ICA/Boston opens Portia Zvavahera’s first U.S. solo museum exhibition
Opening Aug. 28, the exhibition features new boldly colored paintings born out of the artist’s dreams
(Boston, MA—MAY 29, 2025) This August, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens artist Portia Zvavahera’s (born 1985 in Harare, Zimbabwe) first solo museum exhibition in the U.S. Inspired by Zvavahera’s dreams, her layered compositions merge painting and printmaking techniques to create a dazzling array of flat layers and textures. These include the markings of wax relief, linocut stamps, cardboard stencils, lace, and palm leaves from her garden that form figures in atmospheric settings. This exhibition centers animals and the role they play in Zvavahera’s work and the many traditions she draws upon. Featuring a selection of seven of the artist’s works, Zvavahera’s ICA presentation includes three new paintings on view for the first time. Organized by Ruth Erickson, Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, with Meghan Clare Considine, Curatorial Assistant, Portia Zvavahera is on view from Aug. 28, 2025, to Jan. 19, 2026.
Portia Zvavahera includes a selection of recent and new works that focus on the animals that populate the artist’s dreams and thus her pictorial world, revealing the significant and symbolic role animals play. A single powerful dream can produce several distinct and evocative paintings. Throughout the work, Zvavahera engages with Zimbabwean figurative painting as well as the Indigenous Shona and African Pentecostal faith traditions in which she was raised. Her works navigate a broad range of references, from the Shona belief that eagles travel between heaven and earth carrying messages, to the symbolic role of the snake in the biblical story of Adam and Eve, to the flattened pictorial field of modern art.
“Zvavahera compares her practice to the act of worship,” said Erickson and Considine. “Her vivid paintings conjure worlds glimpsed in her dreams, where animals repeatedly appear, bringing with them foreboding and prophetic associations that she is able to visualize in her work.”
In Ndirikumabvisa (2024), a hoard of rats is painted alongside a figure lying prostrate atop a dripping red background, referencing a nightmare during Zvavahera’s pregnancy. Rats reappear in Tinosvetuka Rusvingo (2024), where they gather underneath a trio of winged figures that evoke associations with angels in Western painting traditions and large birds of prey, which are powerful creatures in Shona cosmology. A bull appears to commune with a figure in Prayer amid a battle (2021), and coiled and double-headed snakes appear in her most recent paintings completed in May 2025. This exhibition will be an opportunity for a wider audience to encounter the work of one of the most exciting contemporary painters working in Southern Africa today.
Artist Biography Portia Zvavahera was born in 1985 in Harare, Zimbabwe, where she currently lives and works. She studied at the BAT Visual Arts Studio, National Gallery of Zimbabwe, from 2003 to 2004. She then received a diploma in fine arts from Harare Polytechnic in 2006.
The artist has presented several solo exhibitions with Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg (2014–2023), and a solo exhibition with Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles (2017), as well as solo and group exhibitions at David Zwirner, New York, Los Angeles and London (2020-2024). The National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare, presented her solo exhibition Under My Skin in 2010, and in 2020, the Institute of Contemporary Art Indian Ocean, Port Louis, Mauritius, held her solo exhibition Walk of Life. She was invited to show her work as part of the Zimbabwean Pavilion exhibition Dudziro: Interrogating the Visions of Religious Beliefs at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. In 2022, her work was included in the Milk of Dreams exhibition at the 59th Venice Biennale. In October 2024, Zvavahera had her first European institutional solo exhibition at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, part of their Open Space programming; in the same month the artist had her first UK solo institutional exhibition Zvakazarurwa, organized between Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge and Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (travelled in 2025).
About the ICA Since its founding in 1936, the ICA has shared the pleasures of reflection, inspiration, imagination, and provocation that contemporary art offers with its audiences. A museum at the intersection of contemporary art and civic life, the ICA has advanced a bold vision for amplifying the artist’s voice and expanding the museum’s role as educator, incubator, and convener. Its exhibitions, performances, and educational programs provide access to the breadth and diversity of contemporary art, artists, and the creative process, inviting audiences of all ages and backgrounds to participate in the excitement of new art and ideas. The ICA is located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA, 02210. The Watershed is located at 256 Marginal Street, East Boston, MA 02128. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at icaboston.org. Follow the ICA on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
Credits Portia Zvavahera is organized by Ruth Erickson, Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, with Meghan Clare Considine, Curatorial Assistant.
Kimowan Metchewais, Chief’s Blanket, 2002. Paper, ink. 46 7/8 x 70 inches (119 x 178 cm). National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (26/9521). Photo by NMAI photo services.
This fall, the ICA/Boston opens An Indigenous Present, a thematic exhibition surveying 100 years of Indigenous artistic practice
Nationally touring exhibition curated by artist Jeffrey Gibson and Jenelle Porter; includes work by Teresa Baker, Raven Chacon, Kimowan Metchewais, Caroline Monnet, George Morrison, Mary Sully, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and Kay WalkingStick, among others
(Boston, MA—MAY 2, 2025) This October, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens An Indigenous Present, a thematic exhibition spanning 100 years of contemporary Indigenous art. The exhibition includes new commissions and significant works by 15 artists who use strategies of abstraction to represent personal and collective narratives, describe specific and imagined places, and build upon cultural and aesthetic traditions. Co-organized by artist Jeffrey Gibson and independent curator Jenelle Porter, the exhibition offers an expansive consideration of Indigenous art practices that highlights a continuum of elders and emerging makers, and premieres newly commissioned site-specific works by Raven Chacon, Caroline Monnet, and Anna Tsouhlarakis. An Indigenous Present emerges from Gibson and Porter’s 2023 landmark publication of the same name, which, through a collaborative process, brought together work by Native North American artists exploring diverse approaches to concept, form, and medium. Their engagement with artists during the making of the book inspired this exhibition—one that demonstrates the endless variability of abstraction and its capacity to hold multiple forms and histories. An Indigenous Present debuts at the ICA, where it will be on view from October 9, 2025, through March 8, 2026, before traveling to the Frist Art Museum in Nashville (June 26—September 27, 2026) and the Frye Art Museum in Seattle (November 7, 2026—February 14, 2027).
“This exhibition is one take on the field of contemporary art and culture by Native and Indigenous makers. Some of these artists have been working for decades, and I follow in their path; others are at an earlier stage in their career, and I see new routes and possibilities in their respective practices. Together, they are amplifying the histories that have come before them and building a new context for present and future artists,” said Gibson.
Porter added: “Since curating Jeffrey’s first solo museum exhibition at the ICA in 2013, he and I have continued to think together about ways to enlarge art histories. This exhibition is a proposal, one that explores the ways that these artists challenge the often arbitrary, historical categorizations of art by Indigenous makers.”
The exhibition unfolds across 10 galleries, beginning with a focus on the work of George Morrison and Mary Sully, two important forebearers in the development of contemporary Indigenous art during the first half of the 20th century. Throughout the exhibition, works by emerging artists are positioned in dialogue with those by more established makers. Kay WalkingStick and Dakota Mace explore seriality and repetition in bodies of work realized in the 1970s and 2020s, respectively. WalkingStick’s Chief Joseph Series—dedicated to the heroic Niimíipuu /Nez Perce chief—presents a grid of 32 paintings that characterize the artist’s decades-long devotion to serial forms and storytelling. Mace’s So’ II (Stars II) is composed of 40 unique chemigram prints that draw on Diné (Navajo) design histories and heritage. In another artistic dialogue, George Morrison and Teresa Baker evoke the land and light of their own ancestral homelands through an interplay of color and form. Morrison, who trained alongside Abstract Expressionists painters in New York in the 1950s, is known for vibrant compositions, especially those inspired by the horizon near his Lake Superior, MN, home. Baker composes with yarn, paint, willow, and hide on irregularly cut artificial turf to create large-scale abstractions that convey her memories of place, such as the Northern Plains of her youth, as well as legacies of color field painting and collage.
