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Portraits from the ICA Collection may be closed today due to installation. See what else is on view

“What can I reveal that has not been shown? Black people — not entertaining, just being, living. Letting people deal with that as reality.”
— Derrick Adams

This first mid-career survey of the prolific New York–based artist Derrick Adams (b. 1970 in Baltimore) offers a sweeping view of his multidisciplinary practice over twenty years. Adams celebrates contemporary Black life and culture through a distinct representational language. He often combines planar shapes and patterns to create multifaceted figures that center leisure, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness. Adams’s painting, sculpture, collage, performance, video, and public projects celebrate the beauty of everyday life, transforming these moments into an iconography that resonates with the richness and complexity of Black culture in our time.

An Indigenous Present is a thematic exhibition spanning 100 years of contemporary Indigenous art. The exhibition includes new commissions and significant works by 15 artists who use strategies of abstraction to represent personal and collective narratives, describe specific and imagined places, and build upon cultural and aesthetic traditions. Co-organized by artist Jeffrey Gibson and independent curator Jenelle Porter, the exhibition offers an expansive consideration of Indigenous art practices that highlights a continuum of elders and emerging makers, and premieres newly commissioned site-specific works by Raven Chacon, Caroline Monnet, and Anna Tsouhlarakis.  

An Indigenous Present emerges from Gibson and Porter’s 2023 landmark publication of the same name, which, through a collaborative process, brought together work by Native North American artists exploring diverse approaches to concept, form, and medium. Their engagement with artists during the making of the book inspired this exhibition—one that demonstrates the endless variability of abstraction and its capacity to hold multiple forms and histories. 

Beyond the works in the galleries, the ICA highlights Native and Indigenous makers in a series of public programs and performances including an installation by artist, author, and poet Robert Peters in the ICA Bank of America Art Lab; performances of Raven Chacon’s scores and soundworks; and a film series curated by artist Sky Hopinka in the ICA Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater.   

An Indigenous Present debuts at the ICA, before traveling to the Frist Art Museum in Nashville (June 26—September 27, 2026) and the Frye Art Museum in Seattle (November 7, 2026—February 14, 2027). 

Artist List

Charles Atlas: About Time is the first U.S. museum survey of the pioneering interdisciplinary artist Charles Atlas (b. 1949 in St. Louis). Spanning 50 years of work, this retrospective is conceived as an immersive environment for the visitor, featuring several monumental multi-channel video installations, or “walk-through experiences,” as the artist describes them. To create these installations, Atlas “explodes” single-channel videos into new configurations, presenting the videos on multiple suspended screens and monitors around the gallery, so visitors can move between and among them.

Atlas’s early career is defined by his time as filmmaker-in-residence at the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, New York. Atlas and Cunningham created the genre of “media-dance”: dance made for the camera, rather than an in-person audience, wherein the camera moves seamlessly in concert with the dancers. Since leaving the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in 1983, Atlas has been a leading figure in film and video art, and one of the preeminent artists to capture dance and performance for the camera through groundbreaking collaborations with Michael Clark, Yvonne Rainer, Leigh Bowery, Marina Abramović, Rashaun Mitchell, and Silas Riener, and many others. Much of Atlas’s genre-defying, collaborative work has proved prescient for a generation of artists working today. Contemporary concerns such as the creative possibilities of performance and portraiture on camera and the political urgency of challenging conventions of gender, sexuality, and queer identity have been at the heart of Atlas’s creative output for decades. 

Charles Atlas is oriented around the artist’s groundbreaking work at the intersections of moving image, dance, and performance, and his intimate video portraits of close collaborators and friends. The shifting political and cultural landscape of the United States from the 1970s to the present acts as a backdrop to this dynamic visual exhibition, addressing themes of performance and portraiture, gender and sexuality, and collaboration and friendship.

This exhibition contains works of art with sequences of flashing lights and loud sounds, as well as brief moments of mature material including nudity, simulated violence, and sexual content.

Since the early 1990s, Huma Bhabha (born 1962 in Karachi) has developed a distinct visual vocabulary that draws upon a wide variety of influences, including horror movies, science fiction, ancient artifacts, religious reliquary, and modernist sculpture. The largest survey of the artist’s work to date, Huma Bhabha: They Live encompasses sculpture, drawing, and photography, with a special focus on Bhabha’s engagement with the human figure.

