get tickets

Advance tickets are now available for visits through September 1. Book now

For the last fifty years, Sheila Hicks has been one of the foremost artists working in the medium of fiber. Alongside notable contemporaries such as Magdalena Abakanowicz, Lenore Tawney, and Claire Zeisler, Hicks moved fiber from the loom into the realms of sculpture and architecture. The 1960s and ’70s—when much of this groundbreaking work gained notice—saw the divisions between art and craft eroded by experimentation with nontraditional sculptural materials. Parallel developments occurred in the contemporary art world as artists such as Eva Hesse and Robert Morris began to use fiber in their process-based work. Hicks, now in her eighties, continues to be a renegade sculptor devoted to fiber, or as she often calls her medium, “the linear pliable element.”

Banisteriopsis II is a freestanding sculpture made of compacted linen, gathered and wrapped (most closely resembling a leek or ponytail) to generate endlessly repeatable elements. It was created in 2010 and combined with an earlier work from the Banisteriopsis series (in the collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts) for Hicks’s fifty-year-career survey. The re-creation and expansion of this work is in-line with Hicks’s working process. Hicks’s work in fiber was pioneering in its reliance on serial forms and the specificity of site. She often changed her sculpture according to the exhibition context, and even destroyed older artworks by reusing elements for entirely new sculptures. The deployment of serial forms was unprecedented in fiber work, but entirely in keeping with sculptural movements of the 1960s, minimalism in particular. The Banisteriopsis series is among the most important in Hicks’s oeuvre, not only for its form but its use of vivid yellow. Hicks was attempting to make a new kind of sculpture in fiber, and her groundbreaking move to pile fiber is recognized by art historians as one of the most important transformations of the new movement in fiber art.

Banisteriopsis II is an exceptional addition of fiber art to the museum’s collection and was featured in the ICA/Boston’s 2014–15 exhibition Fiber: Sculpture 1960–Present. It is a major work by this critically important, yet under-recognized artist. The relation to works by Mona Hatoum, Tara Donovan, and Faith Wilding illustrates a way of making sculpture far outside the conventional trajectories of sculpture’s histories.

2012.26

Though she works in a variety of mediums, from painting and drawing to light-projection and video, Kara Walker is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes. A visual language introduced at her New York debut at the Drawing Center in 1994, the silhouette has become Walker’s signature means of interrogating the highly fraught histories of slavery, racism, and gender discrimination in the United States.

The Nigger Huck Finn … was commissioned for the 2010 exhibition Huckleberry Finn at CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art in San Francisco, the final in a trilogy of exhibitions based on canonical American novels. Huckleberry Finn revisits Mark Twain’s investigation of racial tensions in America through an extensive range of materials, including historical artifacts, documents, silent film footage, existing works, and fourteen new commissions that responded directly to the novel. Walker’s response is a sweeping cut-paper wall installation composed of silhouetted figures set on a light brown ground line painted directly on the wall, punctuated by seven framed gouaches. In preparing for the exhibition, Walker reread Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, coming away from it, as she has said, with “a better understanding of Huck, because he’s an abused child and a seeker of freedom.” Using this reading as a point of departure, The Nigger Huck Finn … depicts repeated Huck Finn–like characters—alongside caricatures of Jim and Pap, as well as Topsy from Uncle Tom’s Cabin—in a series of scenes adapted imaginatively by Walker to convey a heightened sense of violence and sexuality.

The Nigger Huck Finn … is unusual within Walker’s body of work, as it combines cut-paper silhouettes, wall paint, and framed works on paper, making it a major addition to the ICA/Boston’s collection. It joins works by Kerry James Marshall and Lorna Simpson that also engage with the complex and pressing issues of race and identity through the distinctive vision of contemporary art.

2015.09

In the 1960s, a decade known for the ascension of minimalism, postminimalism, and conceptualism in sculpture, Eva Hesse was one of the most significant artists working in New York. Through the mid-to-late ’60s, Hesse used materials such as cord and rope, nets, plaster, steel, wood, papier-mâché, latex, rubber, and fiberglass to create forms that derived their structure from repetition and geometry but were executed with intuitive sensitivity. She made many important formal decisions in response to chance, gravity, randomness, and the circumstances of gallery architecture. Hesse created richly organic works that locate human tendencies, contradiction, and a dose of the surreal within the rigor of process-based conceptualism.

