Ingrid Mwangi Hutter, Static Drift, 2001. Chromogenic color prints, Two parts, each 29 1/2 × 44 inches (74.9 × 111.8 cm). Promised gift of Isabel Stainow Wilcox, in honor of her grandfather Thomas Metcalf, trustee of the museum (1936–1946) © Ingrid Mwangi Hutter
Lorna Simpson, ID, 1990. Gelatin silver prints and plastic plaques, Two parts, each 49 x 84 inches (124.5 x 213.4 cm). Gift of Barbara Lee, The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women. Courtesy Salon 94, New York. © Lorna Simpson
Joe Wardwell, If You Got the Money Honey, 2021. Acrylic on canvas, 54 × 72 inches (137.2 × 182.9 cm). Gift of Mathieu O. Gaulin ©️ Joe Wardwell
The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) presents Wordplay, a new collection exhibition exploring a defining aspect of contemporary art: the role of text in visual expression. Since the emergence of conceptual art in the 1960s, artists have used “text art” to probe philosophical questions, express and subvert political messages, challenge notions of identity, and connect their artwork to multiple references, writers, and cultural icons. Wordplay features 35 works—including several recent acquisitions on view for the first time—by artists such as Kenturah Davis, Rivane Neuenschwander, and Joe Wardwell, alongside signature works by Renée Green, Glenn Ligon, Jenny Holzer, Zanele Muholi, and Lorna Simpson, among others. The exhibition is organized by Ruth Erickson, Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, and Erika Umali, the ICA’s first Curator of Collections, and will be on view from Jan. 30 through Dec. 1, 2024.
“Since the ICA began collecting in 2006, we have built a forward-thinking, 20th and 21st-century collection, distinguished by its representation of women artists and commitment to diversity,” said Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director. “Wordplay is an exciting presentation of the many ways that artists use text and language to convey ideas, promote interactivity, and create symbols, composition, color and form.
“The term ‘Wordplay’, or a play on words, references the witty use of words and their meanings, bringing attention to language as a subject of a text,” said curators Ruth Erickson, Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, and Erika Umali, Curator of Collections. “Likewise, the artists featured in Wordplay use text and language in creative ways that heighten our awareness of modes of communication and the acts of seeing and reading.”
Wordplay draws primarily from the ICA’s permanent collection to showcase how contemporary artists have played with words to animate and expand their art practices. The exhibition will debut a number of recent acquisitions including:
— Collen Mfazwe, August House, Johannesburg (2012) by South African artist and visual activist Zanele Muholi. This photograph is part of Muholi’s Faces and Phases series archiving new horizons in queer self-representation. In each photograph the sitters choose their posture, setting, and dress inviting viewers to, as Muholi says, “contemplate questions such as: What does an African lesbian look like? Is there a lesbian aesthetic or do we express our gendered, racialized and classed selves in rich and diverse ways?” In this work, a sash reading “Princess” sits across the chest of the sitter.
— If You Got the Money Honey (2021) by Boston-based artist Joe Wardwell. This painting is Wardwell’s first cityscape, presenting a view of downtown Boston from Wardwell’s Dorchester studio. Created in response to the impending demolition of his studio and Boston’s increasingly unaffordable housing, the artist layers text ranging from lyrics from the Guns N’ Roses song that gives the work its title, to quotations sourced from cultural figures with ties to Massachusetts, including Malcolm X, Buckminster Fuller, and Donna Summer. This matrix of text and landscape evokes the collective and polyphonic voice of an urban environment.
— Static Drift (2001) by biracial artist Ingrid Mwangi Hutter, born in Kenya to an African father and a European mother. To create this diptych, Ingrid Mwangi Hutter applied stencils to her own abdomen and allowed the sun to burn her skin, leaving parts under and overexposed on her body. One photograph shows the map of Germany outlined in darker brown with words “burn out country,” and the other shows a map of the continent of Africa in lighter brown with the words “bright dark continent.” The artist creates a literal map on her body, visualizing her experience as a biracial woman living in both Kenya and Germany—perceived as white in Africa and Black in Germany—using color, geographical shapes, and language on her own body.
— Zé Carioca e amigos (Um festival embananado)/Joe Carioca and Friends (The Festival Went Bananas) (2005) by São Paulo-based artist Rivane Neuenschwander. This interactive installation references a famous Brazilian comic strip featuring the character José “Zé” Carioca, a dapper Brazilian parrot first created in 1941 by cartoonist José Carlos de Brito. Neuenschwander strips the comic of its original text and image, leaving only vibrant, technicolor squares and blank speech bubbles on the wall. The artist invites the public to continue the artwork by writing or drawing in the mural blocks, resulting in a collective form of spontaneous social and individual expression.
