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.
 

Raúl de Nieves (b. 1983, Michoacán, Mexico) is a New York–based interdisciplinary artist, performer, and musician whose multifaceted practice ranges from stained-glass-style narrative paintings to animated performances, to densely adorned figurative sculptures encrusted with bangles, beads, bells, sequins, and other homespun materials. These opulent, joyful sculptures reference traditional costumes in Mexican culture and modes of dress from drag, ballroom, and queer club cultures, while also evoking religious processional attire and the outfits worn by circus performers. All of his works share a distinctive visual language that draws from Mexican craft traditions, religious iconography, mythology, and folktales to explore the transformational possibilities of adornment and the mutability of sexuality and identity. For the ICA, de Nieves is creating a body of interconnected works rooted in memory and exploring themes of personal transformation. The Treasure House of Memory expands the artist’s inventive adaptation of iconographic traditions inherited from the past through vibrant amalgamations of form and material rendered in an energetic and accessible visual language. 

 

The interdisciplinary practice of Los Angeles–based artist Carolina Caycedo (b. 1978, London) is grounded in vital questions related to asymmetrical power relations, dispossession, extraction of resources, and environmental justice.

Since 2012, Caycedo has conducted an ongoing project, Be Dammed, examining the wide-reaching impacts of dams built along waterways by transnational corporations, including the displacement and dispossession of peoples, particularly in Latin American countries such as Brazil or Colombia (where she was raised and frequently returns).

At the ICA, Caycedo will present the culmination of one component of the project, a series of hanging sculptures called Cosmotarrayas that are assembled with handmade fishing nets and other objects collected during field research in river communities affected by the privatization of waterways. These objects, many of which were entrusted to her by individuals no longer able to use them, demonstrate the meaningful connectivity and exchange at the heart of Caycedo’s practice. At the same time, they also represent the dispossession of these individuals and their continued resistance to corporations and governments seeking to control the flow of water and thus their way of life.

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Exhibition essay: The River as a Common Good: Carolina Caycedo’s Cosmotarrayas

 

 

Educational materials

Connecticut-based multidisciplinary artist Tammy Nguyen (b. 1984, San Francisco) creates paintings, works on paper, unique artist books, and publications, including through her independent imprint Passenger Pigeon Press. In the densely layered symphonic space of her gilded paintings, Nguyen explores contradiction and confusion through intertwining narratives of geopolitical, environmental, and spiritual subjects. Many of her paintings are composite images that reconsider lesser-known histories against the backdrop of lush landscapes teeming with insects, animals, and plants imbued with agency, and varied symbols of violent conquest or soft power. Throughout, the beautiful aesthetic of Nguyen’s paintings is disarming, creating a productive tension that opens space to consider the histories and subjects her work examines. For the ICA, her first solo museum exhibition in the U.S., Nguyen is creating a new, interconnected body of paintings, works on paper, and artist books. These works, inspired by East Asian landscape painting, are all related to the relationship between man and nature, landscape and wilderness, as articulated in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s influential book-length essay Nature, written in 1836 in Concord, Massachusetts. Nguyen maps the lasting impact of Emerson’s writing on still commonly held ideas about nature and landscape, especially through a studied consideration of land reform programs in Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

New on View presents a small selection of works on view at the museum for the first time, including several recently acquired works to the permanent collection. Exploring themes such as domesticity and photography in an expanded field, New on View demonstrates that works recently added to the ICA’s collection build on its strengths by taking them in expansive new directions.

Jordan Nassar’s solo exhibition—his first in Boston—presents a selection of his intricate embroidered and mixed media works. Nassar (b. 1985 in New York) draws on traditional Palestinian craft techniques to investigate ideas of home, land, and memory. His work, which he creates in collaboration with Palestinian embroiderers and craftspersons, combines geometric patterns with abstracted landscapes, imbued, in the artist’s words, “with yearning, while hopeful and beautiful.” Through complex patterning and a unique attendance to form and color, the painterly aesthetic of Nassar’s embroidery allows the artist to explore relationships between craft and history in new contemporary dialogues. 

Wall Text and Object Labels

Credits

Organized by Anni A. Pullagura, Curatorial Assistant.

Support for Jordan Nassar: Fantasy and Truth is generously provided by Oliver and Negin Ewald.