At the ICA, An Indigenous Present includes two new commissions that expand the exhibition beyond the galleries. An immersive sound work by Raven Chacon will fill the ICA’s Founders Gallery overlooking Boston Harbor. Monnet’s site-specific installation for the museum’s Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall is composed of commercial building materials—such as Tyvek and roofing underlayment—that are sewn into a fractal-based composition inspired, in part, by Boston’s 600-year history of land reclamation and the ICA’s harbor location. The fractal patterns, or population “blooms,” derive from Anishinaabeg designs that, for the artist, symbolize interconnectedness, knowledge transmission, and kinship. Throughout the run of the exhibition, the ICA will host a series of performances of Raven Chacon’s scores and sound works, a film series curated by artist Sky Hopinka in the ICA’s Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater, and a number of other public programs (dates and details to be announced).
Artist List Teresa Baker (Mandan/Hidatsa; born 1985 in Watford City, ND) Raven Chacon (Diné; born 1977 in Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation) Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation; born 1984 in Bellingham, WA) Sonya Kelliher-Combs (Iñupiaq/Athabascan; born 1969 in Bethel, AK) Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill (Cree and Métis; born 1979 in Comox, British Columbia) George Longfish (Seneca and Tuscarora; born 1942 in Ohsweken, Ontario) Dakota Mace (Diné; born 1991 in Albuquerque, NM) Kimowan Metchewais (Cree; born 1963 in Oxbow, Saskatchewan; died 2011, St. Paul, Alberta) Caroline Monnet (Anishinaabe [Algonquin] and French; born 1985 in Ottawa, Ontario) George Morrison (Ojibwe; born 1919 in Chippewa City, MN; died 2000, Red Rock, MN) Audie Murray (Cree and Métis; born 1993 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan) Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation; born 1940 in St. Ignatius Mission, Flathead Reservation, MT; died 2025, Corrales, NM) Mary Sully (Susan Mabel Deloria) (Yankton Dakota; born 1896 in Standing Rock Reservation, ND; died 1963, Omaha, NE) Anna Tsouhlarakis (Navajo/Creek/Greek; born 1977 in Lawrence, KS) Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee and Anglo; born 1935 in Syracuse, NY)
Credits An Indigenous Present is organized by Jeffrey Gibson and Jenelle Porter, guest curators, with Erika Umali, Curator of Collections, and Max Gruber, Curatorial Assistant.
This exhibition is supported in part by Peggy J. Koenig, Barbara H. Lloyd, and Kim Sinatra.
With warmest thanks, we gratefully acknowledge the generosity of the ICA’s Avant Guardian Society in making this exhibition possible.
About the ICA Since its founding in 1936, the ICA has shared the pleasures of reflection, inspiration, imagination, and provocation that contemporary art offers with its audiences. A museum at the intersection of contemporary art and civic life, the ICA has advanced a bold vision for amplifying the artist’s voice and expanding the museum’s role as educator, incubator, and convener. Its exhibitions, performances, and educational programs provide access to the breadth and diversity of contemporary art, artists, and the creative process, inviting audiences of all ages and backgrounds to participate in the excitement of new art and ideas. The ICA is located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA, 02210. The Watershed is located at 256 Marginal Street, East Boston, MA 02128. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at icaboston.org.
Media Contact Theresa Romualdez, press@icaboston.org
Sarah Sze. Photo by Deborah Feingold.
ICA/Boston announces Sarah Sze as inaugural recipient of the Meraki Artist Award
New $100,000 award recognizes the achievements of women visual artists
(Boston, MA—MARCH 18, 2025) The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) is pleased to announce Sarah Sze (b. 1969, Boston, MA) as the inaugural recipient of its new Meraki Artist Award. Widely recognized for expanding the boundaries between painting, sculpture, video, and installation, Sze’s work blends the intimate with the monumental, precision with chaos, and the physical with the digital. Her intimate paintings and large-scale installations and public works challenge perceptions of space, time, and scale, making her one of the most compelling artists of our time.
“It’s a huge honor to be the first recipient of the Meraki Artist Award and I’m inspired by the dedication to love, care, and art that the award stands for,” said Sze.
Generously funded by Fotene Demoulas, the $100,000 award celebrates the artistic achievements of women artists and their impact on the field of contemporary visual art. Sze will accept the Meraki Artist Award at the museum’s annual Women’s Luncheon on May 5, 2025.
“I am honored to collaborate with the ICA to spotlight the passion and presence that women visual artists bring to their practice through the Meraki Artist Award,” said Demoulas. “I want to offer heartfelt congratulations to Sarah, whose innovate work inspires us to see the world in new ways.”
“In Greek, the word meraki means to pour your soul into something, and I can think of no better way to describe Fotene’s longstanding support of artists and the ICA,” said Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director of the ICA. “The generosity of this award is echoed in the open spirit and artistic expansiveness of Sarah’s work. We are thrilled to recognize Sarah as the inaugural recipient of the Meraki Artist Award and to celebrate her important contributions to art and culture.”
An exhibition of works promised to the ICA by Fotene and Tom Coté will go on view at the museum in January 2026. Reflecting their longtime support of artists at every stage of their career through exhibitions, publications, and museum acquisitions, the exhibition features work by 20 artists including Charlene von Heyl, Deana Lawson, Deborah Roberts, Diedrick Brackens, Laura Owens, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Mickalene Thomas, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Olga de Amaral, and Sarah Sze. The artworks reflect multiple generations, styles, media, and thematic concerns, exemplifying a sustained interest in formal and material complexity and a steadfast belief in the singular perspectives that artists contribute to the world.
About Sarah Sze Sarah Sze gleans objects and images from worlds both physical and digital, assembling them into complex multimedia works that shift scale between microscopic observation and macroscopic perspective on the infinite. A peerless bricoleur, Sze moves with a light touch across proliferating media. Her dynamic, generative body of work spans sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, video, and installation while always addressing the precarious nature of materiality and grappling with matters of entropy and temporality.
Born in Boston, Sze earned a BA from Yale University in 1991 and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 1997. While still in graduate school, she challenged the very nature of sculpture, at MoMA PS1 in New York, by burrowing into the walls of the building, creating sculptural portals and crafting ecosystems that radically transformed the host architecture. A year later, for her first solo institutional exhibition, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, she presented Many a Slip (1999), an immersive installation sprawling through several rooms in which flickering projections were scattered among complex assemblages of everyday objects. This marked Sze’s first foray into video, which has since become a central medium of her installations. Citing the Russian Constructivist notion of the “kiosk” as a key inspiration, she conceived subsequent installations as portable stations for the interchange of images and the exchange of information. Sze represented the United States in the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, and her work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including recently at Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2024); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2023); and Fondation Cartier, Paris (2020), and featured in the Carnegie International (1999); Whitney Biennial (2000); and the Bienal de São Paulo (2002). She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003.
About the Meraki Artist Award The Meraki Artist Award is an annual artist award that is a key part of the ICA’s efforts to exhibit, present and collect the work of women artists. The award takes its inspiration from the Greek word “meraki” (may-rah-kee), which means to do something with soul, love, or creativity. The Meraki Artist Award is funded by Fotene Demoulas and will continue to be supported for the next ten years. The artist will be recognized at the ICA’s annual Women’s Luncheon.
