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Since the early 1990s, Mark Dion has pioneered a unique, interdisciplinary practice by shadowing and appropriating scientific methodologies. He has traveled the world to collect plant and animal specimens, conducted archeological digs, and rummaged through forgotten collections, presenting his finds as charismatic sculptures and curiosity cabinets brimming with objects.

New Bedford Cabinet is a large wooden cabinet of the classic Wunderkammer variety and comes from Dion’s New England Digs project, organized by the Fuller Art Museum in Brockton, Massachusetts. The beautiful cabinet displays hundreds of objects found during an archeological dig led by the artist in New Bedford, Massachusetts, which also happens to be the artist’s hometown. Dion has often said that the origin of his interest in collections and display came from combing the beaches of New England as a child, so this connection to the artist’s biography gives this work a special place in his expansive oeuvre. For New England Digs, Dion conducted digs in Brockton; Providence, Rhode Island; and New Bedford, collecting, cleaning, categorizing, and presenting his finds in handmade wooden cabinets. New Bedford Cabinet is exemplary of Dion’s practice, both his application of scientific approaches and his focus on display techniques to question forms of knowledge and practices of collecting. His intermingling of old and modern objects without attention to hierarchy reflects his own fictive version of history and perhaps encourages viewers to question contemporary institutions and popular ideologies that define today’s official narratives.

This large-scale sculpture is a major addition to the ICA/Boston’s collection by one of Massachusetts’s most celebrated artists. The ICA presented Dion’s first U.S. survey in October 2017, and this is an important marker of the museum’s exhibition history while also capturing the artist’s distinctive use of methods from the sciences and historical display techniques. New Bedford Cabinet joins significant sculptures by Tara Donovan, Rachel Harrison, and Sarah Sze that similarly make use of found and everyday objects to create compelling and memorable artworks.

2017.01

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. Her maximalist aesthetic defies strict classification, but aligns itself with feminism and Afro-futurism. First gaining attention for hybridized collages of female figures set in otherworldly landscapes, Mutu confronts colonialism, displacement, Western perceptions of Africa, and the eroticization of the black female body in her visual language. Blackthrone VIII is part of a series of towering sculptures the artist made by posing ordinary, household chairs atop elongated legs and integrating unusual materials such as tinsel and hair. Like adorned, talismanic thrones, the Blackthrones recombine the fundamental strategies of collage and juxtaposition found in Mutu’s broader creative practice.

This work, along with Untitled (Tumor), 2006, enters the ICA’s collection on the occasion of Mutu’s commission, A Promise to Communicate (2018), for the ICA’s Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall. These pieces enrich the museum’s strong holdings of work made by women and sculptures incorporating found objects by artists such as Mark Dion, Rachel Harrison, Mona Hatoum, and Nari Ward.

2018.06

Since the early 1960s, Larry Bell has explored light as a sculptural medium through innovative uses of glass. A pioneer of the California Light and Space movement among artists such as Robert Irwin and Doug Wheeler, Bell is best known for innumerable iterations of the glass cube. Combining material fragility with a form evocative of industrial and mass production, the cubes’ optically confounding surfaces push the limits of perception.

The rapid development of newly engineered materials in California’s booming aerospace and automotive industries of the 1960s informed Bell’s investigations of light and environment in sculpture, particularly the application of semireflective optical coatings to glass. Supported by initiatives like the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Experiments in Art and Technology, artists associated with Light and Space developed interdisciplinary partnerships with scientists to inform their use of innovative industrial materials, such as new plastics like polymer resins and vacuum-formed acrylic, chrome, fiberglass, and Plexiglas. Developments in perceptual psychology, space exploration, and car culture in Los Angeles provided a context for both serious and playful explorations of the optical and phenomenological experience of art.

CUBE 27 continues Bell’s exploration of transparency and illusion through the application of metallic and nonmetallic coatings to glass. These coatings, such as Inconel—an alloy of nickel containing chromium and iron—are vaporized and applied through vacuum deposition, the same technique used to treat camera lenses, telescopes, and conductive surfaces in the optics, automotive, and computer industries. A contradictory object, CUBE 27 models the perceptual interference created by a discrete volume whose semireflective interior surfaces seem to betray another volume or lend a different shape to light.

This work introduces an artist of great significance to the history of contemporary art as a pioneer in new materials and the Light and Space movement. This complements works by Bell’s contemporaries in the minimal and postminimal period such as Eva Hesse, as well as abstract sculptures by Tara Donovan and Taylor Davis.

800.18.01

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.