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“My works are propositions, meant to create alternate pasts and potential futures, questioning history and culture in order to provide a space for reassessing the present.” — Firelei Báez

This 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. 2, 2024—Mar. 16, 2025) and the Des Moines Art Center (Jun. 14, 2025—Sep. 21, 2025).

Sweeping survey of 20th- and 21st-century art featuring work by Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Francis Alÿs, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jordan Casteel, Paul Klee, Glenn Ligon, Oscar Murillo, Faith Ringgold, and more 

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.

Artists include:

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).

Educational resources

Classroom Kits 

Boston public school teachers can apply to receive a free ICA classroom art kit that includes an art making lesson and art supplies such as clay, raffia, and more. Each kit accommodates 25 students.

Poss Family Mediatheque 

The Mediatheque features a library of resources on black feminism, in partnership with Frugal Bookstore — Boston’s only Black-owned bookstore — and highlights the U.S. Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale. See a list of recommended books

Audio responses to selected works in the exhibition students by students Spelman College’s AUC Art History + Curatorial Studies Collective will be available in the Mediatheque and on the ICA’s Digital Guide on Bloomberg Connects. Written texts by the students are available on simoneleighvenice2022.org. Listen now

Bank of America Art Lab 

Boston-based artist Elisa Hamilton’s participatory installation Can You See Me? invites visitors to reflect on identity through image and what we choose to share about ourselves.

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:

  • This exhibition contains one artwork that features flashing and strobing lights and may not be suitable for all visitors.
  • This exhibition contains works dealing with graphic content. Visitor discretion is advised, particularly for those accompanying children.

In the Poss Family Mediatheque

Stop by the ICA’s Poss Family Mediatheque to read about five artists of Caribbean heritage living and working in Boston and their impact on the city. Featured artists include J. Cottle, Allentza Michel, Yvette Modestin, Mar Parrilla, and Romy Saint Hilaire.

Digital content is presented in partnership with Romy St. Hilaire, founder of Art in the Antilles, which supports Afro-Caribbean artists to equitably navigate the creative economy.

Artwork Transcripts

Deborah Jack, the fecund, the lush and the salted land waits for a harvest . . . her people . . . ripe with promise, wait until the next blowing season, 2022

The audio in this artwork consists of a woman speaking about mining salt as a youngster, string music, excerpts from a 1948 Dutch documentary on St. Maarten, and the sound of the ocean.

[music]

You know, I am—I can tell a little bit about the salt pond, what I know. In that time, in the salt pond time, they were good times. They were good times. The people was very industrious. And they didn’t have nothing, no other alternative but the salt pond. And everybody, everybody used to work their own garden. Everybody worked their own garden.

And when the time come for the salt, because you had to . . . You couldn’t leave the salt pond, just run like that, the sea go in, come out, go in, come out. They had—it had to be taken care of.

[music]

Keith Piper, Trade Winds, 1992

The audio in this artwork consists of howling winds as well as excerpts from Burning Spear’s song “Columbus” and the 1984 documentary Africa: A Voyage of Discovery.

SPEAKER 1: The meeting place of the old world and the new was here.

[music]

Not the discovery of a brave new world. Not glorious Spanish conquistadors. The plantations, which followed Columbus and slavery. Contact with Europe is still seen as having brought with it little but disease, servitude, and deprivation. The destruction of Native peoples and culture.

SPEAKER 2: What about the Arawak Indians? What about the Arawak Indians?

SPEAKER 1: Contact with Europe is still seen as having brought with it little but disease, servitude, and deprivation.

SPEAKER 2: The Indians couldn’t hang on no longer. The Indians couldn’t hang on no longer. Here comes Black man and woman and children. Here comes Black man and woman and children.

SPEAKER 1: Not the discovery of a brave, new world. Not glorious Spanish conquistadors. The plantations, which followed Columbus and slavery.

SPEAKER 3: They were replaced by African slaves.

SPEAKER 2: What about the Arawak Indians? What about the Arawak Indians?

SPEAKER 3: Contact with Europe is still seen as having brought with it little but disease, servitude, and deprivation.

SPEAKER 2: What about the Arawak Indians? The Indians couldn’t hang on no longer. Here comes Black man and woman and children. Here comes Black man and woman and children.

SPEAKER 3: The overseas economies of European powers like England, France, Holland, and Portugal. The overseas economies of European powers like England, France, Holland, and Portugal profited mightily from sugar and from the slave trade needed to produce it.

SPEAKER 2: The Indians couldn’t hang on no longer. Here comes Black man and woman and children. The Indians couldn’t hang on no longer. Here comes Black man and woman and children.

SPEAKER 3: The meeting place of the old world and the new was here. The meeting place of the old world and the new was here.

SPEAKER 1: Not the discovery of a brave new world. Not glorious Spanish conquistadors. The plantations, which followed Columbus and slavery.

SPEAKER 3: Contact with Europe is still seen as having brought with it little but disease, servitude, and deprivation.

SPEAKER 1: The destruction of Native peoples and culture.

SPEAKER 2: What about the Arawak Indians? What about the Arawak Indians?

SPEAKER 3: Contact with Europe is still seen as having brought with it little but disease, servitude, and deprivation.

SPEAKER 2: The Indians couldn’t hang on no longer. The Indians couldn’t hang on no longer. Here comes Black man and woman and children. Here comes Black man and woman and children.

SPEAKER 1: Not the discovery of a brave, new world.

Large print didactics

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Credits

Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today was organized by Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts logo

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.