Ennead is composed of a thick, rectangular board gridded with three-dimensional papier-mâché hemispheres, with a single dyed string hanging from the center of each dome. The orderly, formulaic application of the threads devolves into an increasingly chaotic composition as they accumulate and tangle toward the floor. A few strands are affixed to the adjacent wall, cordoning off a wedge of space that becomes part of the sculpture itself. This gesture also draws the viewer’s attention to the corner of the gallery, activating this normally overlooked area. Additional material hangs to touch the floor, thus uniting three planes. “Ennead” means a group of nine, in this case referring to the nine points from which the strings extend.

Ennead is an important piece in the ICA/Boston’s collection of fiber works, including pieces by artists such as Françoise Grossen, Sheila Hicks, and Faith Wilding. Furthermore, Hesse’s work provides the foundation for the “loaded” material choices and conceptual relationship to the gallery’s architecture that inform works by younger artists as diverse as Taylor Davis, Tara Donovan, and Mona Hatoum, all of whom were influenced by Hesse and her cohort.

2015.15

Eva Hesse was one of the most important artists working in New York in the 1960s, until her untimely death in 1970. In constant dialogue with that decade’s most influential minimalist, postminimalist, and conceptual artists—including Mel Bochner, Dan Graham, Sol LeWitt, Robert Smithson, and Ruth Vollmer—Hesse’s work reflected that circle’s emphasis on rigorously structured sculptural process and fabrication techniques, but also exemplified and in many cases influenced the group’s more corporeal, psychologically loaded, and, to use the critic Lucy Lippard’s term, eccentric strains that ran through postminimalism and process art, and continue to resonate in contemporary sculpture today.

Part of Hesse’s prodigious experimental art making includes the Accession series, created from 1967 to 1968, four iterations of which are extant today. With this series, Hesse created one of the decade’s most radical and psychologically resonant bodies of work based on the primary form of the cube. In each sculpture, rubber tubing is threaded through perforations in the walls of a cube open at the top. The rigidity and aggressively protective exterior walls are subverted by the formal and material complexity of the rubber tubing, with its slick surface, hollow interior, and biomorphic behavior. The smallest in the series, Accession IV has a dense interior space that forcefully underscores the differences between outside and inside, steel and rubber. One of Hesse’s best-known forms, it is an exemplar of postminimalist sculpture, fusing repetition, geometry, and industrial materials with media and processes that suggest the complexity of human experience and the psychically loaded spaces of our built environment.

Accession IV is an important representation of minimalism and conceptualism within the ICA/Boston collection. Hesse’s work provides the foundations for the “loaded” material choices and conceptual relationship to the gallery’s architecture (why a work sits on the floor instead of a pedestal, for instance) in works by younger artists as diverse as Taylor Davis, Tara Donovan, and Mona Hatoum, all of whom have responded to Hesse’s influence and the art history it represents.

2015.14

The sculptural installations of Carol Bove draw together found and made objects into thoughtfully constructed assemblages that explore both historical misapprehensions and modernist modes of display.

Bove has long addressed the social dynamics of the late 1960s and early ’70s through the presentation of objects, looking at, as she says, “the tiniest details to think about history and to think about history to reflect on the present moment.” She began by drawing portraits of women who appeared in issues of Playboy from 1966 to 1972, a period when she observed a “calculated ambivalence” in the women being photographed. Bove’s engagement with the era resulted in sculptural arrangements of its cultural artifacts; she employed furniture such as Knoll tables as settings for books, magazines, and objects that suggestively, albeit indeterminately, tie together various histories. Bove often put wall-mounted shelving units such as those designed by George Nelson and Poul Cadovius to similar ends. Innerspace Bullshit is one such wall-mounted shelf with an arrangement of books, objects, and ephemera, including Gregory Battcock’s conceptual art anthology Idea Art (1973), a small-press magazine called Grope, a collection of Michael McClure’s poetry called Ghost Tantras (1964), a rock from Marfa, and a pseudo-cubist sculpture. Bove’s meticulous arrangement further encodes the objects to project the aura of the ’60s, both the decade’s utopian impulses and its failures, creating a system through which history can be reevaluated in the present.