About the ICA Since its founding in 1936, the ICA has shared the pleasures of reflection, inspiration, imagination, and provocation that contemporary art offers with its audiences. A museum at the intersection of contemporary art and civic life, the ICA has advanced a bold vision for amplifying the artist’s voice and expanding the museum’s role as educator, incubator, and convener. Its exhibitions, performances, and educational programs provide access to the breadth and diversity of contemporary art, artists, and the creative process, inviting audiences of all ages and backgrounds to participate in the excitement of new art and ideas. The ICA is located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA, 02210. The Watershed is located at 256 Marginal Street, East Boston, MA 02128. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at icaboston.org. Follow the ICA on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
Media Contact Theresa Romualdez, press@icaboston.org
Installation view, Reimagine: Himalayan Art Now, Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art, New York, 2024. Sneha Shrestha, Mending and Moving, 2024. Mixed media. Dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist. Photo by Jane Louie.
Installation view, Yorgos Efthymiadis: The Lighthouse Keepers, Gallery Kayafas, Boston, 2024. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Kayafas, Boston.
Installation view, WHAT WOOD, Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, Massachusetts, 2015. Damien Hoar de Galvan, Something Could Happen at Any Moment, 2010–15. Mixed media. Dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist.
ICA/Boston announces recipients of the 2025 James and Audrey Foster Prize
(Boston, MA—Feb. 20, 2025) Alison Croney Moses, Yorgos Efthymiadis, Damien Hoar de Galvan, and Sneha Shrestha (aka Imagine) have been named the recipients of the 2025 James and Audrey Foster Prize, the museum announced today. Their work will be presented in the 2025 James and Audrey Foster Prize Exhibition, on view from Aug. 25, 2025, through Jan. 19, 2026. Organized by Tessa Bachi Haas, Assistant Curator, the exhibition recognizes the global and local roots of each artist, and how this is reflected in their practice.
“The biannual James and Audrey Foster Prize Exhibition consistently introduces audiences to the vitality of Boston’s artistic community and supports artists through exhibition, collaboration and a deepened sense of community. It is always a highly anticipated moment within our exhibition program,” said Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director. “We are grateful to Jim and Audrey Foster, whose ongoing generosity over two decades has made it possible for us to share the work of immensely talented area artists with many thousands of people in person and online.”
“We are thrilled to congratulate the 2025 Foster Prize artists, whose work demonstrates the strength and creativity of Boston’s arts scene. We can’t wait to see their work on view in the ICA galleries,” the Fosters added.
Following recent visits to over 50 Boston-area artist studios, Haas wishes to express her immense gratitude to each artist with whom she has met during this time and over her years in Boston. “It is a unique and necessary privilege to spend extended time with artists in their studios,” said Haas. “I am immensely proud to organize an exhibition of four outstanding artists who are pillars of supporting the arts, equity, and education in our region.”
“Each of this year’s Foster Prize recipients draws on materials that connect their local and global roots,” said Haas. “Whether through woodworking, installation, sculpture, painting, and photography, the expansive art practices of Croney Moses, Efthymiadis, Galvan, and Shrestha underpin the strength of our greater Boston arts community.”
The James and Audrey Foster Prize is key to the ICA’s effort to recognize, present, and acquire works by exceptional Boston-area artists. First established in 1999, the Foster Prize (formerly the ICA Artist Prize) expanded its format when the museum opened its Seaport building in 2006. James and Audrey Foster, passionate collectors and lifelong supporters of contemporary art, endowed the prize, ensuring the ICA’s ability to sustain and grow the program for years to come.
The program has proven to be a springboard for many artists to have major museum exhibitions. The selection of artists for the James and Audrey Foster Prize Exhibition spans generations and results from sustained conversations with Boston’s community of working artists. More than 46 artists have participated in the Foster Prize exhibition program, including: Ambreen Butt (1999), Taylor Davis (2001), Kelly Sherman (2006), Rania Matar (2008), Evelyn Rydz (2010), Luther Price (2013), Lucy Kim (2017), Lavaughn Jenkins (2019), Marlon Forrester (2021), Yu-Wen Wu (2023), and many more. Works by many Foster Prize recipients have entered the ICA’s permanent collection.
Artist Biographies Alison Croney Moses (born 1983, Fayetteville, North Carolina; lives and works in Roslindale, MA, and Allston, Boston, MA) creates wooden objects that reach for your senses—the smell of cedar, the glowing color of honey, the round form that signifies safety and warmth, the gentle curve that beckons to be touched. Born and raised in North Carolina by Guyanese parents, Croney Moses remembers making clothing, food, furniture, and art as part of her childhood. She carries these values and habits into adulthood and parenting, creating experiences, conversations, and educational programs that cultivate the current and next generation of artists and leaders in art and craft. Croney Moses holds an MA in Sustainable Business & Communities from Goddard College, and a BFA in Furniture Design from Rhode Island School of Design. She has been included in group exhibitions at Houston Center for Contemporary Craft (2024-25); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2024); Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Discovery Center (2023); Center for Art in Wood, Philadelphia (2022-23); MassArt Art Museum, Boston (2022); the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2021-22); and Center for Architecture + Design, Philadelphia (2021), among others. Croney Moses’s work is in the collections of Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, MA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Detroit Institute of Arts Museum; and Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. She is recipient of the 2024 Black Mountain College International Artist Prize, the 2023 Boston Artadia Award, the 2022 USA Fellowship in Craft, and a finalist of the 2024 LOEWE FOUNDATION Craft Prize. She will debut her first public art installation at the Boston Public Art Triennial in 2025 through their Accelerator program. This is Croney Moses’s first institutional solo exhibition.
Damien Hoar de Galvan (born 1979, Northampton, MA; lives and works in Milton, MA) has developed a unique output of painted sculpture made primarily from recycled wood for nearly 20 years. Some of the wood Hoar de Galvan uses is reclaimed from his time as a preparator at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, MA, and from his father’s carpentry projects, which he began in the 1970s as an immigrant to Massachusetts from Argentina. Hoar de Galvan grew up between Western Massachusetts, Argentina, and spent most of his adolescence in Beverly, MA. He holds a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a BA from Green Mountain College in Poultney, VT. Hoar de Galvan has exhibited in group exhibitions at Concord Center for Visual Art, Concord, MA (2024); Drive-By Projects, Watertown, MA (2023); and has had several solo and group exhibitions at galleries in New York, Seattle, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and across Massachusetts. He is represented by Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown, MA. This is Hoar de Galvan’s first institutional solo exhibition.
Sneha Shrestha (born 1987, Kathmandu, Nepal; lives and works in Kathmandu, Boston, and Somerville, MA), also known as Imagine, creates paintings, works on paper, sculpture, and larger-than-life murals that harmoniously blend her native Nepali and Sanskrit languages, mantras, sacred sounds used in meditation and prayer, and American graffiti hand styles. Education has always been at the forefront of Shrestha’s work to celebrate and inspire an appreciation for the beauty and diversity of Nepali language. Shrestha received her MA in Education from Harvard University. She has had a solo exhibition at Cantor Arts Gallery, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA (2024); and participated in group exhibitions at Wrightwood 659, Chicago (2024-25); Nepal Arts Council, Kathmandu (2024); and Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art, New York (2024). In 2025, she will complete a public art project in partnership with Rubin Museum and New York City Department of Transportation’s Temporary Art Program. One of her iconic public murals is at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Main Street in Central Square, Cambridge, MA, and her work can also be found in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Fidelity Art Collection, among others. Shrestha’s additional honors include a commissioned thirty-foot sculpture at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2024); a grant from the Collective Futures Fund (2024); becoming the first contemporary Nepali artist the be included in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s permanent collection (2023); inclusion in WBUR The ARTery’s 25 Millennials of Color (2019); recognition as one of the 100 most influential women in Nepal by the Nepal Cultural Council (2018); a Boston Artist-in-Residence Award (2018); the HUBWeek Change Maker Award (2018); South Asia and the Arts Fund Grant, Harvard University (2017); and Project Zero Artist-in-Residence Award, Harvard University (2017). She was recently selected for a studio residency at Boston Center for the Arts.