Best known for her sculptures, Bhabha uses a diverse array of natural, industrial, and found materials to make compelling works that engage the arts and histories of diverse cultures. Her work transcends a singular time and place, instead creating an exploration of what she describes as the “eternal concerns” found across all cultures: war, colonialism, displacement, and memories of home.

Huma Bhabha: They Live also includes drawings, photographs, and prints spanning the past two decades, as well as new works made on the occasion of this exhibition. It is accompanied by a lushly illustrated scholarly publication.

The ICA presents the first comprehensive American exhibition of performative objects, video installations, and interactive sculptures of the internationally celebrated choreographer William Forsythe. 

World renowned, Forsythe is counted among the foremost choreographers of our time. For over four decades he has created productions that redefine classical ballet’s vocabulary, and his groundbreaking approach to choreography, staging, lighting, and dance analysis has influenced countless choreographers and artists. Since the 1990s, parallel to his stage productions, Forsythe has developed installations, sculptures, and films that he calls Choreographic Objects. Blurring the lines between performance, sculpture, and installation, his Choreographic Objects invite the viewer to engage with the fundamental ideas of choreography. These site-responsive, interactive works are designed to stimulate movement from visitors through interactions with kinetic sculptures, video projections, and architectural environments. The exhibition features large-scale installations, including several works developed for the ICA. Via the artist’s instructions for action posted on the wall next to the works, visitors are invited to move freely through the performative exhibition and generate an infinite range of individual choreographies.

William Forsythe: Choreographic Objects coincides with Forsythe’s five-year residency at the Boston Ballet, providing audiences with instrumental insight into his pioneering choreographic work across different platforms. Catch a new world premiere in Full on Forsythe March 7–17, 2019.

The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated publication featuring writers from the disciplines of both dance and art.

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Virgil Abloh: “Figures of Speech” is the first museum exhibition devoted to the work of the genre-bending artist and designer Virgil Abloh (b. 1980, Rockford, IL). Abloh pioneers a practice that cuts across media and connects visual artists, musicians, graphic designers, fashion designers, and architects. 

Abloh cultivated an interest in design and music at an early age, finding inspiration in the urban culture of Chicago. While pursuing a master’s degree in architecture from the Illinois Institute of Technology, he worked on album covers, concert designs, and merchandising. In 2013, Abloh founded his stand-alone fashion brand Off-White™ in Milan, Italy, and, in 2018, assumed the position of artistic director of Louis Vuitton’s menswear. 

Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and set in an immersive space designed by Rem Koolhaas’s renowned architecture firm OMA*AMO, the exhibition will offer an in-depth look at defining highlights of Abloh’s career, including signature clothing collections, video documentation of iconic fashion shows, distinctive furniture and graphic design work, and collaborative projects with contemporary artists. A program of cross-disciplinary offerings will mirror the artist’s range of interests across music and design. 

Tickets available now

Explore the companion pop-up store, “Church & State”

Explore an Abloh-inspired zine by ICA Teens

How artists have used ornamentation to transform craft and design, feminism, queerness and gender, beauty and taste, camouflage and masquerade, and multiculturalism and globalism.

Less Is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design brings together works in painting, sculpture, ceramic, dance, furniture design, and more that privilege decoration, pattern, and maximalism.

Borrowing its attitude from architect Robert Venturi’s witty retort to Mies van der Rohe’s modernist edict “less is more,” Less Is a Bore shows how artists, including those affiliated with the Pattern & Decoration movement of the 1970s, have sought to rattle the dominance of modernism and minimalism. Encouraged by the pluralism permeating many cultural spheres at the time, these artists accommodated new ideas, modes, and materials, challenging entrenched categories that marginalized non-Western art, fashion, interior design, and applied art.

The exhibition considers how artists have used ornamentation, pattern painting, and other decorative modes to critique, subvert, and transform accepted histories related to craft and design, feminism, queerness and gender, beauty and taste, camouflage and masquerade, and multiculturalism and globalism. More recent artworks in the exhibition chart both the legacy and transformation of these trajectories.

Spanning generations, geographies, and traditions, Less Is a Bore includes works ranging from experiments in patterning by Sanford Biggers, Jasper Johns, and Miriam Schapiro to the transgressive sculpture and furniture of Lucas Samaras and Ettore Sottsass, to the installations of Polly Apfelbaum, Nathalie du Pasquier, and Virgil Marti.  

