
Firelei Báez, Man Without a Country (aka anthropophagist wading in the Artibonite River) (detail), 2014–15. Gouache, ink, and chine-collé on 225 deaccessioned book pages. 106 1/4 × 252 inches (270 × 640 cm). Institu…
View full creditsThis is the first North American survey dedicated to the richly layered work of Firelei Báez (b. 1981, Dominican Republic). One of the most exciting painters of her generation, Báez delves into the historical narratives of the Atlantic basin. Over the past fifteen years, she has made work that explores the multilayered legacy of colonial histories and the African diaspora in the Caribbean and beyond. She draws on the disciplines of anthropology, geography, folklore, fantasy, science fiction, and social history to unsettle categories of race, gender, and nationality in her paintings, drawings, and installations. Her exuberant paintings feature finely wrought, complex, and layered uses of pattern, decoration, and saturated color, often overlaid on maps made during colonial rule in the Americas. Báez’s investment in the medium of painting and its capacity for storytelling and mythmaking informs all her work, including her sculptural installations, which bring this quality into three dimensions. This exhibition will offer audiences a timely opportunity to gain a holistic understanding of Báez’s complex and profoundly moving body of work, cementing her as one of the most important artists of the early 21st century. The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue.
The exhibition will tour throughout North America to the Vancouver Art Gallery (Nov. 3, 2024—Mar. 16, 2025) and the Des Moines Art Center (Jun. 14, 2025—Sep. 21, 2025).
Childhood, a subject of universal significance and personal experience, provides a compelling framework for understanding the past and imagining the future. To Begin Again: Artists and Childhood investigates the influence of children and childhood on visual artists from the early 20th century to today. While artists have long been inspired by children—by their imagination, creativity, and unique ways of seeing and being in the world—the field of art history has largely undervalued the influence of children and the subject of childhood. Through vibrant works of art, this exhibition illustrates the diverse experiences of childhood and engages childhood as an intellectual query into language and learning. The six thematic sections of To Begin Again explore how artists have grappled with timely issues of self-expression, creativity, power, care, labor, and learning through their engagement with childhood.
“Children are the ways the world begins again and again.”
—June Jordan
The exhibition features an international and intergenerational group of 40 artists whose works in painting, sculpture, photography, installation, and video offer distinctive viewpoints and experiences. The featured artists—many parents themselves—have made artwork that involves children as collaborators; mimics their ways of drawing or telling stories; and addresses ideas of innocence, spontaneity, and dependency closely associated with children. These artworks, along with a selection of works made by young people, reveal the multiform idea of childhood as the foundation upon which society is built, imagined, and negotiated. To Begin Again invites audiences of all ages to consider how children and childhood have inspired artists in making their work, and, in turn, how their work reflects, contributes to, and challenges perceptions of childhood.
Ann Agee (b. 1959, Philadelphia)
John Ahearn (b. 1952, Binghamton, New York) and Rigoberto Torres (b. 1960, Aguadilla, Puerto Rico)
Njideka Akunyili Crosby (b. 1983, Enugu, Nigeria)
Francis Alÿs (b. 1959, Antwerp, Belgium)
Jean-Michel Basquiat (b. 1960, Brooklyn, New York; d. 1988, New York)
Brian Belott (b. 1973, East Orange, New Jersey)
Jordan Casteel (b. 1989, Denver)
Lenka Clayton (b. 1977, Cornwall, United Kingdom)
Allan Rohan Crite (b. 1910, North Plainfield, New Jersey; d. 2007, Boston)
Henry Darger (b. 1892, Chicago; d. 1973, Chicago)
Karon Davis (b. 1977, Reno, Nevada)
Robert Gober (b. 1954, Wallingford, Connecticut)
Jay Lynn Gomez (b. 1986, San Bernardino, California)
Trenton Doyle Hancock (b. 1974, Oklahoma City)
Duane Hanson (b. 1925, Alexandria, Minnesota; d. 1996, Boca Raton, Florida)
Mona Hatoum (b. 1952, Beirut)
Sharon Hayes (b. 1970, Baltimore)
Ekua Holmes (b. 1955, Roxbury, Massachusetts)
Mary Kelly (b. 1941, Fort Dodge, Iowa)
Paul Klee (b. 1879, Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland; d. 1940, Muralto, Switzerland)
Justine Kurland (b. 1969, Warsaw, New York)
Helen Levitt (b. 1913, Brooklyn, New York; d. 2009, New York)
Tau Lewis (b. 1993, Toronto)
Glenn Ligon (b. 1960, New York)
Oscar Murillo (b. 1986, Valle del Cauca, Colombia)
Rivane Neuenschwander (b. 1967, Belo Horizonte, Brazil)
Berenice Olmedo (b. 1987, Oaxaca, Mexico)
Charles Ray (b. 1953, Chicago)
Faith Ringgold (b. 1930, Harlem)
Deborah Roberts (b. 1962, Austin, Texas)
Tim Rollins and K.O.S. (b. 1955, Pittsfield, Maine; d. 2017, New York)
Rachel Rose (b. 1986, New York)
Heji Shin (b. 1983, Seoul)
Sable Elyse Smith (b. 1986, Los Angeles)
Becky Suss (b. 1980, Philadelphia)
Mierle Laderman Ukeles (b. 1939, Denver)
Cathy Wilkes (b. 1966, Belfast, Northern Ireland)
Carmen Winant (b. 1983, San Francisco)
To Begin Again: Artists and Childhood has been designed with an intergenerational audience in mind. Many artworks are displayed at a lower than standard height, and with labels including descriptions written at both adult and third-grade reading levels. Labels written at a third-grade reading level invite younger visitors to read and discuss what they see with one another and the adults accompanying them. The exhibition also includes an interactive drawing table where visitors can to contribute their own drawings, and a reading room developed in conversation with librarians from Boston Public Schools, Boston Public Library, and a children’s book author. The reading room welcomes visitors of all ages to explore the world of children’s literature as a site of significant artistic production. Explore the book list
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated scholarly catalogue, featuring the voices and perspectives of a variety of artists, scholars, and writers.