Yorgos Efthymiadis (born 1972, Halkidiki, Greece; lives and works in Somerville, MA) is an artist and curator who works in photographic media. Drawing from his experience as an architectural photographer, recent series by Efthymiadis explore portraiture of kin through their material cultures and surrounding natural environments in Greece, Boston, and beyond. Efthymiadis has had solo exhibitions at Gallery Kayafas, Boston (2024, 2019, and 2016) and the Griffin Museum of Photography, Winchester, MA (2016); and has been included in several group exhibitions including at the Griffin Museum of Photography, Winchester, MA (2025, 2024, 2023, and 2020); Boston City Hall (2024 and 2017); Filter Photo Gallery, Chicago (2023, 2022, 2017, and 2014); Vermont Center for Photography, Brattleboro, VT (2022 and 2017); Danforth Art Museum, Framingham, MA (2022, 2016, 2015, and 2013); Distillery Gallery, Boston (2021); Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts, Providence (2020); Somerville Museum, Somerville, MA (2019); and Photographic Resource Center, Boston (2015). Efthymiadis is an awardee of the Artist’s Resource Trust A.R.T. Grant (2024); a finalist for the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship (2017); and recipient of the St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award (2017). A board member of Somerville Arts Council and chair of the Visual Arts Fellowship Grants since 2017, Efthymiadis has also been a reviewer for the Lenscratch Student Prize Awards since 2023 and finds it deeply fulfilling to work with fellow photographers and give back to the photographic community. In 2015, Efthymiadis created a gallery in his own kitchen titled The Curated Fridge, to celebrate fine art photography and connect photographers with established and influential curators, gallerists, publishers, and artists from around the world through free, quarterly curated calls. The Curated Fridge recently celebrated 10 years of exhibitions featuring more than 1500 artists in 40 shows juried by 45 guest curators.
Exhibition Credits The 2025 James and Audrey Foster Prize is organized by Tessa Bachi Haas, Assistant Curator.
This exhibition and prize are generously endowed by James and Audrey Foster.
ICA/Boston opens Stanley Whitney’s first-ever retrospective
Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon traces the evolution of Whitney’s unique and powerful abstractions over the course of his 50-year career
(Boston, MA—February 6, 2025) In April 2025, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) will open Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon. The ICA/Boston will be the last stop for this major touring survey, which traces the development of Whitney’s unique and powerful abstractions over his 50-year career. The exhibition includes over 100 works, featuring extensive installations of the artist’s improvisatory small paintings; drawings and prints; and a selection of his sketchbooks spanning from 1987 to 2021, offering a view into Whitney’s endless variations on the theme of color, form, and his engagement with the written word.
Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon is organized by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and is curated by Cathleen Chaffee, Charles Balbach Chief Curator at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. The ICA’s presentation is organized by Ruth Erickson, Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, with Tessa Bachi Haas, Assistant Curator, and will be on view from April 17 through September 1, 2025.
“Like the 1940 song, penned by Nancy Hamilton and Morgan Lewis, that inspired the exhibition’s title, Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon conveys feelings of enchantment through the artist’s consistent yet wholly expansive paintings,” said Ruth Erickson, Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the ICA. “Whitney’s abstractions create a space for viewers focus on their wide-ranging responses to color, rather than a specific subject.”
This exhibition places Whitney’s color-saturated paintings in the context of his diverse sources of inspiration, which include jazz and soul music, poetry, American quilting traditions, and global histories of art and architecture. Between the early 1970s and the early 1990s, while making works characterized by a bold, experimental palette and unique rhythm, Whitney wrestled with the spatial legacies of foreground and background, and of object and field. His travels through the American West, Italy, and Egypt in the mid-1980s and the early 1990s transformed his work. Prior this period, Whitney’s paintings of colorful forms were suspended in what Whitney called “landscape air.” In the decades since, inspired by the natural and built environments he encountered, including Egyptian Pyramids and the Roman Colosseum, he began grounding his paintings with the loose but ever-present framework featuring horizontal rows of alternately askant and ordered squares, resulting in the loosely gridded abstractions that capture the imagination of audiences today.
Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon surveys Whitney’s extensive investigation of color at the true height of his career. The survey features the artist’s large-scale explorations of color alongside his improvisatory small paintings. His drawings and prints provide vital, and often overlooked, context to the artist’s practice. These smaller works will be exhibited alongside a chronological selection of the artist’s sketchbooks spanning from 1987 to 2021 to provide a view into Whitney’s engagement with the written word, and contemporary social and political issues.
This career retrospective is accompanied by a catalogue featuring new essays by Chaffee and host curators Ruth Erickson, Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the ICA, and Pavel S. Pyś, Curator of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. It also features texts by Kim Conaty, Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Normal Cole, a poet, designer, painter, and translator; and Duro Olowu, a London-based fashion designer and curator. These examinations of and reflections on the arc of Whitney’s career are presented alongside full-color reproductions of the works featured in the exhibition, a robust bibliography, an exhibition history, an illustrated chronology, and an extensive interview with the artist by Grégoire Lubineau and a conversation between Cole and Whitney.
Media Preview of Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon and Christian Marclay: Doors Tuesday, April 15 from 9:30 AM Join us for a walkthrough of Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon and Christian Marclay: Doors with curators Ruth Erickson and Tessa Bachi Haas.
The Artist’s Voice: Stanley Whitney with Narayan Khandekar Thursday, April 17 at 7 PM In this conversation moderated by Ruth Erickson, Whitney and Khandekar, curator of the Forbes Pigment Collection at Harvard Art Museum and director of the Strauss Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, will come together to reflect on their lifetime work, including Whitney’s five decades of painting represented in his retrospective.
About the ICA Since its founding in 1936, the ICA has shared the pleasures of reflection, inspiration, imagination, and provocation that contemporary art offers with its audiences. A museum at the intersection of contemporary art and civic life, the ICA has advanced a bold vision for amplifying the artist’s voice and expanding the museum’s role as educator, incubator, and convener. Its exhibitions, performances, and educational programs provide access to the breadth and diversity of contemporary art, artists, and the creative process, inviting audiences of all ages and backgrounds to participate in the excitement of new art and ideas. The ICA is located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA, 02210. The Watershed is located at 256 Marginal Street, East Boston, MA 02128. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at icaboston.org. Follow the ICA on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
Media Contact Theresa Romualdez, press@icaboston.org
Credits Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon is organized by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum.
The exhibition is curated by Cathleen Chaffee, Charles Balbach Chief Curator, Buffalo AKG Art Museum. The ICA/Boston’s presentation is organized by Ruth Erickson, Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, with Tessa Bachi Haas, Assistant Curator.