This collection exhibition features works by 16 artists: Jennifer Bartlett, Kenturah Davis, Taylor Davis, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Shepard Fairey, Renée Green, Jenny Holzer, Glenn Ligon, Ingrid Mwangi Hutter, Guadalupe Maravilla, Zanele Muholi, Rivane Neuenschwander, Tschabalala Self, Lorna Simpson, Travares Strachan, and Joe Wardwell.
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
Igshaan Adams, Bonteheuwel / Epping, 2021. Wood, painted wood, plastic, bone, stone and glass beads, seashells, polyester and nylon rope, cotton rope, link chain, wire (memory and galvanized steel), cotton twine, 194.88 x 460.63 x 127.95″ / 495 x 1170 x 325cm. Photo by Mario Todeschini. Courtesy of the artist.
Igshaan Adams, Samesyn, 2023. Installation view 35th Bienal de São Paulo – choreographies of the impossible. Photo by Levi Fanan. Courtesy the artist and Casey Kaplan.
(Boston, MA–Nov. 14, 2023) On February 13, 2024, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) unveils a monumental, site-specific commission by multidisciplinary artist Igshaan Adams (born 1982 in Cape Town, South Africa). Adams’s woven tapestries point to the interconnectedness of the artist’s spirituality, familial histories, and local community narratives as rooted in his South African heritage. The ambitious new work, entitled Lynloop [Toeing the Line], will be on view from February 13, 2024, to February 15, 2025, in a presentation organized by Ruth Erickson, Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs.
Drawing on the notion of “desire lines”—paths created by pedestrians over time that fall outside of sanctioned walkways—Adams visualizes the everyday movements of people through a range of tactile materials to contest fixed boundaries. At the ICA, Adams will transform the first-floor lobby’s Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall into a multi-part, experimental weaving and sculptural installation conceived in response to the museum’s architecture and the artist’s recollections of post-apartheid South Africa.
“Igshaan Adams brings a distinct, new voice to the ICA, combining monumentality, tactility and cosmology with a unique combination of materials and techniques, to represent histories of an apartheid and post-apartheid era in South Africa,” said Jill Medvedow, the ICA’s Ellen Matilda Poss Director. “Visitors will encounter this stunning new work as they enter the museum’s first floor lobby, a free and open space for the public.”
“Adams’s installation at the ICA considers the impact of childhood experiences and memories on the trajectory of one’s life,” said Erickson. “He takes maps of areas where enforced boundaries, such as those formerly used to separate communities along racial castes during the apartheid era, and reframes them with his own observations and fantasies. In this work, pathways between sports fields adjacent to where the artist grew up are softened with hues of pink, mohair, and delicate gold chain.”
Adams uses aerial images from Google Earth as the basis for his intricate, monumental weavings. In his commission at the ICA, Lynloop, he reproduces the footpaths between a sports field and a walled-off recreational space in Heideveld, a town in Cape Town, South Africa, adjacent to Bonteheuwel, the artist’s hometown. Lynloop is an Afrikaans term formerly used by South African gangs to denote control, or to punish those who stepped out of line. Adams reimagines a “hyper-masculine” territory of his childhood and associated memories to consider both the imprint of early experiences and the potential of other futures. In dialogue with the extensive weavings are enormous suspended metallic, cloud-like sculptures that suggest concentrated areas of movement and human interaction. The artist describes his new work as “a yearning for the beauty and fantasy of what could have been if my environment had allowed for it – forcing a wish onto a memory.”
The ICA’s Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall is dedicated to site-specific, commissioned works by leading contemporary artists. Located within the museum’s glass-enclosed lobby, the Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall is the visitor’s first encounter with art upon entering the building and has featured commissions by Barbara Kruger, Wangechi Mutu, Matthew Ritchie, Gillian Wearing, and Haegue Yang.
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
Igshaan Adams, Bonteheuwel / Epping, 2021, Wood, painted wood, plastic, bone, stone and glass beads, seashells, polyester and nylon rope, cotton rope, link chain, wire (memory and galvanized steel), cotton twine, 194.88 x 460.63 x 127.95″ / 495 x 1170 x 325cm. Photo: Mario Todeschini, Courtesy of the artist and Casey Kaplan.
