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

From early breakthroughs to mature formal experiments, How High the Moon is the first retrospective to trace the evolution of Stanley Whitney’s wholly unique and powerful abstractions over the course of his 50-year career. The exhibition’s title is inspired by the 1940 song penned by Nancy Hamilton and Morgan Lewis, which became a jazz standard that has conveyed enchantment, longing, and, in some interpretations, has reached for the sublime. 

Since he began making them in 2002, Whitney’s square-format, loosely gridded abstract canvases have increasingly captured the imagination of viewers. Each contains four horizontal rows of alternately askant and ordered squares painted in varying degrees of opacity. While Whitney’s format has remained consistent over the past twenty years, no painting is the same as another. As he builds these immersive abstractions, Whitney holds space for his viewers to focus not on each painting’s subject, but rather on our own response to color. 

How High the Moon features extensive installations of the artist’s improvisatory small paintings; his drawings and prints, which constitute their own important practice for Whitney; and a chronological selection of the artist’s sketchbooks spanning from 1987 to 2021, which offer a view into Whitney’s engagement with the written word as well as politics. Throughout, his work is put in the context of his diverse sources of inspiration, which include music, poetry, American quilts, and the history of art and architecture, among many others. 

Whitney’s powerful, color-saturated abstractions give viewers the space to feel what it means to be human, to mentally wander, and to gather the strength to survive. This touring retrospective, the first survey of Whitney’s work ever assembled, demonstrates the true height of his achievement. 

Examine the political, social, cultural, and aesthetic priorities of women of color during the emergence of second-wave feminism.

Focusing on the work of black women artists, We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 examines the political, social, cultural, and aesthetic priorities of women of color during the emergence of second-wave feminism. It is the first exhibition to highlight the voices and experiences of women of color—distinct from the primarily white, middle-class mainstream feminist movement—in order to reorient conversations around race, feminism, political action, art production, and art history in this significant historical period. The exhibition features a wide array of work, including performance, film, and video art, as well as photography, painting, sculpture, and printmaking by a diverse group of artists and activists who lived and worked at the intersections of avant-garde art worlds and radical political movements.

Artists include Camille Billops, Elizabeth Catlett, Julie Dash, Maren Hassinger, Jae Jarrell, Lorraine O’Grady, Howardena Pindell, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, Lorna Simpson, and Carrie Mae Weems, among many others.

A Place for Me celebrates a new generation of artists at the vanguard of contemporary painting. David Antonio Cruz, Louis Fratino, Doron Langberg, Aubrey Levinthal, Gisela McDaniel, Arcmanoro Niles, Celeste Rapone, and Ambera Wellmann are propelling figurative painting’s recent revival by depicting what they love—their friends, lovers, and family; studio spaces and homes; and the scenes that make up their everyday. Evoking intimacy, community, and the personal in the power to represent oneself in painting, these artists consider the politics of seeing and being seen and how the process of painting might register care, tenderness, fragility, empathy, and resilience. Colorful, surprising, and full of life, A Place for Me is a testament to the vitality of contemporary figurative art, reflecting a multitude of styles and approaches to painting through a cross-section of contemporary painting today.

About the Artists

An open gallery with three prominent works (two sculptures and a painting) in a dimly lit space unfinished with industrial raw walls in the left background.

To expand access to i’m yours: Encounters with Art in Our Times during the pandemic, the ICA has created a virtual experience of the exhibition. 

Explore i’m yours virtually

Events of this year have brought the world to a halt, affecting global commerce and security, putting our own mortality in sharp focus, and heightening existing inequities, injustices, and political tensions. In this time, we ask: What is the role of art and museums? 

i’m yours: Encounters with Art in Our Times celebrates the power of experiencing art in person. This exhibition, which borrows its title from a Henry Taylor painting in the ICA collection, is conceived as an invitation to our visitors to create a personal connection with works of art. Collaboratively and virtually organized in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic and social unrest, i’m yours is presented within a dramatic, raw architectural space as a series of small galleries, each offering a different artistic perspective to emphasize that the stories museums may tell through art are never fixed but always in process. Comprising unique encounters with new acquisitions and iconic works from the ICA’s collection, the exhibition’s groupings, or scenes, address a range of topics, including ideas of home and history, social and material transformation, and frames of identity in portraiture and sculpture.

Including works by Njideka Akunyili CrosbyKader Attia, Firelei Báez, Louise Bourgeois, Nan Goldin, Simone Leigh, Doris Salcedo, and many others, i’m yours sparks wonder, encourages questions, challenges assumptions, and provides a space for reflection. 

Credits

Organized by Jeffrey De Blois, Assistant Curator and Publications Manager; Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Curator; Anni Pullagura, Curatorial Assistant; and Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator.

Support for i’m yours: Encounters with Art in Our Times is provided by First Republic Bank.

First Republic logo

Additional support is generously provided by Lori and Dennis Baldwin and The Paul and Phyllis Fireman Charitable Foundation; Ed Berman and Kate McDonough; Clark and Susana Bernard; Kate and Chuck Brizius; Paul and Katie Buttenwieser; Stephanie and John Connaughton; Karen and Brian Conway; Steve Corkin and Dan Maddalena; Jean-François and Nathalie Ducrest; Bridgitt and Bruce Evans; the Ewald Family Foundation; Sandra and Gerald Fineberg; James and Audrey Foster; Hilary and Geoffrey Grove; Vivien and Alan Hassenfeld and the Hassenfeld Family Foundation; Jodi and Hal Hess; Marina Kalb and David Feinberg; Barbara Lee; Tristin and Martin Mannion; Aedie and John McEvoy; Ted Pappendick and Erica Gervais Pappendick; The Red Elm Tree Charitable Foundation; Charles and Fran Rodgers; Mark and Marie Schwartz; Kambiz and Nazgol Shahbazi; Kim Sinatra; Charlotte and Herbert S. Wagner III; and anonymous donors.