With warmest thanks, we gratefully acknowledge the generosity of the ICA’s Avant Guardian Society in making the ICA’s presentation of this exhibition possible
ICA/Boston revisits important 1998 exhibition in the upcoming Believers: Artists and the Shakers
Believers brings together works by Janine Antoni, Kazumi Tanaka, Wolfgang Tillmans, Nari Ward, and Chen Zhen, alongside Jonathan Berger, Taylor Davis, Gordon Hall, Pallavi Sen, and Cauleen Smith
(Boston, MA—JANUARY 16, 2025) On Feb. 13, 2025, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens Believers: Artists and the Shakers, a tightly conceived group exhibition revisiting The Quiet in the Land: Everyday Life, Contemporary Art and the Shakers, an exhibition presented at the ICA in 1998. The Quiet in the Land was organized by independent curator France Morin andbrought to the ICA by Jill Medvedow at the beginning of her tenure as Ellen Matilda Poss Director. Believers reunites a core group of works first presented in The Quiet in the Land by artists Janine Antoni, Kazumi Tanaka, Wolfgang Tillmans, Nari Ward, and Chen Zhen—some of which have been remade for this exhibition—alongside more recent works by artists Jonathan Berger, Taylor Davis, Gordon Hall, Pallavi Sen, and Cauleen Smith. Believers considers how contemporary artists continue to derive inspiration from the utopian community’s vital experience as “ordinary people attempting to live an extraordinary life.” On view from Feb. 13 to Aug. 3, 2025, Believers: Artists and the Shakers is organized by Jeffrey De Blois, Mannion Family Curator, with Tessa Bachi Haas, Assistant Curator.
“The Quiet in the Land was a deeply meaningful project for me when I began my work at the ICA,” said Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director of the ICA. “I look forward to revisiting many of the artworks included in the 1998 exhibition and to discover how Shaker ideas around community, utility, and simplicity continue to resonate with artists today.”
The Quiet in the Land featured a dynamic body of works born out of an unorthodox residency initiated by Morin in 1996. During this residency, ten artists were invited to live, work, and worship in the only remaining active Shaker community located near New Gloucester in Sabbathday Lake, Maine. According to Morin, The Quiet in the Land set out “to explore the complex relationship between artistic practice and everyday life, as well as to define the spiritual impetus of the creative act,” with and through the art works inspired by the Shakers. Believers builds on the ways the earlier project “sought to probe conventional notions of gender, work, and spirituality, to redefine the making and experiencing of art, and to challenge the widespread belief that art and life exist in separate realms.”
Since arriving in America from England 250 years ago, the Shakers—a radical Christian sect—have occupied a unique and romantic place in American national identity and the public imaginary. Also known as the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, the Shakers ascribe to values and practices of celibacy, communal living, pacifism, shared property, and gender and racial equality, and they are widely recognized for their simple living and architectural style, music, and furniture design. The Shakers have captured the imagination of many artists since at least the early 20th century, when ideas about self-perfection, practicality, and the austere elegance associated with Shaker material culture and religious practice took hold. These ideas entered more strongly into the American consciousness following a string of influential exhibitions and books, many of them organized and authored by those outside of Shaker communities (what Shakers refer to as “the world”).
“Whereas artists were attracted initially to the sense of perfection and simplicity they associated with Shaker furniture, many artists today find in the Shakers a model for living otherwise at a time of radical social transformation,” said De Blois. “Long-held Shaker values like communal living, pacifism, shared property, and gender and racial equality are appealing for many artists—ideas that Believers traces from The Quiet in the Land to artists responding to the Shaker legacy in their work today.”
Believers presents selected works from The Quiet in the Land alongside more recent works by Jonathan Berger and Cauleen Smith. Taylor Davis, Gordon Hall, and Pallavi Sen have made new works for the exhibition. Examples include:
Community Threshold (1997–2024), a found object sculpture by New York-based artist Nari Ward. Previously presented in The Quiet in the Land, this assemblage originally combined a child’s cradle, elements of a porch from Sabbathday Lake, and two banisters from a church in Harlem. The material conversation held by the sculpture between elements of the Shaker built environment and Harlem church banisters reflects Ward’s own consideration of his Baptist upbringing alongside his experience living with the Shakers. However, only a portion of the original sculpture survived after The Quiet in the Land. For Believers, Ward remade the sculpture around what remained, transforming it in the process by adding new materials such as children’s cots, bed springs, and lecterns. Elements of the sculpture are bound with strips of burlap that suggest techniques of Shaker basket making, while two washbasins with inset mirrors feature scattered soil recently collected from the grounds of Sabbathday Lake. Remaking the sculpture allowed the work to grow with him, mirroring the lasting impact that his time at Sabbathday Lake among the Shakers had on his life.
Communion (1996/2025) by New York-based artist Kazumi Tanaka was made following her 1996 residency at Sabbathday Lake. Tanaka was inspired by the everyday rituals of communion, such as shared meals in the dining room of the dwelling house. Tanaka memorialized this experience in the form of an installation composed of two tables and a clock, all made meticulously by hand. Inlaid into the top of the tables—which evoke the separate tables for men and women in the dining room—are metal trays filled with water. The plates float on the surface of the water, evoking the presence of the Shakers sharing a meal, just as the ticking clock with no hands evokes the passage of time, which Tanaka observed passed “more carefully” at the village. Here, Tanaka also included an anamorphic door that sits permanently ajar. Conceived in 1996 but not shown until 2025, the door alludes to Shaker founder Mother Ann Lee’s sentiment that the Shakers should open the windows and doors to receive whoever will arrive, a spirit of openness and generosity Brother Arnold Hadd carries forward at Sabbathday Lake today.
Pilgrim (2017) is a short film by Los Angeles-based filmmaker and artist Cauleen Smith. Against the backdrop of a live recording of Alice Coltrane performing “One for the Father,” Smith combines ecstatic footage from three inspired sites: Alice Coltrane’s Sai Anantam Ashram (founded in 1983 though lost to a California wildfire in 2018); Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers (a collection of seventeen interconnected sculptural towers built between 1921 and 1954 in Los Angeles, and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1990); and the Watervliet Shaker Village (the first Shaker settlement in America, established in 1776 in Albany County, New York). Presenting these three unique places on a continuum, Smith’s approach in Pilgrim traces lines between Shaker placemaking and other important sites of spiritual practice in America.
In Jonathan Berger’s text-based, sculptural installation An Introduction to Nameless Love—Untitled (Brother Arnold Hadd, with Sarah Workneh), Brother Arnold Hadd of Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village was one of six protagonists interviewed on the subject of “nameless love,” a term the artist uses to describe nonromantic forms of love. After extensive conversations with Brother Arnold, the transcripts were edited and condensed by Sarah Workneh, Berger’s collaborator and the former codirector of Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, located in Maine near Sabbathday Lake. Berger then cut the text letter by letter from tin and reassembled them into a wall-size, text-based sculpture with doors on either side—a reference to the Shaker separation of genders reflected in their architectural forms. In the text, Brother Arnold describes how, for the Shakers, labor is a spiritual expression of divine love. This labor of love is likewise expressed in Berger’s meticulously crafted sculpture.
ICA Watershed launches 2025 season with Chiharu Shiota’s powerful installations that reflect on home and migration
Working with Boston residents and organizations, the artist will integrate personal stories into her Watershed presentation
(Boston, MA—JANUARY 14, 2025) This summer, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens the 2025 Watershed season with Chiharu Shiota: Home Less Home, on view May 22 through Sept.1, 2025. The exhibition features two large-scale installations by the Berlin-based, Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota (born 1972 in Osaka, Japan), including the debut of a new commission made for the ICA Watershed. Shiota foregrounds universal stories of migration, home, connection, memory, and survival. Her signature approach combines intricate, immense, and web-like installations built of thread and rope with quotidian objects—such as shoes, suitcases, beds, chairs, dresses, and keys—that serve as symbols for human presence and memory. Chiharu Shiota: Home Less Homeamplifies the ICA Watershed as a unique space for public art in Boston and will be included as part of the inaugural Boston Public Art Triennial. The exhibition is the artist’s first solo presentation in New England and is organized by Ruth Erickson, the ICA’s Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, with Brianne Chapelle, Curatorial Department Coordinator.