Igshaan Adams, Samesyn, 2023. Installation view 35th Bienal de São Paulo – choreographies of the impossible. Photo by Levi Fanan. Courtesy the artist and Casey Kaplan.
Photo by Liza Voll.
(Boston, MA—Oct. 25, 2023) Steven D. Corkin and Charlotte Wagner, Co-Chair and President of the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA), announced today that longtime director Jill Medvedow will step down from her position in December 2024. Over her 25-year tenure as Ellen Matilda Poss Director, Medvedow has led the transformation of the ICA from a small, non-collecting kunsthalle to a major contemporary art museum, a national leader in teen arts education, and a pioneering advocate for the role of art in civic life.
In a statement on behalf of the ICA’s Board of Trustees, Corkin and Wagner said, “Jill transformed the ICA into an anchor institution in Boston, and one of the leading centers for artistic experimentation and contemporary culture in the country. Working with staff, artists, teachers, students, and community partners, she has integrated new art and ideas into the heart of our communities, bridged the connection between contemporary art and civic life, and in doing so, forever changed the landscape for contemporary art and culture in the city of Boston. We are profoundly grateful to Jill for her inspired leadership, her commitment and dedication, and her unwavering mission to expand access to art for all.”
“I love the ICA; I love its people and programs, and I am excited for all of us as we move forward,” said Medvedow.
In 1998, when Medvedow was hired, the ICA was located in a former police station. Medvedow sparked a renaissance for contemporary art in Boston when, in 2006, she opened the city’s first new art museum in nearly a century. The first U.S. commission of architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the ICA today is an architectural icon. The museum now encompasses a waterfront campus including the building in the Seaport, the ICA Watershed—a free, industrial space across Boston Harbor for immersive art and community engagement—and Seaport Studio, a dedicated space for teen arts programs.
Under Medvedow’s leadership, annual attendance at the ICA has grown more than 1,000%, to more than 300,000 today. Through major campaigns, Medvedow has raised more than $200 million to build the new ICA and the ICA Watershed and to improve financial strength and resiliency for generations to come.
Medvedow has been a leader in nurturing artistic experimentation, championing new artists and new ideas and amplifying artists’ voices, additionally establishing the museum’s first Artist Advisory Council to ensure that the ideas and needs of artists are central to institutional planning. During the course of her directorship, the ICA has presented more than 250 exhibitions, including groundbreaking thematic exhibitions such as Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957; Fiber: Sculpture 1960–present; Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today; When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art; and To Begin Again: Artists and Childhood as well as important single-artist exhibitions by Cornelia Parker, Tara Donovan, Shepard Fairey, Nick Cave, Doris Salcedo, Ragnar Kjartansson, Arlene Shechet, Amy Sillman, Jeffrey Gibson, Yayoi Kusama, Huma Bhabha, Deana Lawson, and Simone Leigh, among many others. Watershed presentations include commissions from John Akomfrah, Firelei Báez, and Guadalupe Maravilla.
In the performing arts, the ICA has been a vibrant presenter of new work, including recent commissions by Jason Moran and Alicia Hall Moran, Okwui Okpokwasili, and Liz Gerring. Medvedow was the co-commissioner of the U.S. Pavilion of the 2022 Venice Biennale with a historic presentation of Simone Leigh.
Medvedow transformed the ICA into a collecting museum—including the acquisition of The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women—bringing to the fore diverse artistic voices and artists who have been historically underrepresented. Today it is one of the only art museum collections with almost 60% of works by artists who identify as women and 38% who identify as people of color. Equally notable, Medvedow is a national champion for teen arts programs and the role museums can play in the lives of teens and their city. In 2012, the ICA’s teen initiative was recognized with a National Arts and Humanities Youth Program award from the White House, the highest honor of its kind. Today an average of 6,000 teens a year participate in ICA programs and national convenings.
Throughout her career, Medvedow has been equally passionate about contemporary art and civic life, from her leadership on after- and out-of-school equity for children; early work with City Year developing a survey on attitudes and behaviors of young people on the arts; and championing temporary public art projects in unexpected locations since the early 1980s. A member and former trustee of the American Association of Museum Directors, she led efforts for paid internships at art museums, changing a longstanding tradition in the field. Medvedow’s commitment to enriching the lives of young people extends to her personal creativity as well; she recently authored a children’s book titled Kangamoo!, donating hundreds of copies to early education programs in Boston. She served on Governor Deval Patrick’s Creative Economy Transition Team in 2008 and more recently on the arts policy transition group for Governor Maura Healy. In 2022, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Medvedow is currently a Trustee of Boston After School and Beyond and serves on the Boston Public Schools Arts Expansion Arts Advisory Board. In 2023 she began as a fellow at the Harvard Divinity School, exploring art’s expanded role in community. She is a passionate speaker about art, healing, and social change.