Hear exclusive audio from artists Trenton Doyle Hancock, Ekua Holmes, Deborah Roberts, and Carmen Winant, plus curators Ruth Erickson and Jeffrey De Blois, on the ICA Digital Guide on Bloomberg Connects
Anna Craycroft’s website Childishism is a visual essay commissioned for the catalogue accompanying To Begin Again: Artists and Childhood. Childishism takes the form of an imagined search engine that algorithmically maps an associative history between artistic representations of the childish. For Craycroft, “when artists personify the childish or childhood in their work, a deeper social imaginary is revealed.”
Simone Leigh (b. 1967, Chicago) represented the United States at the 2022 Venice Biennale, one of the largest and most important contemporary art exhibitions in the world. Selections from Leigh’s landmark Venice presentation are making their U.S. premiere in Boston, joined by key works from throughout her career, providing a holistic understanding of the artist’s production in ceramic, bronze, and video.
For over two decades, Leigh has embraced a polyphonic artistic vocabulary that elaborates on Black feminist thought, an intellectual tradition which values and centers the experiences of Black women. Informed by a rigorous attention to a wide swath of historical periods, geographies, and artistic traditions of Africa and the African diaspora, Leigh often combines the female body with domestic vessels or architectural elements to point to unacknowledged acts of labor and care, particularly among and for Black women.
Clay forms the basis of most of Leigh’s artworks, including her bronze sculptures, which are first modeled in clay. The artist pushes the medium’s possibilities through scale and method, challenging conventional, hierarchical fine arts histories, which can still attach to ceramics associations around women’s labor, decoration, domestic crafts, and utility. This exhibition traces the artist’s unique visual language through signature motifs, including cowrie shells, braiding, rosettes, face vessels, and eyeless faces. Through Leigh’s re-performing of these forms in varying materials and scales, new structures of thought and meanings emerge, each consistently centering the experiences and intellectual labor of Black femmes.
Accompanied by a major monograph, this exhibition offers visitors a timely opportunity to experience the complex and profoundly moving work of this groundbreaking artist.
Simone Leigh will tour to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. (November 3, 2023–March 3, 2024) and a joint presentation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and California African American Museum (CAAM) in Los Angeles (May 26, 2024–January 20, 2025).
Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today gathers artworks by 28 artists connected to the region, including standout works by María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Teresita Fernández, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Deborah Jack, Ana Mendieta, Suchitra Mattai, Lorraine O’Grady, and Ebony G. Patterson. Full of new ideas, this far-reaching and evocative exhibition looks at the complexities of the region with “rigor, beauty, and aplomb” (Art in America).
The exhibition is anchored in the concept of diaspora, the dispersal of people through migration both forced and voluntary. Here, diaspora is not a longing to return home but a way of understanding that we are always in movement and that our identities are in constant states of transformation. Works on view explore how much of our personal and collective histories we carry in our bodies and how art-making can reflect cross-cultural exchanges.
The profound social and political transformations of the 1990s form the cultural backdrop of the exhibition. The emergence of globalization and multiculturalism at that time led to debates around identity and difference that influenced stereotypical perceptions of the Caribbean as an exotic tropical paradise.
Challenging conventional ideas about the region, which is constituted by more than 700 islands and landmasses, Forecast Form reveals new ways of understanding the Caribbean as a place defined not by geography, language, or ethnicity, but by constant exchange, displacement, and movement.
Please note:
Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today was organized by Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
Major support for Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today was provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
The exhibition is curated by Carla Acevedo-Yates, Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator, with Iris Colburn, Curatorial Assistant, Isabel Casso, former Susman Curatorial Fellow, and Nolan Jimbo, Susman Curatorial Fellow.
The ICA/Boston presentation is coordinated by Jeffrey De Blois, Associate Curator and Publications Manager.
With warmest thanks, we gratefully acknowledge the generosity of the ICA’s Avant Guardian Society in making this exhibition possible.