Bove’s shelf-based arrangements of books and objects are an early signature trademark of what has developed into a unique and important sculptural practice. Innerspace Bullshit contains all the hallmarks of this practice and points to Bove’s evolution, providing a crucial link between her early drawings and her more recent expansive installations. This work forms part of the ICA/Boston’s diverse holdings in contemporary sculpture, especially works that reference the practice and legacy of integrating found elements, also seen in the works of Taylor Davis, Rachel Harrison, and Roni Horn.

2015.26

Sculptor, feminist, and influential artist Louise Bourgeois has produced a distinctive oeuvre over her seventy-year career, combining abstraction and figuration and a wide array of media to explore such themes as the body, trauma, and sexuality.

One of several major sculptures by Bourgeois in the ICA/Boston collection, Untitled is one of the artist’s early carved and painted-wood totemic sculptures, which she refers to as “personages.” Starkly vertical, thin, and luminescent, Untitled is an abstract, almost tusklike form that suggests the fragility of the upright human figure. The influence of the surrealists on Bourgeois is apparent in this work, in which the tension between the familiar and unfamiliar becomes paramount as the figurative adopts a new form.

Since introducing Bourgeois to Boston audiences in a 1953 group exhibition, the ICA has featured her work in a number of exhibitions, including the major 2007–08 solo show Bourgeois in Boston. This work joins the ICA’s rich collection of sculptures by Bourgeois and adds to the holdings of figurative sculptures by such artists as Rachel Harrison, Juan Muñoz, and Kiki Smith.

2015.10

Faith Wilding is a multidisciplinary artist whose works often focus on the sociopolitical history of the body. Born in Paraguay, Wilding emigrated to the United States in 1961. Her life and work have been influenced by the political and cultural movements of the 1960s and ’70s. Frequently discussed in relation to feminist art, Wilding’s sculptures can also be seen as an exploration of the expanded possibilities of drawing through her deployment of linear thread.

Crocheted Environment is a sculptural installation referred to as “womb room.” This piece was originally part of the 1972 exhibition Womanhouse, organized by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, co-founders of the California Institute of the Arts Feminist Art Program. The exhibition was staged in an abandoned mansion in Hollywood and one of the rooms included Wilding’s Crocheted Environment. At the ICA/Boston, the viewer experiences this piece in a small chamber with black walls. Suspended from the ceiling and enveloping the space is a large crocheted, weblike composition. The threads are simultaneously dense and open. Viewers may stand or sit in this enclosure, suggesting contradictory sensations of security, entrapment, serenity, and danger. About this work, the artist says: “Our female ancestors first build themselves and their families round-shaped shelters. These were protective environments, often woven out of grasses, braches, or weeds. I think of my environment as linked in form and feeling with those primitive womb-shelters, but with the added freedom of not being functional.”

Crocheted Environment is an important installation in the ICA’s collection of fiber works, including pieces by artists such as Eva Hesse, Françoise Grossen, and Sheila Hicks, and marks the museum’s commitment to examining the relationships between craft-based media and contemporary art.

2012.20

Californian artist Kaari Upson uses found objects and narratives as starting points for her work. Upson is interested in issues of identity, familiarity, and domesticity. In 2007, she initiated the long-term Larry Project that involved the collection and rearrangement of abandoned objects, photographs, and personal ephemera she discovered at a burned-down house in her neighborhood. The project was an intimate and at times manic investigation into the life of a stranger, resulting in a large body of work that included video, drawings, paintings, sculptures, and performances.

For her 2011 installation at the Overduin and Kite gallery in Los Angeles, Upson recreated a cast figure of Larry, which she subsequently burned in a room-sized box. For this same exhibition, Upson presented a series of charcoal tablets that preserved her bodily motions. To produce these works, she mixed charcoal dust with resin and performed movements over flexible metal sheets, such as dragging, contracting, and pouring. The sheets were altered by the corporeal weight of the artist, capturing her gestural actions. In Charcoal Tablet 6, the artist pressed her fist into the material, transcribing the sexual act of fisting and creating a work that blurs the lines of performance, sculpture, and painting.

Upson’s Charcoal Tablet 6 enriches the ICA/Boston’s collection of works by artists, such as Mona Hatoum and Sophie Calle, who explore the intersection of sculpture and performance to examine issues of trust and intimacy.

