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Haegue Yang makes intricate and visually-compelling sculptures from largely banal materials, including clothing racks, light bulbs, and bamboo roots. She first became known for her experiential installations consisting of venetian blinds—an important material for the artist due to its binary properties of folding and unfolding, transparency and privacy. As Yang said in a 2014 interview in Ocula, “My driving interests and motivations are often concrete, but my artistic language is one of abstraction. Abstraction is, for me, a way of thinking and working through collective and individual narratives across different histories, generations, and locations.”

The Intermediate – Inceptive Sphere comes from a larger series of straw works entitled The Intermediates. Some of the works reference actual architectural structures or are stand-alone sculptural objects or figures. Each is decorated with Asian folk objects, such as a Korean bride’s headpiece and bells that are hung from the necks of cows in India or used in shamanistic rituals, all collected by Yang herself. The critical material is straw, a familiar, even primitive material, but here Yang uses artificial, plastic straw dismissing all potential nostalgia or desire for a primal past. As with most of her sculptures, this work evokes an in-between, intermediate state, between the real and artificial, civilization and nature, and, largely, the human and spirit worlds.

This work reflects the museum’s commitment to have a more global program and to explore how artists are reconciling the ever-changing concept of the global, especially the fraught binary between the so-called East and West. In addition to the 2013 Art Wall, Yang’s work was included in the ICA/Boston’s 2014 exhibition Fiber: Sculpture 1960–Present. The Intermediate – Inceptive Sphere connects with the museum’s commitment to critically examine craft in contemporary art, as seen in the work of Nick Cave and Arlene Shechet, and joins significant sculptures by artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Marisol, and Rachel Harrison.

2016.04

Over the last thirty-five years, Diane Simpson has produced a unique body of work founded on the relationship between precise, diagrammatic drawings and the uncanny sculptures they generate. Simpson begins by translating details she encounters in daily life and through research—elements of clothing, parts of the body, domestic and public archi-tectural details—into rigorous schematic drawings rendered at a 45-degree angle. From these plans she retranslates each detail back again into an object in the world. She creates each sculpture through labor-intensive fabrication, using materials that range from corrugated cardboard and MDF (medium-density fiberboard) to aluminum, wool, polyester, poplar, faux fur, mahogany, brass, copper, and steel. During this process, her original sources are wholly transformed.

Elements of clothing are Simpson’s most frequent subject. Drawing inspiration from both physical facts and their social contexts, Simpson’s decisions about color, bodily proportions, clothing references, fashion, and style add pointed specificity to each sculpture’s abstracted form. By exaggerating details such as sleeves and necklines, and often highlighting ancillary garments that cover and hide, Simpson’s outsized forms make a big deal out of the marginal. Vest (Scalloped) is one of only a few works that appropriate an existing material element: the base of the work is a stand from a dress form, which Simpson has wholly transformed by applying a thick, skinlike coating in a turquoise reminiscent of a 1950s appliance color. The upper vest form is made of a psychedelically patterned linoleum on one side and an elegant, minimalist combination of burlap and copper on the other side. Simpson is committed to the small details that normally function as supporting characters and that, by the end of her labor-intensive process, have gained new stature and created a playful distortion of everyday life.

Vest (Scalloped) joins other sculptural works in the ICA/Boston collection that address the body, gender, and the domestic, by artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Josh Faught, and Doris Salcedo.

2016.08

Cady Noland emerged on the art scene in New York in the 1980s, and is now among the leading voices of her generation. Drawing from mass media images such as press photographs of Lee Harvey Oswald and Patty Hearst and found objects from the urban landscape such as beer cans, American flags, and police barricades, Noland’s collages, sculptures, and mixed-media installations examine the underbelly of the American psyche, specifically the fascination with celebrity and violence.

Noland is perhaps best known for her sculptural assemblages of the later 1980s and ’90s that incorporate detritus from American consumer and vernacular culture. A leading example of this vein, Objectification Process deftly explores the American psyche through its most potent symbol of national unity and pageantry—the flag. The motif populates a number of her works from this period, but rather than hoisted high and unfurled, Noland’s flag is often draped or hung, limp or pierced. Objectification Process features a rolled-up flag placed on an orthopedic walker, suggesting a deflated, ailing, or immobilized nation. Noland’s incorporation of walkers, canes, police barricades, and fences conveys narratives of containment, confinement, and violence. The juxtaposed elements in Objectification Process create a powerful critique of the state of American nationalism and identity, a topic that still resonates deeply three decades later.

