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Through her sculptural work, Taylor Davis explores the relationship between object and viewer through precise manipulations of form. Her work, often made of wood and industrial materials, investigates issues of orientation, space, identity, and perception. Taylor Davis is a long-time and critically acclaimed member of the Boston arts community and has taught at Massachusetts College of Art and Design since 1999.

In Untitled, 2001, Davis draws inspiration from vernacular objects and architecture. The work evokes such structures as a wooden pallet turned on its end, a garden gate, or a pen for livestock. Seen from a distance these associations compete with the sculpture’s abstract grid of horizontals and verticals, which oscillate in an optical play of positive and negative space. From a closer vantage the spare pine boards come alive with detail. The setting of screws marks a steady cadence while the wood grain swirls. The interior of the work contains a secret: mirrors line its frame on all four sides, opening up an internal landscape of seemingly infinite reflection, a field that appears to extend forever.

This work bolsters the ICA/Boston’s holdings of works by artists with connections to Boston and the museum’s exhibition program, and it also expands the museum’s holdings of sculptures that reference everyday objects by such artists as Mona Hatoum, Cornelia Parker, and Rachel Harrison.

2006.2

Louise Bourgeois has been creating poignant, cathartic work for more than seventy years, exploring sexuality, the human form, and traumatic events from her childhood. Janus is an evocatively corporeal object, formed out of sleekly polished, milky-hued porcelain. Bourgeois is well known for sculptural work in a variety of media, including marble, bronze, plaster, and fabric, but ceramic is a rarity in her oeuvre. After a period in the late 1950s when Bourgeois withdrew from the art world, in the 1960s she began experimenting with organic and biomorphic forms. She created six versions of Janus in 1968: five in bronze and one in porcelain. Each piece in this series is delicately suspended by a single wire, free to spin on its axis. Other hanging sculptures from this era include the amorphous painted bronze Fée Couturière, 1963, and the phallic latex-and-plaster sculpture Fillette, 1968, with which Bourgeois famously posed for her portrait by Robert Mapplethorpe in 1982. The title references the Roman god Janus, the god of gates, doorways, and beginnings and endings, who is often portrayed as having two heads facing in opposite directions. Indeed, the month of January, the beginning of each year, is named after this god. There is a sense of fragility and purity in Janus, with its smooth, clean form rendered in porcelain, in comparison to its companion pieces cast in the more fleshy bronze. A duality of meaning can often be found in Bourgeois’s work, with forms appearing at once male and female, abstract and representational, menacing and nurturing. In Janus, we see mirrored forms drooping in opposite directions from a central point, a blending of female and male anatomy that creates a disarming sculpture.

There are two versions of Janus in the ICA/Boston collection—one in porcelain and one in bronze—which enables the institution to represent a key early series by one of the most influential artists of the past century.

2009.2

At age eight, Kerry James Marshall moved with his family from Birmingham to the neighborhood of Watts in South Central Los Angeles. The environment of his upbringing had a profound impact on the subject matter of his work, which revisits the legacy of the Civil Rights era and the nation’s progress—or lack of progress—toward the goal of racial equality. As Marshall has stated: “You can’t be born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 and grow up in South Central near the Black Panthers headquarters, and not feel like you’ve got some kind of social responsibility. You can’t move to Watts in 1963 and not speak about it. That determined a lot of where my work was going to go.”

The five dinner plates in this set feature the texts “We Shall Overcome,” “Burn Baby Burn,” “By Any Means Necessary,” “Black Is Beautiful,” and “Black Power,” taken from a print series shown in Mementos, a 1998 solo exhibition of Marshall’s work organized by the Renaissance Society in Chicago, which traveled to the ICA/Boston, among other venues. The ceramic plates were produced as an edition to benefit the Renaissance Society. The affirmations they present are slogans popular during the 1960s Civil Rights movement, and they range in tone from peaceful to aggressive, reflecting the plurality of stances taken in the fight for equality in that era. In discussing the prints in his essay for the Mementos exhibition brochure, curator Hamza Walker considers them elegiacally, as “fallen monuments, tombstones even, to popular slogans which have lost their ability to galvanize the black community.” On benign, domestic plates, their revolutionary impact is perhaps further softened.

This edition, which was included in the 1999 ICA exhibition Collectors Collect Contemporary: 1990–99, builds on the museum’s interest in craft media, while introducing into the collection the work of an important contemporary practitioner, teacher, and voice.

2011.1

Though Glenn Ligon began his career as an abstract painter, after enrolling in the Whitney Independent Study Program in the mid-1980s he turned to more conceptual concerns. He is now known for using text and found images to introduce a broad range of references in his work.