800.13.06

Keith Sonnier’s work debuted in Lucy Lippard’s famous 1966 exhibition Eccentric Abstraction, a pointed response to the end-game strategies of minimalist sculpture. Minimalism’s geometric, machine-made, and unified forms were countered by Sonnier and other so-called postminimalist artists working in downtown New York in the late 1960s—including Eva Hesse, Barry Le Va, Richard Tuttle, and Jackie Winsor—with diffuse forms, a process-oriented approach, and performative elements. Though Sonnier studied painting, early on he moved into three dimensions, the use of neon, and the integration of movement in the form of video art and performance.

Depose II is one of Sonnier’s rare inflatable sculptures. Using the unlikely combination of neon lighting, metal, and nylon sailcloth, Sonnier balances a readymade aesthetic with painted geometric elements. The metal forms that pinch the inflatable are based on extruded found material, such as the rebar commonly used to build cement structures. The gestural neon shapes derive from the artist’s drawings. The inflatable assumes an anthropomorphic form that, when filled with air from the blower, suggests a living being. Initially a limp sack, the sculpture must breathe and expand to assume its final form. The title references the act of being deposed, wherein a person is required to give oral out-of-court testimony. The person being deposed is often asked exceedingly personal questions. Perhaps the pinched or pressed inflatable alludes to the feeling of duress that might arise from having to tell the truth in a compromising situation.

Depose II is the first work by Sonnier to enter the ICA/Boston collection. It is a unique postminimalist sculpture that integrates fabric, a medium the ICA collects and exhibits in depth. It joins a number of important sculptures made of repurposed materials by such artists as Tara Donovan and Rachel Harrison.

2013.12

In 1969, Robert Rohm’s manila rope reliefs were included in three important group exhibitions: Lucy Lippard’s 557, 087 at the World’s Fair Pavilion in Seattle; Marcia Tucker and James Monte’s Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and String and Rope at the Sidney Janis Gallery, New York. These three presentations defined the emerging movements of conceptual art, process art, and fiber art, respectively. In his rope reliefs, Rohm united the three currents by giving equal weight to issues of idea, process, and material. Knotted into grid shapes and darkened with a brown, oil-based wood stain, these netlike structures were nailed directly onto the gallery walls. Rohm then performed a sequence of simple, minimal interventions that drastically altered the appearance of the original grids.

Rohm divided his rope sculptures into three categories based on the gestures he executed. He made the first set by stretching or relaxing the rope; the second, by cutting it; and the third, by piling it. Gravity is the common denominator in the three groups. Untitled, 1969, is a knotted grid that exemplifies the first body of work. For this piece, Rohm tacked a rectangular net along its perimeter to the wall and then removed the nails along the top and right edges. He had anticipated that this would result in a crisp diagonal as with folded paper; instead, the rope slouched into an asymmetrical catenary curve. As it so often did, the material behaved contrary to Rohm’s prediction, introducing the element of chance.

Chance was also a factor in Rohm’s second and most influential series—rope grids he cut at predetermined points, such as Untitled, 1970. These cuts nearly always followed a logical pattern he had plotted on a preliminary diagram. Paradoxically, these methodical, orderly cuts caused the loose ends to dangle and droop into irregular, and at times even chaotic, new compositions. Rohm created a tension between rationality and randomness; after the grid’s connections were severed, its organized, geometric pattern devolved into disarray, illustrating the law of entropy that preoccupied many American artists during the 1970s.  The configuration of each sculpture provides the viewer with enough visual information to identify where Rohm sliced the grid and to mentally reconstruct the trajectory of the rope’s descent. “Visually, if it’s clear enough, one would read that that’s what happened,” he explains in an Artscanada article. “It’s not an illusion, it’s what actually did happen.”

Due to the ephemeral, disposable nature of Rohm’s early media, most of those early pieces were recycled or discarded soon after they were made. Like many important examples of conceptual and process-based works of the 1960s and ’70s, these two Rohm sculptures exist as instructions until they are realized in rope. Working with Rohm, and later his widow, Candy Adriance, the ICA/Boston obtained both the specific instructions for the works and recommendations of rope type. These works join other sculptures in fiber in the collection by artists such as Françoise Grossen and Sheila Hicks that appeared in Fiber: Sculpture, 1960—present, organized by Jenelle Porter, former Mannion Family Senior Curator, and enable the ICA to give a more complete art-historical story about approaches to process and material in sculpture of the 1960s and ’70s.

2015.29