Although Noland has largely withdrawn from the art world, she continues to have a vital influence on younger artists working in sculpture and collage, including Ellen Gallagher and Rachel Harrison, both represented in the ICA/Boston collection. Noland’s provocative exploration of the more nefarious aspects of American culture paved the way for a generation of artists who also use methods of appropriation in their critique of culture, including Anne Collier, Leslie Hewitt, and Lorna Simpson. Objectification Process joins Noland’s screenprint Untitled, 1989, creating a varied representation of this important artist in the ICA’s collection.

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One of the most original artists working today, Ron Nagle has made stunning small sculptures since the 1950s. A student of ceramics pioneer Peter Voulkos (who taught ceramics at Black Mountain College), Nagle participated in an important dialogue with other artists working in the medium, like Ken Price and Jim Melchert. At the beginning of his career, Nagle made funky, rough cups and vessels out of earthenware, and by the early 1960s was using low-fire, slip-casting techniques to make smoother surfaces and bring into play the luminous colors that would become his calling card. He also began gluing elements together, disrupting the purity of ceramics and allowing more play and flexibility with form. In vessels no higher than a few inches, Nagle references experiences of the body and architecture in a vocabulary that draws on abstract expressionism, minimalism, and the California Light and Space movement.

Although he has been influenced by such diverse artists as Joseph Albers, Philip Guston, and Giorgio Morandi, Nagle is equally attached to popular culture: “I’m just as moved by seeing a 1934 DeSoto Airflow or by listening to ‘Waterloo Sunset’ by the Kinks as I am by most things in a museum.” In the irreverent Boston Scrambler, pocked polyurethane surfaces create a dynamic contrast with the glassiness of an adjacent porcelain finish. Like many of Nagle’s works from 2015, this one references the landscape as well as the body: tentacle-like forms evoke vegetal matter as well as limbs, and the baselike block and its liquidy cover conjure ground and water, habitat for a strange pink form. Nagle invariably imbues his work with linguistic humor. Contributing to an obvious allusion to the Boston Strangler, the word “scrambler,” in Nagle’s lexicon, is a toupee or comb-over, amusingly recasting the imagery.

Since the 2010s, Nagle has diverged from pure ceramic processes in innovative ways. Boston Scrambler joins other works in the ICA/Boston collection that approach body, cultural references, and new approaches to traditional sculptural process by artists including Louise Bourgeois, Rachel Harrison, and Arlene Shechet.

2016.03

Sarah Sze uses everyday materials such as paper cups, tape, string, and plants to create ambitious, site-specific sculptures and installations that take on the character of landscapes, architecture, constellations, and improvisational systems. An important contemporary artist redefining the boundaries of sculpture, Sze begins with a close consideration of her physical encounter with a particular site and then launches into an exploratory process involving drawing, collecting, building, testing, and often complex engineering. Her artworks frequently fill entire rooms and in some cases even penetrate such barriers as walls and windows to defy architectural space. Born in Boston, Sze represented the United States at the fifty-fifth Venice Biennale in 2013.

Sze was commissioned to create Hidden Relief by the Asia Society in New York. The work, sited in the corner of the gallery behind a strip of caution tape, appears to be at once a freestanding sculpture and part of the wall. Layers of paint peel away from the wall, and orange scaffolding and curving yellow rulers pierce the geological white forms. Sze uses a simple palette of white, orange, yellow, blue, and black throughout the work, which is brightly illuminated by floodlights that are part of the sculpture. On the walls, Sze has drawn diagram-like lines, using pins and string as if plotting the next move. Hidden Relief conveys a mesmerizing impression of movement, in which balance is constantly negotiated, questioned, and affirmed. The work reflects Sze’s acute attention to detail as well as her ingenious use and transformation of existing architecture.

The acquisition of Hidden Relief brings an important artist with Boston roots into the ICA/Boston’s collection and greatly enhances the museum’s holdings of large-scale works. Sze’s strategies of appropriation and transformation of the mundane correlate with the practices of such collection artists as Cady Noland, Mona Hatoum, and Rachel Harrison.

