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Portia Zvavahera (b. 1985, Harare, Zimbabwe) draws from her dreams to create layered paintings that evoke moments of transition and transcendence. For the artist, the act of painting is akin to an act of worship. Across her work, Zvavahera engages deeply with the African Pentecostal and Indigenous Shona traditions in which she was raised, illuminating the centrality of dreams, ancestors, and revelation to both belief systems. The artist merges painting and printmaking techniques to conjure worlds glimpsed in her dreams, where figures commune with spirits, and protective comforts and nightmares collide in stirring unions. Culling from an array of sources ranging from the angels and demons of medieval European devotional art to the vibrant patterns of Zimbabwean textile designs, Zvavahera constructs what the art historian Tamar Garb has described as “a unique and porous pictorial world.”  For the ICA, her first solo museum exhibition in the U.S., Zvavahera is presenting a selection of recent paintings centered on the theme of animals, considering how they populate her work as well as the collective imagination.  

“…You hear those numbers all the time, but you never tie names to them. I wanted you to see who my son was.”

—Pamela Bosley, Co-Founder of Purpose Over Pain, Mother of Terrell Bosley

“Our goal was to communicate the enormity of the epidemic while also honoring the individuals whose lives have been taken.”

—Jha D. Amazi, MASS Design Group

The Gun Violence Memorial Project (2019–present) creates space to gather, remember, and act in light of the ongoing gun violence crisis. A collaboration between Boston-based MASS Design Group and Songha & Company, where artist Hank Willis Thomas is Creative Director, in partnership with the gun violence prevention organization Purpose Over Pain, the project was launched at the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennale. It comprises four glass houses, each built of 700 clear bricks, a reference to the average number of gun deaths every week in the United States.[1] Many of the bricks hold remembrance objects such as baby shoes, graduation tassels, and photographs offered by families in honor of loved ones whose lives have been taken due to gun violence. These living memorials invite us to view the impact of gun violence through individual personal narratives.

In a citywide collaboration, The Gun Violence Memorial Project will be on view at the ICA, Boston City Hall, and the MASS Design Group gallery in Boston’s South End. Local collecting events organized through Louis D. Brown Peace Institute will take place in summer and fall 2024. Learn more.

[1] This number is based on a 2018 statistic. The average number of gun deaths per week in 2024 is 840. https://www.google.com/url?q=https://everytownresearch.org/report/gun-violence-in-america/&sa=D&source=docs&ust=1706218733359014&usg=AOvVaw2l589qAF8dBGGkoZI3mdEy

For several years Boston-based artist Steve Locke has been making images of male heads with their tongues sticking out—a curious expression that suggests disgust or dislike as much as it does teasing or flirting. Lushly painted in a wide-ranging palette, they are alternately disturbing, comical, vulnerable, and sensual. Locke’s works challenge the historical tendency in portraiture to depict men as authoritative and powerful by suggesting a more ambivalent array of ideas and emotions regarding masculinity. His first solo museum exhibition, there is no one left to blame features twelve all-new works—including a “constellation” of paintings, paintings affixed to sculptural supports, and a neon work bearing the show’s title.

The male faces in Locke’s portraits float disembodied within the canvas, evoking a range of references—from the myth of Medusa to historical traumas such as the French Revolution or the lynching of African-Americans to current anxieties about terrorism, war, and torture. In addition to this layered and nuanced field of associations, Locke is also experimenting with a variety of display strategies for paintings. Whether embedding them in the wall of the museum, or propping them onto sculptural supports, Locke’s treatment of oil paintings—traditionally simply hung on the wall—is commensurate with his complication of our conventional images of men. In both instances, Locke’s work pushes boundaries and suggests subtle hopes for new ideas and expanded freedoms.

Steve Locke is an Associate Professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. His work has been exhibited in several solo and group shows, and he has served as Artist-in-Residence at Savannah College of Art and Design and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Locke has received numerous awards including the LEF Foundation Contemporary Work Fund Grant and the Art Matters Foundation Award. He lives and works in Boston.

 

“Meleko Mokgosi’s work flames with purpose and pointed history.”
— Los Angeles Times 

African history meets Western forms of expression in the work of Meleko Mokgosi. Working from photos and clippings from his native Botswana, the New York–based artist creates scenes that investigate Southern Africa’s past and present.

While Mokgosi references history painting, film, and philosophy to create his powerful works, the results are distinctively his. Keenly realistic depictions of people, domestic dogs, and animals native to Africa fade into more abstract settings, or even open white space. Monumental and hung in immediate, filmstrip-like succession, these images challenge common understandings of history, country, and representation.

In Democratic Intuition, Mokgosi will present a new body of work created especially for the exhibition. Divided into five sections, the works offer five different perspectives on democracy.

The series title refers to a lecture by philosopher and activist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who suggests that to recognize the ability of other individuals and their children to think abstractly and take part in civic life is inherently democratic. Mokgosi is interested in the pursuit of recognition as both a primary goal of suppressed peoples and the essence of artistic expression.

Mokgosi currently lives in New York. His work has been exhibited at institutions such as the Botswana National Gallery, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. He was featured in the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center’s first Made in L.A. biennial in 2012, where he received the prestigious Mohn Award. This is his first solo museum exhibition.

You’re invited to an eclectic, exuberant, gender-bending, and totally wild art experience.

