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.

800.17.01

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