“Shiota’s awe-inspiring installations address themes of migration and home that resonate meaningfully with the Watershed’s location in East Boston and beyond,” said Erickson. “She uses common materials to imbue her work with profound and personal connections. We are honored to be able to invite Boston audiences to participate by sharing an image or story of their personal experiences of leaving one home and finding another, adding another meaningful dimension to this important exhibition.”
Visitors to the exhibition will first encounter the installation Accumulation – Searching for the Destination (2014/2025), which the artist has adapted to fill the monumental scale of the Watershed space. In this powerful work, dozens of vintage suitcases are suspended from red rope, some vibrating and shaking with the turbulence of anticipation. For Shiota, who brought only one suitcase when she moved from Japan to Berlin in 1996, the suitcase symbolizes the starting point of a new journey.
The exhibition then leads to the artist’s newly commissioned work, Home Less Home. Within a field of red and black ropes forming the shape of a house in space, Shiota suspends thousands of documents, including those contributed by local Boston participants. These passports, letters, photographs, immigration papers, and messages hover above vignettes of domestic furniture selected and arranged by Shiota.
For her new work, Shiota invites individuals to share stories and images of what home means, what it feels like to leave home, and what it takes to rebuild it. The collection of personal images and stories will take place in the spring of 2025 through partnerships with local community organizations and an open call to East Boston residents from the artist and ICA. Together, these works consider the journey towards one home and away from another.
Chiharu Shiota: Home Less Home will be included as part of the inaugural Boston Public Art Triennial, the city’s first and only public art event set to run every three years from May to October.
About the Artist Chiharu Shiota (born 1972, Osaka, Japan) is a Berlin-based Japanese artist who has been working at the intersection of performance, sculpture, and large-scale installation since the 1990s. Shiota is internationally renowned for her large-scale installations, which she has exhibited globally, with recent solo presentations at the Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan (2024); Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, Spain (2024); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2023); Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia (2022); ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medien, Karlsruhe (2021); Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington (2020); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2019); and Gropius Bau, Berlin (2019). Her work has also been included in numerous group shows and international exhibitions, including the 56th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale (2015) where Shiota represented Japan with her installation The Key in the Hand.
About the ICA Since its founding in 1936, the ICA has shared the pleasures of reflection, inspiration, imagination, and provocation that contemporary art offers with its audiences. A museum at the intersection of contemporary art and civic life, the ICA has advanced a bold vision for amplifying the artist’s voice and expanding the museum’s role as educator, incubator, and convener. Its exhibitions, performances, and educational programs provide access to the breadth and diversity of contemporary art, artists, and the creative process, inviting audiences of all ages and backgrounds to participate in the excitement of new art and ideas. The ICA is located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA, 02210. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at icaboston.org. Follow the ICA on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
The ICA/Boston unveils an ambitious, two-part exhibition with artist Sara Cwynar
Opening Feb. 13, the presentation will feature a site-specific, billboard-scale photo collage, and an immersive photo-based installation
(Boston, MA—DECEMBER 20, 2024) On February 13, 2025, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) unveils an ambitious two-part exhibition from New York-based artist Sara Cwynar (b. 1985, Vancouver). Cwynar is creating a floor-to-ceiling, photo collage billboard for the Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall in the ICA’s lobby, as well as an installation in the Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser Gallery on the fourth floor, marking the first time an artist has worked simultaneously in these two spaces at the ICA. The photo-based exhibition builds on the artist’s longstanding investigation of the relationship between images and the construction of selfhood in the digital era. Organized by Jeffrey De Blois, Mannion Family Curator, with Max Gruber, Curatorial Assistant, Sara Cwynar and Sara Cwynar: Alphabet are on view from Feb. 13 to Aug. 3, 2025.
Cwynar’s densely layered photographs, films, and installations employ the visual languages of design and advertising to explore themes of seduction, desire, and commodification. Her practice of constant archiving and re-presentation of collected visual materials recalls advertisements, retail catalogues, and old history books. These visual assemblages invite viewers to consider how life online increasingly structures our perceptions of the world, and how these perceptions can change through time and contextual manipulation. Her work interrogates how the dizzying velocity with which images circulate today online conceals systems of control embedded in our everyday lives.
“Cwynar is one of the most exciting contemporary artists working with photography to emerge in the last several years,” said De Blois. “Her meticulously assembled artworks take on pressing questions around the ways in which human biases are implicit in technologies, how photography works in lockstep with capitalism, and, against the backdrop of the proliferation of images online, how we understand who we are and want to be today.”
Upon entering the ICA, visitors will first see Cwynar’s floor-to-ceiling, site-specific billboard created for the Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall. The billboard is a visual index of an alphabetical list of terms pulled from the media in the last few years. Some words are more personal, such as terms suggested by search engine algorithms responding to the artist’s online activities, and others are more universally common search terms. The terms are represented in the artwork by commonplace image types from advertising: the reclining woman, the domestic object, perfect looking food, familiar logos, luxury cars, and more. Although the form of the artwork is guided by principles of billboard design, nothing is clearly for sale: what is being “advertised” is an overview of our contemporary moment as seen through seductive images suggesting a generalized desire.
Upstairs, the alphabetical list of terms is expanded into an immersive photo-based installation. Each term is accompanied by an array of associated images, objects, or videos presented around the gallery on panels inspired by German art historian Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1925–29). Warburg organized an encyclopedic collection of nearly 1,000 images on black panels to understand and contextualize recurring visual themes and patterns across time and cultures, from antiquity to the present. Cwynar similarly combines each term with a corresponding visual, connecting each term to contemporary life. For Cwynar, all archives, including the internet, are inflected with human biases and failed aspirations toward objectivity. Even still, as the human impulse to search for answers moves online, Cwynar considers how “personal responses to the world are filtered through a history of images that trails behind us.”
Artist Bio Sara Cwynar (b. 1985, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada) is interested in the way that images accumulate, endure, and change in value over time. Her conceptual photographs and films involve constant archiving and re-presentation of collected visual materials, layering diverse imagery with references to art theory. The works intricately recall advertisements, retail catalogues, and old art history textbooks. Her visual assemblages meditate on how vernacular images shape collective world views, and how those ideals can change through time and contextual manipulation. Cwynar was one of the recipients of the 2020 Sobey Art Award, the 2020 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, and the 2021 Shpilman Photography Prize. She earned her Bachelor of Design from York University in 2010 and her MFA from Yale University in 2016. In 2014, she was awarded the Printed Matter Emerging Artists Publication Series and published her first monograph, entitled Kitsch Encyclopedia, with Blonde Art Books. A monograph of Cwynar’s work, entitled Glass Life, was published in 2021 by Aperture with the Remai Modern.
About the ICA Since its founding in 1936, the ICA has shared the pleasures of reflection, inspiration, imagination, and provocation that contemporary art offers with its audiences. A museum at the intersection of contemporary art and civic life, the ICA has advanced a bold vision for amplifying the artist’s voice and expanding the museum’s role as educator, incubator, and convener. Its exhibitions, performances, and educational programs provide access to the breadth and diversity of contemporary art, artists, and the creative process, inviting audiences of all ages and backgrounds to participate in the excitement of new art and ideas. The ICA is located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA, 02210. The Watershed is located at 256 Marginal Street, East Boston, MA 02128. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at icaboston.org. Follow the ICA on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
Credits Sara Cwynar is organized by Jeffrey De Blois, Mannion Family Curator, with Max Gruber, Curatorial Assistant.
Support for Sara Cwynar is provided by The Kristen and Kent Lucken Fund for Photography.