Media contact:
ICA: Colette Randall, crandall@icaboston.org, 617-318-8271
Wu Tsang, Of Whales, 2022. Installation view, The Milk of Dreams, 59th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, 2022. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin. Photo by Matteo De Fina. © Wu Tsang
(Boston, MA—OCT. 11, 2023) The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) presents Wu Tsang: Of Whales, an immersive video installation inspired by Herman Melville’s classic 1851 American novel Moby Dick; or, The Whale.
In Of Whales, Wu Tsang (b. 1982, Worcester, Massachusetts) reimagines the story of Moby Dick from the perspective of the sperm whale, inviting viewers on a mesmerizing journey through the depths of a CGI ocean, only surfacing for the occasional breath of air. Created on the Unity gaming platform, the dynamically generated real-time video installation loops continuously and offers audiences a multisensorial experience of undersea life that transforms with each viewing. The exhibition is organized by Ruth Erickson, Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, and Tessa Bachi Haas, Curatorial Assistant, and will be on view Feb. 15 through Aug. 4, 2024.
Of Whales (2022) is part of a filmic trilogy derived from Tsang’s multidisciplinary research around Moby Dick; or, The Whale. An artist whose practice frequently centers on reinventing cinematic language and narrative, Tsang approaches the novel through a decolonial lens, channeling perspectives of the whale and the ‘motley crew’ aboard the whaling ship to evoke non- and inter-human sociality, as well as environmental themes and queer intimacies.
As collaboration is central to Tsang’s practice, she often works with a variety of artists, scholars, and performers on a single project. In Of Whales, the endless expanse of ocean life is accompanied by a multi-channel, layered soundscape that fills the entire gallery. The musical score, composed by Asma Maroof and Daniel Pineda, and performed by Tapiwa Svosve, Jalalu-Kalvert Nelson, Miao Zhao, and Ahya Simone, blends saxophone, trumpet, bass clarinet, harp, and vocals to accompany the audience’s surreal adventure into the unknown depths of the sea.
“Wu Tsang is one of the most significant video artists working today, and her epic commission Of Whales was an important highlight of the 2022 Venice Biennale. We are thrilled to share this mesmerizing installation with our audiences. Overlooking the Boston Harbor, the ICA is a poignant location to view the work with its references to maritime culture and New England’s whaling history – as well as the artist’s personal connection with Massachusetts,” said Erickson and Haas.
Wu Tsang will be at the ICA on February 15 for an Artist’s Voice conversation with Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, Ruth Erickson.
Artist Biography
Wu Tsang (born 1982 in Worcester, Massachusetts) is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker who combines narrative and documentary techniques to explore fluid identities, marginalized histories, and whimsical worlds. Tsang received her MFA from the University of California at Los Angeles and BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Other films by Tsang include We hold where study (2017), Girl Talk (2015), Damelo Todo (Gimme Everything) (2010), and Shape of a Right Statement (2008). Tsang’s work was included in the ICA/Boston’s acclaimed Art in the Age of the Internet: 1989 to Today (2018) and has been exhibited or screened at La Biennale de Venezia, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern London, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, among many other national and international venues.
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
Firelei Báez, Untitled (Les tables de geographie reduites en un jeu de cartes), 2022. Oil and acrylic on archival printed canvas. 82 3/8 × 105 3/4 inches (209.2 × 268.4 cm). Collection of Deborah Beckmann and Jacob Kotzubei. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Jackie Furtado. © Firelei Báez
Firelei Báez, A Drexcyen chronocommons (To win the war you fought it sideways), 2019. Installation view, Firelei Báez: A Drexcyen chronocommons (To win the war you fought it sideways), James Cohan, New York, 2019. The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle. © Firelei Báez
Firelei Báez, Man Without a Country (aka anthropophagist wading in the Artibonite River), 2014–15. Gouache, ink, and chine-collé on 225 deaccessioned book pages, 106 1/4 × 252 inches (270 × 640 cm). Promised gift of Fotene Demoulas and Tom Coté. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, New York. Photo by Oriol Tarridas. © Firelei Báez
(Boston, MA—Sept. 15, 2023) In April 2024, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) presents Firelei Báez, the first museum survey dedicated to the richly layered work of Firelei Báez (b. 1981, Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic). The exhibition will feature approximately 40 works—paintings, installations, and works on paper spanning nearly two decades of the artist’s practice—and showcase Báez’s profoundly moving body of work, which explores the complicated and often incomplete historical narratives that surround the Atlantic basin. The artist will premiere new works in the exhibition, which is slated to tour throughout North America to the Vancouver Art Gallery (Fall 2024) and Des Moines Art Center (Spring 2025). The exhibition will be accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue co-published by the ICA and DelMonico Books. On view from April 4 to Sept. 2, 2024, Firelei Báez is organized by Eva Respini, Deputy Director and Director of Curatorial Programs, Vancouver Art Gallery (former Barbara Lee Chief Curator at the ICA), with Tessa Bachi Haas, ICA Curatorial Assistant.