#RRHparty

Ramin Haerizadeh (b. Tehran, 1975), Rokni Haerizadeh (b. Tehran, 1978), and Hesam Rahmanian (b. Knoxville, 1980) live and work communally in a shared house in Dubai. The three Iranian artists—two brothers and their childhood friend—combine their individual work, and that of other artists, in sculpture, painting, drawing, and video, to generate probing and beautiful environments. The ICA invites the trio to create an on-site installation in the gallery, joining the intimacy of the artists’ collective lifestyle with their critical engagement of a globalized contemporary culture.

They brought the spirit of their underground curation with them: challenge authority, work with friends, blur boundaries, and see what springs up.

The Boston Globe

 

Explore a world of shifting borders and precarious boundaries in the work of Mona Hatoum, a major figure in art today.

Over the past three decades, Lebanese-born Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum (b. 1952, Beirut) has explored the fine line between the familiar and the uncanny in her visceral body of work. Through the juxtaposition of contradictory materials, changes of scale, or the introduction of uncharacteristic elements, she infuses commonplace and even banal objects with an element of danger, references to violence, or the capability to inflict bodily harm. In doing so, Hatoum engages the tactile imagination, her sculptures, photographs, and videos incite viewers to imagine their own bodies in relation to these unruly objects. The myriad and often-conflicting allusions speak both to the history of conflict in the artist’s homeland and to the comfort and safety provided by the domestic realm. Mona Hatoum is drawn entirely from the ICA’s Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women.

Keogh’s work “affirms the power of imagery in a way that few painters do today.” —Observer 

This exhibition is the first solo museum presentation of the paintings of New York–based artist Caitlin Keogh (b. 1982, Anchorage, Alaska). Keogh’s work explores questions of gender and representation, articulations of personal style, and the construction of artistic identity. Her vivid, seductive paintings combine the graphic lines of hand-drawn commercial illustration with the bold matte colors of the applied arts to reimagine fragments of female bodies, natural motifs, pattern, and ornamentation. Drawing from clothing design, illustration, and interior decoration as much as art history, Keogh’s large-scale canvases dissect elements of representations of femininity with considerable wit, pointing to the underlying conditions of the production of images of women. Natural forms recur throughout her work as a means of depicting artistic style, and for the way that these different depictions speak to specific political and cultural contexts, such as her examination of the naturalistic designs of the 19th-century British textile designer William Morris and how they relate to his utopian politics.

​The exhibition takes its title from an interpretive poem written by Charity Coleman for Keogh’s recent artist book Headless Woman with Parrot (2017). Keogh is creating a new body of work in response to Coleman’s imagistic poem for the exhibition.

A playful and poignant parable of economic crisis and contemporary culture

Hito Steyerl (b. 1966, Munich, Germany) is an artist, filmmaker, and writer whose art speaks urgently to our digitally mediated era. In her work, she has addressed the wide-ranging effects of today’s mass proliferation and dissemination of images, issues of surveillance and militarization, and the evolving functions of technology in our networked culture. Liquidity Inc. (2014) is a new acquisition to the ICA’s collection and is on view at the museum for the first time. As suggested by the title, this video sculpture uses water as its guiding theme, and has particular resonance at the ICA’s waterfront location. Liquidity Inc. takes as a point of departure the story of Jacob Wood, a former financial analyst who lost his job during the 2008 economic recession and decided to turn his hobby in mixed martial arts into a career. Steyerl follows actor and martial artist Bruce Lee’s dictum to “be shapeless, formless, like water,” turning “liquidity” into a trope fluid enough to speak about everything from the weather to water as material resource, to the circulation of information and assets. Projected onto a double-sided screen in front of a wave-like ramp structure, Liquidity Inc. is a captivating parable of economic crisis and contemporary culture that is by turns playful and poignant.

Hito Steyerl: Liquidity Inc. is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today, on view February 7 – May 28, 2018.

Organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Jeffrey De Blois, Assistant Curator.

Los Angeles–based artist Rodney McMillian creates sculptures, videos, and paintings, often based on found objects or elaborately constructed forms. Formally striking and emotionally charged, their poetic force is often sharpened by an engagement with personal and political themes.

For Momentum 14, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States, McMillian presents new work including a large-scale painting on canvas that spans the length of a gallery wall, two videos, and sculptures made using furniture from his home.

McMillian brings an immediacy and rawness to his work that reaches out, often literally, to the viewer, with appendages sprouting from large canvases and wall pieces. Found objects, such as a stained armchair, a kitchen table and chairs, and a refrigerator with a hole punched through the freezer door, speak eloquently to a sense of both abjection and loss. They are relics of former occupants, imbued with their physicality.

In these powerful works, themes of race, class, and identity are subtly woven into a formal language that mines personal and cultural history as it looks squarely at our present condition.

Vivian Suter (b. 1949, Buenos Aires, Argentina) works in close partnership with the natural environment surrounding her home and studio in Panajachel, Guatemala. Her method often involves moving her canvases between the indoors and outdoors and exposing them to the climate in order to allow nature to commingle with her broadly painted swaths of vivid color. Inspired by the surrounding vegetation and landscape, Suter’s gestural compositions work in concert with rainfall and mud puddles, with the light that passes between branches and the animals in the forest. A place of tremendous beauty and plant and animal life as well as the rich, indigenous Mayan culture, Panajachel and the area around Lake Atitlán has also witnessed countless disruptions throughout history, from active volcanoes and numerous floods to Spanish colonization and a thirty-six-year civil war that ended in 1996. This installation of layered and suspended canvases invites visitors to discover her unique dialogue with imagined and natural worlds.
 

Credits

This exhibition is organized by Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Curator.

Support for Vivian Suter is generously provided by Fotene Demoulas and Tom Coté and Alan and Vivien Hassenfeld.