Full artist list

Ron Amstutz (b. 1968, Youngstown, OH)
Polly Apfelbaum (b. 1955, Abington Township, PA)
Jennifer Bartlett (b. 1941, Long Beach, CA)
Sanford Biggers (b. 1970, Los Angeles)
Tord Boontje (b. 1968, Enschende, The Netherlands)
Leigh Bowery (b. 1961, Sunshine, Australia; d. 1995, London) and Fergus Greer (b. England)
Roger Brown (b. 1941, Hamilton, AL; d. 1997, Atlanta)
Taylor Davis (b. 1959, Palm Springs, CA)
Nathalie Du Pasquier (b. 1957, Bordeaux, France)
Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian (b. 1922, Qazvin, Iran; d. 2019, Tehran, Iran) 
Jeffrey Gibson (b. 1972, Colorado Springs, CO)
Nancy Graves (b. 1939, Pittsfield, MA; d. 1995, New York)
Valerie Jaudon (b. 1945, Greenville, MS)
Jasper Johns (b. 1930, Augusta, GA)
Joyce Kozloff (b. 1942, Somerville, NJ)
Robert Kushner (b. 1949, Pasadena, CA)
Ellen Lesperance (b. 1971, Minneapolis)
Sol LeWitt (b. 1928, Hartford, CT; d. 2007, New York)
Liza Lou (b. 1969, New York)
Babette Mangolte (b. 1941, Montmorot, France) and Lucinda Childs (b. 1940, New York)
Virgil Marti (b. 1962, St. Louis)
Dianna Molzan (b. 1972, Tacoma, WA)
Joel Otterson (b. 1959, Los Angeles)
Laura Owens (b. 1970, Euclid, OH)
Howardena Pindell (b. 1943, Philadelphia)
Lari Pittman (b. 1952, Los Angeles)
Ruth Root (b. 1967, Chicago)
Lucas Samaras (b. 1936, Kastoria, Greece)
Zoe Pettijohn Schade (b. 1973, Boston)
Miriam Schapiro (b. 1923, Toronto; d. 2015, Hampton Bays, NY)
Ettore Sottsass (b. 1917, Innsbruck, Austria; d. 2007, Milan)
Frank Stella (b. 1936, Malden, MA)
Stephanie Syjuco (b. 1974, Manila, Philippines)
Philip Taaffe (b. 1955, Elizabeth, NJ)
Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates (founded 1960 as Venturi & Associates, Philadelphia)
Marcel Wanders (b. 1963, Boxtel, The Netherlands)
Pae White (b. 1963, Pasadena, CA)
Kehinde Wiley (b. 1977, Los Angeles)
Franklin Williams (b. 1940, Ogden, UT)
Betty Woodman (b. 1930, Norwalk, CT; d. 2018, New York)
Christopher Wool (b. 1955, Chicago)
Haegue Yang (b. 1971, Seoul)
Ray Yoshida (b. 1930, Kapaa, Hawaii, HI; d. 2009, Kauai, HI)
Robert Zakanitch (b. 1935, Elizabeth, NJ)

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication with essays by Elissa Auther, Amy Goldin, and Jenelle Porter.

Please note: One work in this exhibition contains a video with rapidly changing, high-contrast imagery that creates a flashing effect.

International artists respond to the migration, immigration, and displacement of peoples today, in works ranging from personal accounts to poetic meditations.

When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art considers how contemporary artists are responding to the migration, immigration, and displacement of peoples today. We are currently witnessing the highest levels of movement on record—the United Nations estimates that one out of every seven people in the world is an international or internal migrant who moves by choice or by force, with great success or great struggle. When Home Won’t Let You Stay borrows its title from a poem by Warsan Shire, a Somali-British poet who gives voice to the experiences of refugees. Through artworks made since 2000 by twenty artists from more than a dozen countries — such as Colombia, Cuba, France, India, Iraq, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, Palestine, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States — this exhibition highlights diverse artistic responses to migration ranging from personal accounts to poetic meditations, and features a range of mediums, including sculpture, installation, painting, and video. Artists in the exhibition include Kader Attia, Tania Bruguera, Isaac Julien, Hayv Kahraman, Reena Saini Kallat, Richard Mosse, Carlos Motta, Yinka Shonibare, Xaviera Simmons, and Do-Ho Suh, among others. A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition, with an essay by Eva Respini and Ruth Erickson and texts by prominent scholars Aruna D’Souza, Okwui Enwezor, Thomas Keenan, Peggy Levitt, and Uday Singh Mehta, among others.