2016.31

Since the 1970s, Senga Nengudi has been a leading figure of the Black avant-garde communities in Los Angeles and New York. The artist’s background as a dancer and choreographer informs her practice. In the 1970s, she began making her now iconic anthropomorphic nylon mesh sculptures and installations, which she often incorporates into her performances, testing the limits of the nylon material by manipulating, wearing, and stretching these works.

On her use of material, Nengudi explains: “I am working with nylon mesh because it relates to the elasticity of the human body…. From tender, tight beginnings to sagging…. The body can only stand so much push and pull until it gives way, never to resume its original shape.” R.S.V.P. Reverie–“B” Suite is composed from worn pantyhose filled with sand, which the artist knots and hangs from a horizontal bar. The work possesses strong corporeal references, suggesting a body stretching or in slow motion. It also activates the built space, drawing attention to corners that join walls and floors and intimate the close meeting of overlooked yet structurally significant architectural sites.

R.S.V.P. Reverie–“B” Suite is part of the artist’s R.S.V.P series, which was exhibited in her breakthrough 1977 show at Just Above Midtown Gallery, whose mission was to provide an exhibition platform for Black artists. Since then, Nengudi’s installations—which she describes as “subtle and intimate, involving issues of time and personal change”—have been exhibited widely, cementing the artist’s contributions to performance, installation, and sculpture in contemporary art. R.S.V.P. Reverie–“B” Suite was included in the ICA/Boston’s exhibition Dance/Draw in 2011.

2017.18

Lynda Benglis came of age as an artist in New York in the 1960s, and her work was closely associated with both process art and minimalism. She is best known for pouring industrial materials such as latex and foam—often directly onto the floor, echoing Jackson Pollock’s style of painting—to compose abstract, biomorphic forms. An important feminist icon, Benglis expanded the purview of minimalism, a genre dominated by male artists, by experimenting with color and form and engaging explicitly with the body.

In the 1970s, Benglis created a series of metalized knot structures from materials such as wire mesh and aluminum. Hung on a wall, they appear to hover in space. Robert Pincus-Witten, an editor at Artforum, described the artist’s work as “frozen gestures,” exemplified in this 1974 work Sierra. Paula Cooper Gallery presented these knot works in 1974, the same year Benglis took out the infamous Artforum ad picturing her nude and holding a dildo in front of her genitals as a comment on the male-dominated art world. Implicating her own body in these works, she makes the process of knotting visible, while the structure resembles twisted arms, internal organs, or entwined bodies. Sierra demonstrates Benglis’s unique and expansive approach to sculpture and the ways it can reference the body and bodily experience through abstraction.

Sierra bolsters the Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women and adds a seminal woman artist who is not yet represented in the museum’s collection. This hallmark work, the twin of which is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, joins major sculptures by Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Cady Noland, and Faith Wilding. Benglis’s exploration of the body is in conversation with works by Bourgeois, Ana Mendieta, Kiki Smith, and Nancy Spero. Her early use of industrial materials creates an interesting dialogue with the work of younger artists such as Tara Donovan and Rachel Harrison. The acquisition of this work allows the ICA/Boston to tell a fuller story of twentieth-century feminist art.

2017.19

New York-based Kevin Beasley uniquely combines sound and clothing—his core artistic materials—in stunning, densely packed sculptures and immersive acoustic installations. His work involves the appropriation and recontextualization of found objects, sounds, and symbols to explore how personal memory and lived experience intersect with broader examinations of power and race.

Phasing (Ebb) brings together Beasley’s signature use of colorful, patterned housedresses dipped in resin with his incorporation of environmental sounds. One of the artist’s “ghost” sculptures, Phasing (Ebb) features a cluster of figures that move outward into the viewers’ space. Beasley creates his ghost sculptures by laying clothing impregnated with resin over molds, which once removed leave striking, swooping forms without bodies or faces but filled with air and light. Beasley has also added a sound element to this sculpture. A microphone placed at a distance from the wall-mounted sculpture picks up the conversations of visitors and the ambient sound of the environment. Nearby equipment placed on the floor processes these sounds and emits them from speakers hidden within the sculpture. The distorted sounds ebb and flow—as the title suggests—connecting viewers in different locations. In combining the sounds of distant visitors with the absent bodies of the ghost sculptures, Phasing (Ebb) invites mediations on presence and absence—especially as they inform the practices and histories of representation.

