packing peanuts.

In 2014, Kline began making 3-D scans with a DSLR (digital single-lens reflex) camera, a photographic process in which hundreds of images are taken of an individual subject from different perspectives. These images are then composited and 3-D printed. Kline took FedEx delivery drivers as a subject—specifically the individuals who delivered regularly to his studio—with a critical interest in commenting on how FedEx employees, and other third-party contractors, are regularly denied full benefits. In Saving Money with Subcontractors, the worker’s disembodied head is 3-D printed three times, once according to his real-life appearance, and twice more with his features overprinted with FedEx logos, bar codes, and documents. They rest on a bed of cast urethane foam packing peanuts also formed from the driver’s head, lending the work a surreal quality that also reads as a portrait of contemporary corporate subjugation. According to Kline, the technique of compositing fragments resonates with how companies and government agencies collect information about people: “Fractured aspects of our lives accumulating in different databases, creating subtly different portraits.”

Kline’s Saving Money with Subcontractors and Frank Benson’s Juliana (2014–15)—both included in the 2018 exhibition Art in the Age of the Internet—bolster the museum’s strong holdings in sculpture, and represent new technological developments in the medium through 3-D scanning and printing.

2019.06

Josiah McElheny is known for sculptural installations of handmade glass objects in precisely designed vitrines, pedestals, or wall units. They are often accompanied by explanatory texts, documentation, or titles that reflect on the origins of traditional craft and design, their role in the history of modern aesthetics, and the ideologies these aesthetics project.

Included in the major exhibition Josiah McElheny: Some Pictures of the Infinite at the ICA in 2012, Halo after Botticelli features a wall-mounted, circular glass object juxtaposed with a framed reproduction of a portion of Sandro Botticelli’s painting Virgin and Child with an Angel (1470–74). A three-dimensional reimagining of the diaphanous halo that appears atop the Virgin Mary’s head in Botticelli’s painting, the handmade glass object is studded with a network of gold stars that refracts light against the wall, suggesting the heavenly matter of the halo, which itself refracts celestial power in order to identify a figure of divine influence. As a sculptural translation of Renaissance iconography, Halo after Botticelli also acknowledges the genealogies of influence within the history of Western art.

Halo after Botticelli represents an important early strain of McElheny’s work, a strong complement to another of his works in the ICA collection, the mirrored sculptural tableau Czech Modernism Mirrored and Reflected Infinitely (2005).

2019.01

Michelle Grabner’s work unfolds across multiple platforms and in various media, united by a feminist politics that often focuses on domestic items as a means of generating new models of abstraction. A committed teacher, curator, and writer, as an artist she is well-known for her painted abstractions based on such everyday textiles as tablecloths, bed linens, and baby blankets.

Since 2015, she has developed a new body of bronze sculptures based on casts of the hand-crocheted and knitted blankets that she uses as templates for her abstract paintings. To create these works, Grabner makes wax positives of the blankets, and then pours molten bronze into the molds, burning out both the fabric and wax, thereby sacrificing the original textile. Untitled features a small, square blanket that drapes elegantly between two points, recalling the textile’s original soft, pliable form, which is here remade to stand freely. Its scale relates to the human body, and by extension to the original comfort, warmth, and care provided by the blanket. The play between hard and soft, metal and textile, practical handicraft and art object, all point to how subtly Grabner inflects her work with feminist politics, locating the heroic within the quotidian. In their sophisticated layering of meanings, Grabner’s works invite a different kind of attention to traditional and craft-based artistic practices, themselves often passed down within families.

This work joins other sculptures in the ICA’s collection by artists such as Nari Ward, Mark Dion, and Mona Hatoum, which employ found objects and domestic items. It also speaks to the ICA’s collection of textile-based sculpture by artists such as Josh Faught, Sheila Hicks, and Faith Wilding.

2019.04