Photo by Nikki Rae
Nora Burnett Abrams Appointed as Next Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston
(Boston, MA—Nov. 20, 2024) The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) announced today that Nora Burnett Abrams has been appointed the museum’s next Ellen Matilda Poss Director, succeeding Jill Medvedow after a 26-year tenure that has transformed the ICA into one of the leading centers for contemporary art in the country. Abrams joins the ICA from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver (MCA Denver), where she has served as the Mark G. Falcone Director since 2019. Medvedow will step down on March 31, 2025, and Abrams will begin her new role on May 1, 2025.
“On behalf of the Board of Trustees, we welcome Nora to the ICA with great enthusiasm,” said Board Co-Chair Bridgitt Evans, who led the yearlong search for the new director. “In Denver, Nora elevated expectations for how a museum can embed its work in its community and engage audiences. She has an ambitious vision for programmatic excellence combined with cultural and civic relevance, and we look forward to bringing that vision to Boston.”
“As a longtime admirer of the ICA, I am deeply honored to lead this inspiring and courageous organization,” said Abrams. “Through its lauded exhibitions and programming, the ICA embodies the rigor, relevance, and creativity which so many in our field look to as a model. Jill’s visionary leadership has set the bar for what a contemporary art museum can be and redefined what museums can achieve through the values of openness and care. My 15-year tenure at MCA Denver was an extraordinary and formative experience which I will always treasure thanks to our inspiring artists, colleagues, and Board of Trustees. I look forward to building on the ICA’s incredible legacy and collaborating with the ICA’s outstanding team to begin an exciting new chapter for the museum.”
“Nora has articulated a bold vision for the ICA’s future, and we are confident that the ICA will continue to flourish under Nora’s leadership, energy, and values,” said Charlotte Wagner, President of the ICA’s Board of Trustees.
An accomplished museum leader and highly regarded curator, Abrams developed and realized a new strategic vision for MCA Denver, deepening the museum’s role as a catalyst for creative energy, community engagement, and artistic experimentation. As director, she increased the museum’s endowment by 30%, led successful fundraising campaigns, and spearheaded the opening of the museum’s second space at the historic Holiday Theater in Denver’s Northside neighborhood. Through a landmark agreement with the Denver Cultural Property Trust, Abrams ensured the city’s creative community would have a long-term hub for the arts and expanded MCA Denver’s impact by developing a new destination for innovative community and artist-driven programming. She also led the creation of the organization’s Racial Equity Plan to further MCA Denver’s dedication to inclusivity, inspiring and building strong teams, engaging internal and external stakeholders, and broadening institutional development.
Over her 15 years at MCA Denver, Abrams took on roles of increasing scope and responsibility, serving as adjunct curator (2009), associate curator (2010–2015), curator (2015–2018), and Ellen Bruss Curator & Director of Planning (2018–2019), helping increase the museum’s attendance by more than 200% before being named director in 2019. Within the curatorial department, she organized more than 40 exhibitions and authored or contributed to more than 15 publications. Abrams was the curator of some of MCA Denver’s most successful exhibitions, including Basquiat Before Basquiat (2017); the first-ever survey of Senga Nengudi’s R.S.V.P. sculptures (2014); and Fieldwork (2018), a retrospective of Tara Donovan; and she co-curated Cowboy (2023), a thematic group show exploring the mythology of the American West. As director, she oversaw the expansion of the museum’s youth programming, including the launch of a workforce development program for young creatives, and grew a range of multi-disciplinary adult programs.
Abrams serves on the Board of Trustees of the American Association of Museum Directors and is an alumna of the Center for Curatorial Leadership (2018 class). She also served as a co-chair of Mayor Mike Johnston’s transition committee for Denver’s Arts & Venues (2023). Prior to MCA Denver, Abrams worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She holds a Ph.D. in the history of art from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, an M.A. in Modern Art and Critical Studies from Columbia University, and a B.A. in Art History from Stanford University.
About the ICA Since its founding in 1936, the ICA has shared the pleasures of reflection, inspiration, imagination, and provocation that contemporary art offers with its audiences. A museum at the intersection of contemporary art and civic life, the ICA has advanced a bold vision for amplifying the artist’s voice and expanding the museum’s role as educator, incubator, and convener. Its exhibitions, performances, and educational programs provide access to the breadth and diversity of contemporary art, artists, and the creative process, inviting audiences of all ages and backgrounds to participate in the excitement of new art and ideas. The ICA is located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA, 02210. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at icaboston.org. Follow the ICA on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
ICA/Boston presents the first U.S. museum survey of Charles Atlas, featuring over 50 years of the artist’s groundbreaking work
Opening Oct. 10, the exhibition premieres a room-sized sculptural video installation featuring several of the artist’s frequent collaborators
(Boston, MA—AUGUST 27, 2024) In October 2024, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) presents Charles Atlas: About Time, the first U.S. museum survey of pioneering interdisciplinary artist Charles Atlas (b. 1949 in St. Louis). The retrospective exhibition presents work created over 50 years, including the debut of a new, room-sized sculptural video installation that considers abiding themes of collaboration and friendship. The exhibition brings together key components of more than 125 films and videos in monumental and immersive multichannel video installations the artist describes as “walk-through experiences.” Encompassing themes of performance and portraiture, gender and sexuality, and collaboration and friendship, Charles Atlas: About Time is oriented around the artist’s groundbreaking work at the intersections of moving image, dance, and performance, and his intimate video portraits of close collaborators and friends. The exhibition is accompanied by a lushly illustrated catalogue featuring significant new scholarship on Atlas’s practice and co-published by the ICA and DelMonico Books. On view from Oct. 10, 2024 to March 16, 2025, Charles Atlas: About Time is organized by Jeffrey De Blois, the ICA’s Mannion Family Curator, with Max Gruber, ICA Curatorial Assistant.
“Charles Atlas originated the genre of ‘media-dance’ while working as filmmaker-in-residence at Merce Cunningham Dance Company in the 1970s and early 80s. This retrospective exhibition offers visitors an important and long overdue immersion into Atlas’s unparalleled and highly influential legacy in film and video art,” said Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director.
“Charles Atlas: About Time is a historically significant retrospective, displaying the breadth of Atlas’s work through room-filling installations that collapse time within their structures and showcase the full scope of Atlas’s creative powers,” said De Blois. “Featuring ‘exploded views’ of the artist’s genre-defying works, this presentation reveals Atlas’s unique negotiation of time as a medium throughout his storied, 50-year career.”
Atlas’s early career is defined by his time as filmmaker-in-residence at the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in New York. There, he followed the circle of artists with whom Cunningham collaborated closely, including John Cage, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and others. Atlas and Cunningham pioneered the genre of “media-dance”—dance made for the camera, rather than an in-person audience—through a series of video collaborations of successive complexity. Following his time at the company, his works increasingly featured overt expressions of sexuality, especially gay and queer sexuality, and notions of gender that move well beyond constrictive binaries. Likewise, Atlas goes on to value every form of performance equally, from modern dance made for the stage, to drag shows in underground clubs, to today’s viral dance videos made for TikTok.
Beginning around the time of friend and collaborator Merce Cunningham’s death in 2009, Atlas, an artist who always looked unflinchingly forward to the next project, began to look back at his vast archive of video to create new and increasingly personal works. Through this retrospective approach, Atlas creates “exploded views” of his earlier single-channel videos. Footage from one video is displayed in new spatial configurations on multiple screens and monitors, split into fragments, and edited together for dramatic effect as a “walk-through experience.” These installations are choreographed in space in a way that approximates the movements of the performers on-screen, inspiring visitors to move fluidly between and among them. The works reveal Atlas’s astute sense of architectural space—informed by his time working for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.