This work introduces a new artist to the ICA/Boston’s collection and demonstrates the museum’s commitment to Beasley at an early moment in his career—something the institution has done since its founding. In addition to presenting Beasley’s work as part of the traveling group exhibition When the Stars Begin to Fall in 2015, the ICA is mounting a solo exhibition of Beasley’s work. Phasing (Ebb) offers a new dimension to the collection’s strength in figurative sculpture, joining works by Louise Bourgeois, Rachel Harrison, and Doris Salcedo, among others, and expands the museum’s capacity to narrate how artists employ found objects.

2017.20

Emerging in the early 1990s as part of a generation of artists exploring the intersections of art, identity formation, and political representation, Nari Ward engages the symbolic potential of found objects. The artist draws on many references, ranging from folklore to West African and Western avant-garde sculptural legacies. Using labor-intensive processes, Ward imbues his work with layered meanings connected to cultural expression, history, and black experience, particularly of his native Jamaica and his adopted home of Harlem, New York, while also addressing issues related to immigration.

Savior resembles a regal version of a cart used often by homeless or itinerant people to collect recyclables or store their belongings. The sculpture is dense with material—its surface a web of twisted plastic and fabric and its interior filled with colored plastic bags holding empty bottles and other refuse. In his associated performance, documented in the video Pushing Savior—also in the ICA/Boston’s collection—Ward pushed the cart through the streets of Harlem. In these two works, the artist brings attention the city’s marginalized homeless population, questioning the visibility and invisibility of the disenfranchised in the public sphere. He began the sculpture during a residency at a Shaker community in Maine, where a resident building a chair explained to Ward that he constructs each piece of furniture for an angel to sit on. The chair at the very top of Savior references this exchange. Ward, however, remains skeptical of organized religions and thinks reliance on otherworldly entities strips one of agency. The sculpture conveys the vision and desire to push to reach one’s destiny.

Savior was included in the artist’s first major retrospective Nari Ward: Sun Splashed, which traveled to the ICA in 2017 from the Pérez Art Museum Miami. It enriches our sculpture as well as video holdings. Savior in particular is in conversation with works in the museum’s collection that similarly exalt everyday materials to examine cultural, bodily, and societal issues by such artists as Alexandre da Cunha, Tara Donovan, Mona Hatoum, Cady Noland, and Doris Salcedo.

2017.03

Since the 1950s, Ron Nagle has been creating intimately scaled and original sculptural works. The artist’s compact artworks bring together virtuoso techniques and materials from traditional ceramics, experimental sculpture, and painting. In the 1960s, he began using a low-fire, slip-casting technique to create objects with smooth surfaces and brilliant hues, which he is best known for today. He also started to incorporate synthetic materials such as resin and polyurethane, resulting in unique and often humorous forms. Nagle layers his range of techniques with a diverse array of formal and cultural references from abstract expressionism, the California Light and Space movement, to Japanese Momoyama ceramics. His distinct practice, playing with style and form, ultimately expands the ceramic tradition.

As in his best works, Nagle’s Faberge Leg conflates references and forms from disparate sources to humorous effect. About the size of a sardine can, the sculpture evokes this classic compact container, with a green ceramic layer peeling back to reveal a smooth black porcelain slab, bathed in a glassy, reflective surface. Read from the left to the right, the work also resembles a small bed, but as it progresses horizontally, references shift to landscape as a lavender form sprouts to suggest a cactus or tree, as well as a bodily protrusion. The corporeal allusion is reinforced by the title’s word play, Faberge Leg, conjuring the bejeweled baubles of the tsars to describe the awkward epoxy leg sprouting from this exquisite landscape.

Since the 2010s, Nagle has diverged from pure ceramic processes in innovative ways. Faberge Leg joins another work by Nagle in the museum’s collection and reflects new approaches to traditional sculptural processes, as evidenced also in the work of Louise Bourgeois, Rachel Harrison, and Arlene Shechet.

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