Rückenfigur is an important neon piece that was included in the 2011 exhibition Glenn Ligon: America at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. It consists of a neon sign, painted black, installed on the floor. The title, literally “back figure,” is a German art-historical term for the Romantic device of depicting a subject from behind, often contemplating a grand landscape, as in the work of Caspar David Friedrich. Facing the same direction, the viewer can more readily identify with the subject’s experience. Ligon literalizes the title by placing the ostensible “front” of the neon sign against the floor, placing the viewer in the symbolic position of looking at the back of the vast and diverse landscape that is America.

A flagship work by Ligon, and his first to enter the ICA/Boston collection, Rückenfigur engages with questions of national and racial identity as well as the process of identification in a simple, rigorous way. It enters into dialogue with other text-based works in the collection, especially those that address the complexity of race, by such artists as Ellen Gallagher, Kerry James Marshall, and Lorna Simpson.

800.11.1

In a distinctive and powerful body of work, Charles LeDray has employed diverse sculptural languages with materials such as needle-stitched cloth, carved human bone, and hand-thrown ceramics. In an era of high-tech production values, LeDray insists on a painstakingly manual fidelity that lends an air of deeply felt experience to his work. His diminutive sculptures transport viewers to moments of shared personal and cultural history, from childhood games to festive occasions.

LeDray learned to sew at home and intuitively developing his sense of the sculptural possibilities of vernacular forms and working most often at a micro scale. His objects carved from human bone are exquisitely rendered, with astonishing precision, to sixteenths of an inch. He creates ceramic pots that are smaller than many people’s fingers, yet technically perfect and extraordinary in their diversity. At the same time, LeDray’s work is in no sense “naïve”; he has studied and absorbed the most sophisticated art of the classical, modern, and contemporary periods.

Untitled is an assemblage of denim like fabric patches that covers a form suggestive of the body of a child, perhaps taking refuge or playing hide-and-seek. Possessing a compelling magnetism, the unique floor sculpture displays LeDray’s rigorous and virtuosic handwork. The artist works on pieces in meticulous detail over weeks and years, without the help of studio assistants. His process and techniques of sewing and carving recall the visionary work of folk and outsider artists, and his commitment to everyday material is consistent with the broad interest in manual craft and the handmade in contemporary art.

2011.3

Over the past decade, Thomas Hirschhorn has become known for ephemeral constructions he calls “displays” rather than “installations.” Often overflowing their museum or gallery environments, these works resemble shanties, makeshift altars, or department stores gone awry. To build his displays, Hirschhorn employs low or untraditional art materials—cardboard, packing tape, aluminum foil, plastic, and plywood—which are then layered with all manner of text and image: hand-scrawled slogans, clippings from newspapers and magazines, stacks of philosophy and political science books. The result is an intense and immersive interplay of ideas made physical.

Wood-Chain VIII (Pisa Tower) is a more discrete work than Hirschhorn’s usual production—but it is just as difficult to classify. Neither sculpture, relief, nor painting, the work resembles a giant necklace supporting a pendant made of wood inscribed with burned-in figuration and detail. Hirschhorn’s signature mode is to juxtapose different, sometimes incongruous, types of symbolism, making intellectual and political leaps that create rough collisions. Wood-Chain VIII (Pisa Tower) links or “chains” together a conversation about architecture and globalization––its tower is an oversized version of a memento that might be bought at a tourist gift shop, its wooden chain a reference to the gaudy jewelry of hip-hop or mafia dons colloquially named “bling” (for the “bling-bling” sound of the cash register). The work speaks to the circulation of architectural signs along the trashy byways of touristic commerce—not without irony, given Hirschhorn’s use of patently un-bling burnt wood. Branded on the pendant’s base is the phrase “Utopia, Utopia, One World, One War, One Army, One Dress,” the title of Hirschhorn’s 2005 exhibition at the ICA/Boston, which denotes the artist’s longtime preoccupation with the dystopian conflicts of globalization.

This work, by an artist supported by the ICA with a major early exhibition, deepens and broadens the museum’s holdings in object-based or sculptural work, joining major sculptural works by Tara Donovan, Rachel Harrison, and Mona Hatoum.

2009.6

Damián Ortega is one of the most influential artists to emerge from the circle of contemporary artists working alongside Gabriel Orozco in Mexico City in the 1990s. His art exposes the underlying mechanisms and systems that make up familiar objects in the manmade and natural worlds. Ortega often disassembles and rearranges everyday objects in order to consider their elements, setting them out for scrutiny like a scientific diagram of the atoms in a molecule. His untraditional materials—tortillas, pennies, and used furniture—subvert traditional notions of sculpture.