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“I photograph family, friends, and strangers, and I operate on the belief that my own being is found in union with those I take pictures of.” 

—Deana Lawson

This exhibition is the first museum survey dedicated to the work of Deana Lawson (b. 1979 in Rochester, NY), a singular voice in photography today. For more than 15 years, Lawson has been investigating and challenging conventional representations of Black life through a wide spectrum of photographic languages, including the family album, studio portraiture, staged tableaux, documentary pictures, and appropriated images. Engaging acquaintances as well as strangers she meets on the street, Lawson meticulously poses her subjects in highly staged photographs that picture narratives of family, love, and desire, and create what the artist describes as “a mirror of everyday life, but also a projection of what I want to happen. It’s about setting a different standard of values and saying that everyday Black lives, everyday experiences, are beautiful, and powerful, and intelligent.” 

This survey exhibition will include a selection of photographs from 2004 to the present, and will be accompanied by a fully illustrated scholarly catalogue, featuring the voices and perspectives of a variety of scholars, historians, and writers. Deana Lawson will travel to MoMA PS1 April 14–September 5, 2022 and to the High Museum October 7, 2022–February 19, 2023. 

A medium-dark-skinned woman and two children pose in a domestic space with a tinsel Christmas tree and walls painted bright blue.

Explore the Deana Lawson Family Resource Guide

Hear from the curators, community members, artists, and more on the ICA Digital Guide

ICA/Boston presents the first comprehensive museum survey for American artist Sterling Ruby.

The exhibition features more than 70 works that demonstrate the relationship between material transformation in Ruby’s practice and the rapid evolution of culture, institutions, and labor. Spanning more than two decades of the artist’s career, the exhibition looks to the origins and development of his practice, through mediums ranging from lesser-known drawings and sculptures to his renowned ceramics and paintings.

Since his earliest works, Ruby has investigated the role of the artist as an outsider. Critiquing the structures of modernism and traditional institutions, Ruby addresses the repressed underpinnings of U.S. culture and the coding of power and violence. Craft is central to his inquiry, as he explores California’s radical ceramics history and traditions of Amish quilt making, shaped by his upbringing in Pennsylvania Dutch country. The process of combining disparate elements is central to Ruby’s material reclamations, which serve as a form of autobiographical and cultural archeology. Organized loosely by chronology and medium, Sterling Ruby considers the artist’s explorations of these themes across the many materials and forms he has utilized throughout his practice.

Sterling Ruby is co-presented with Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and is accompanied by an illustrated scholarly catalogue edited by Alex Gartenfeld and Eva Respini, with a conversation between Ruby and Isabelle Graw. Published with DelMonico Prestel, the catalogue features essays that consider Ruby’s work amidst the contemporary art production and visual culture of the last 30 years.

Sterling Ruby (American/Dutch, b. 1972, Germany) is a leading contemporary artist whose work has been presented in solo exhibitions throughout the globe. Ruby received his B.F.A. in 2002 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, and his M.F.A. in 2005 from the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

Educational materials

Credits

Sterling Ruby is organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, ICA/Boston, and Alex Gartenfeld, Artistic Director, ICA, Miami, with Jeffrey De Blois, Assistant Curator and Publications Manager, ICA/Boston.

Sterling Ruby is on view at ICA, Miami November 7, 2019 – February 2, 2020.

Major support for Sterling Ruby is provided by Sprüth Magers, Gagosian, and Xavier Hufkens.

SPONSORS_Spruth Magers Gagosian Xavier Hufkens combined Sterling Ruby

Additional support for the Boston presentation is generously provided by Stephanie Formica Connaughton and John Connaughton, Jean-François and Nathalie Ducrest, Bridgitt and Bruce Evans, James and Audrey Foster, Ted Pappendick and Erica Gervais Pappendick, David and Leslie Puth, and Charlotte and Herbert S. Wagner III.