Charles Atlas: About Time traces a non-linear arc of the artist’s practice from the early 1970s to the present, featuring works that highlight key moments from Atlas’s prodigious career, starting with his sculptural video installation, The Years (2018). In The Years, the artist imagines a stand-alone retrospective comprising 77 videos and films laid out across four flat-screen monitors that are displayed upright, like gravestones. On each screen, short excerpts of earlier works—organized into 12-year periods—scroll like the ending credits of a film. These include moments from the small, personal film Cartridge Lengths and Long Shots (1970); Son of Sam and Delilah (1991), which the artist describes as an emotional response to the AIDS crisis; Mrs. Peanut Visits New York (1992–99), which features famed performance artist, fashion designer, and nightlife icon Leigh Bowery; and What Does Unstable Time Even Mean (2015), a media-dance choreographed by Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Reiner. Projected behind the gravestone-like monitors is a group of four expressionless young people staring unmoved into the distance. Farther behind them is a projection showing a starry night sky, as if the sun had already set. This heightens the theatricality of The Years, in which Atlas wonders openly what his work will mean to subsequent generations.
Since leaving the company in 1983, Atlas has been a leading figure in film and video art, and one of the preeminent artists to capture dance and performance on camera through groundbreaking collaborations with Michael Clark, Yvonne Rainer, Leigh Bowery, Marina Abramović, Rashaun Mitchell, and Silas Reiner, among others. Much of Atlas’s genre-defying, collaborative work has proved prescient for a generation of artists working today. Contemporary concerns such as the creative possibilities of performance and portraiture on camera and the political urgency of challenging commonly held conventions of gender, sexuality, and queer identity have been at the heart of Atlas’s creative output for decades.
Of her time working with Charles Atlas, Abramović said, “Putting together his over-the-top spirit of plenty and my minimalism, we brought to life three collaborative works: SSS, The Biography, and Delusional. Looking back, I can see now how this collaboration pushed me into a new dimension, liberating me from my own limitations and fears. Charles Atlas is a true original and innovator, helping us to see the world around us in a new way through his work.”
Collaboration has been central to Atlas’s practice and his work. MC⁹ (2012) commemorates the artist’s long-term collaboration and friendship with choreographer Merce Cunningham. Created following Cunningham’s death in 2009, MC⁹ combines large-scale projection screens and sculpturally positioned monitors in a complex arrangement of newly edited material from Atlas’s work with Cunningham. The installation encompasses fragments of 21 videos from their 40-year collaboration, from Walkaround Time, Atlas’s first proper film documenting a performance in 1973, through Ocean, completed in 2010. Also included is footage of a gray-haired Cunningham dancing to house music around a ballet barre, his final filmed dance piece captured by Atlas. The monumental scale of MC⁹ in many ways conveys the scale of the artists’ creative partnership.
Taking an approach similar to MC⁹, A Prune Twin (2020) adapts fragments of Hail the New Puritan (1986) alongside elements from Because We Must (1989), riffing on two iconic works in Atlas’s long-term collaboration with Michael Clark. One of Atlas’s most well-known works, Hail the New Puritan revolves around the anarchic energy of Clark’s countercultural milieu in mid-1980s London. The film—which Atlas refers to as an “anti-documentary”—purports to show a typical day in the life of Clark in Thatcherite London, albeit one that is highly stylized and fictionalized. Made two years after Hail the New Puritan, Because We Must was based on an original stage production at Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London, whose formal theatricality is counterbalanced by a behind-the-scenes narrative fantasy featuring Leigh Bowery’s extravagant costumes and production design. In 2020, Atlas created A Prune Twin—an anagram of New Puritan. Thistransposition of letters from the original phrase to coin the new title is analogous to the transposition of fragments from Atlas’s older works to imagine something entirely new. The baroque aesthetic captured on screen is perfectly complemented by a sense of irony that reflects the spirit and specificities of queer cultures in the 1980s and is now matched by the almost over-the-top sense of excess that this newly imagined installation brings to life.
Charles Atlas: About Time also features The Tyranny of Consciousness (2017), a work that marries a montage of sunsets Atlas filmed at the Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva Island in Florida with a monologue by iconic drag performer Lady Bunny about the flowering of her political consciousness. In The Tyranny of Consciousness, Atlas synthesizes the social urgency and political consciousness of his portrait of Lady Bunny with the geometric patterns and repeated numerical sequences of his “number pieces”, uniquely tying together his overarching artistic concerns across decades to transformative effect. One of the numbers pieces, Plato’s Alley (2008), is a site-specific video installation and architectural intervention that will be displayed alongside documentation of other site-specific works.
Finally, the exhibition will premiere a new sculptural video installation entitled Personalities (2024). Personalities iscomprised of twelve video monitors with each monitor newly edited footage of one or more of Atlas’s collaborators. These include performance artist Marina Abramović, musicians John Zorn and Sonic Youth, performers Leigh Bowery, Johanna Constantine, and Annie Iobst, and even his father Dave Atlas and his longtime partner Joe Westmoreland. The monitors are arranged in a spiral, presented against two backdrops: collage-based wallpaper and bright orange walls, the artist’s signature color complemented by the artist’s lighting design. The wallpaper brings together a range of images featured in INSTANT FAME! (2003), an exhibition in New York in which the artist simultaneously created and projected live video portraits in a gallery space. Personalities conveys the extent to which collaboration and friendship have always been at the heart of Atlas’s decades-long practice and prefigures today’s artists, who continue to be moved by the progressive motion of Atlas’s pioneering work today.
Charles Atlas will be at the ICA on March 6th for An Artist’s Voice conversation with Mannion Family Curator, Jeffrey De Blois.
Publication
The exhibition is accompanied by a generous and lushly illustrated catalogue that generates significant new scholarship on Atlas’s practice, framed by the exhibition’s key themes and artworks. It features commissioned essays by leading scholars, historians, and writers discussing Atlas’s groundbreaking work and legacy: Erika Balsom, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Drew Sawyer, and Jeffrey De Blois, the exhibition’s curator. The catalogue also foregrounds the voices of a diverse group of artists reflecting on Atlas’s influence, including Nicole Eisenman, Eileen Myles, Jordan Strafer, Martine Syms, and Ryan Trecartin.
About the ICA
Since its founding in 1936, the ICA has shared the pleasures of reflection, inspiration, imagination, and provocation that contemporary art offers with its audiences. A museum at the intersection of contemporary art and civic life, the ICA has advanced a bold vision for amplifying the artist’s voice and expanding the museum’s role as educator, incubator, and convener. Its exhibitions, performances, and educational programs provide access to the breadth and diversity of contemporary art, artists, and the creative process, inviting audiences of all ages and backgrounds to participate in the excitement of new art and ideas. The ICA is located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA, 02210. The Watershed is located at 256 Marginal Street, East Boston, MA 02128. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our website at icaboston.org. Follow the ICA on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
About Orange Barrel Media
Recognizing that the future of this country is in its cities, OBM’s pioneering work in out-of-home media has defined the company since its founding in 2004. Today, OBM is one of the largest independent out-of-home media companies and is nationally recognized by cities seeking to implement programs that add to the character of urban places. OBM has a longstanding commitment to investing in the production and presentation of contemporary art and has engaged in projects with hundreds of artists and institutions on public projects of all sizes. Over the past 20 years, OBM’s architecturally significant projects and balanced programming mix of art, community, and commercial content have redefined the possibilities of outdoor media. The company’s ongoing investment in new technologies has evolved its portfolio from wallscapes and unique large-format digital displays to freestanding digital spectaculars, and with the development of sister company IKE Smart City in 2015, interactive wayfinding kiosks. The company is headquartered in Columbus, OH, with additional offices in New York City, West Hollywood, CA, and Charlotte, NC. OBM currently operates in 28 top U.S. markets. Learn more at www.obm.com.