Olympus references other works in Ortega’s oeuvre, such as the hanging installations of a disassembled Volkswagen Beetle (Cosmic Thing, 2003) and a grouping of hand tools (Controller of the Universe, 2007). In these installations, Ortega deconstructs a useful, familiar object—a common car and a toolkit—reinterpreting the way one can understand its parts and thus revealing a new relationship to the whole. In Olympus, Ortega takes apart a 35mm Olympus camera and suspends its component parts, secured within twenty-six clear plastic sheets, so that they appear to float in a row inside two cases. Ortega is fascinated by the study of vision and optics, and the relationships between seeing and technology. In Olympus, he deconstructs the mechanics of photography, stretching the camera’s zoom lens to absurd lengths as he tests the camera’s capacity for capturing an image from afar.

Olympus enhances the ICA/Boston’s growing collection of sculpture by important international artists, including Louise Bourgeois, Tara Donovan, Mona Hatoum, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Cornelia Parker.

2010.1

Jason Middlebrook works in sculpture, drawing, painting, and installation to image the clash between nature and the built environment. In California, where the artist was raised, this is called the suburban/wildlife interface: a trouble zone where wildfires regularly decimate neighborhoods and where you might see a coyote trotting down the street. In these edge scenarios, humankind encroaches on nature. Middlebrook’s drawings depict weedy, trash-strewn hillsides teeming with avian life. Roughhewn wooden planks, looking like construction castoffs, are embellished with paint and varnish and lean against the wall like surfboards or minimalist sculptures.

In Finding Square, Middlebrook moves away from quasi-narrative depictions of decaying landscapes and toward abstract modes. A roughly hewn empty wooden frame speaks more to roadside handicrafts (chainsaw animal sculptures) than to fine art accoutrements. The molding is painted with concentric, deep umber-red geometric borders of diminishing width that suggest pictorial recession. These nested borders are evocative of Frank Stella’s groundbreaking early painting, Sol LeWitt’s drawn and painted lines, and Josef Albers’s Homage to the Square series. The frame is, therefore, a ground for painting; with timber substituting for stretched canvas, the painting is also object. The found object is readymade by nature—or, rather, by our manipulation of it. The interior space remains empty, making the wall on which it hangs the “picture” on display. Other works in this series are planks of similarly roughhewn wood, painted to highlight the wood grain or time-demarcating rings.

The addition of Finding Square to the ICA/Boston’s collection augments the strong holdings in works that elegantly merge the conceptual with the highly crafted, such as those by Taylor Davis, Charles LeDray, Josiah McElheny, and many others.

2012.1

Josiah McElheny’s installations of handmade glass objects in precisely designed vitrines, pedestals, or wall units with explanatory texts, documentation, or titles entice us to reflect on the origins of this traditional craft, the history of aesthetics it embodies, and the ideologies these aesthetics project. The product of an ancient technology that defies scientific classification as liquid or solid, glass is an amorphous medium ideally suited to McElheny’s presentation of classic stylistic forms as suspensions of unsettled ideals. Through them, seemingly absolute notions such as perfection, infinity, self-reflection, and utopia are recast as malleable artifacts subject to the forces of history and culture, the advances of art and science, and the contemporary context of their display.

In Czech Modernism Mirrored and Reflected Infinitely, a line of eight polished decanters is viewed through a sheet of one-way glass that reflects the enfilade in what appears to be endless recession into a horizon-less darkness beyond the limits of our vision. A close look at the surface of each object reveals its own reflection, which itself contains another, like a Russian nesting doll. This vacuum of containers-within-containers completely bereft of our own reflection is a vision of modernism devoid of the human element. The seamless landscape of shining forms entrances our senses but denies our presence, hinting at the dangers of infinite absolutes.

Striking for its craftsmanship and conceptual rigor, this perceptually stimulating piece provides a counterpoint to other sculptural works in the ICA/Boston’s permanent collection, such as Taylor Davis’s finely fabricated Untitled, 2001, and Mona Hatoum’s handworked Pom Pom City, 2002.

2006.4

Françoise Grossen’s work is central to the wave of innovations in fiber art that took place during the second half of the twentieth century. In describing her artistic development, Grossen summarizes two of the most important ways in which artists transformed fiber in the late 1960s: “First we broke with the rectangle, then we broke with the wall.” By exploring the sheer weight of rope and its response to gravity, Grossen aligned her work with broader artistic debates taking place in New York in the 1960s and ’70s.

Inchworm’s insistent horizontality is related to avant-garde dance, which during this period was moving from the stage to the floor, as well as to contemporaneous installations of scattered scraps of industrial felt and thread. While experimenting with scale, orientation, and composition, Grossen maintained two constants: her medium and her process. She has worked almost exclusively in rope, knotting and braiding it throughout her career; rather than inhibiting her, this self-imposed limitation has facilitated her sustained contemplation of rope’s material properties.

Inchworm is a classic example of fiber art, a movement the ICA/Boston has sought to bring to critical attention and recognition, in part through the major exhibition Fiber: Sculpture 1960—present (2014), and it joins other works in fiber in the collection, such as Josh Faught’s Untitled, 2009, and Faith Wilding’s Crocheted Environment, 1972/2005.

2015.05