“Firelei Báez is part of a vital movement in contemporary art that embraces the role of art in understanding gaps in the historical record,” said Jill Medvedow, ICA Ellen Matilda Poss Director. “She delves into the historical narratives and fluid identities of the Atlantic basin in a way that invites audiences to reimagine and reassess. Firelei’s stunning, immersive installation at the ICA Watershed in 2021 left an indelible impression on all who saw it. This comprehensive survey will examine two decades of the artist’s practice, offering audiences a deeper and richer encounter with the work of this important artist.”
“This survey highlights Báez’s investment in the medium of painting and its capacity for storytelling and mythmaking, featuring complex and layered uses of pattern, decoration, and saturated color, often overlaid on maps made during colonial rule in the Americas,” said Respini. “Her work is about looking at history through multiple lenses – she shifts perspectives and creates layers of complexity where history has only provided a single perspective.”
Drawing on disciplines of anthropology, geography, folklore, fantasy, science fiction, and social history, Báez presents works that engage with Caribbean, African, and Latin American diasporas and histories. Her large-scale map paintings, featuring colonial maps, charts, and architectural plans immerse audiences in sweeping narratives that bring together myth and history. In Man Without a Country (aka anthropophagist wading in the Artibonite River) (2014-2015), Báez uses 225 pages sourced from late nineteenth-century texts on the history of Hispaniola—the Caribbean island that is divided between the Dominican Republic and Haiti—as supports for her drawings depicting chimeric organisms, femme figurations, and decorative embellishments. The markings intervene across the text, fusing folkloric motifs with academic writing to offer new ways of reading history and culture. Báez installs each page individually to form this wall-size installation, suggestive of island geographies and bodies of water, which viewers navigate according to their own trajectories, resisting singular narratives in favor of multiple readings.
Báez employs a similar reframing of recorded histories in her drawings. In Can I Pass? Introducing the Paper Bag to the Fan Test for the Month of July (2011), she creates a series of 31 self-portraits displayed like a calendar for the month of July. The self-portraits detail only the artist’s eyes and silhouette as she poses with different hair styles for each day of the calendar month. All of the portraits are made to match the artist’s shifting skin tone as it darkens and lightens with changing seasons. This exercise is reminiscent of the social practice of using the Brown Paper Bag Test to admit or deny entry to social functions based on one’s skin color in the 20th century United States.
Bringing the powerful quality of her paintings into three dimensions with her sculptural installations, Báez creates generative spaces with painted architectural forms that invite new possibilities and ideas to be explored. A Drexcyen Chronocommons (To win the war you fought it sideways) (2019) is an immersive installation that invites audiences to reexamine historical narratives, echoing some of the same characteristics of her 2021 commission for the ICA Watershed. Báez envelops the space in a hand-perforated blue tarp, casting spots of light onto surfaces painted with symbols reflective of the Black diaspora, constructing a place where the past, present, and future intertwine.
Publication
The exhibition will be accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue featuring works in the exhibition, works from throughout Báez’s career, and essays from Leticia Alvarado, Katherine Brinson, Jessica Bell Brown, Julie Crooks, Daniella Rose King, Eva Respini, Hallie Ringle, and Katy Siegel.
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
This exhibition is organized by Eva Respini, Deputy Director and Director of Curatorial Programs, Vancouver Art Gallery (former Barbara Lee Chief Curator, ICA/Boston), with Tessa Bachi Haas, Curatorial Assistant, ICA/Boston
Major support for Firelei Báez is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, Karen and Brian Conway, David and Jocelyne DeNunzio, Mathieu O. Gaulin, The Kotzubei-Beckmann Family Philanthropic Fund, Lise and Jeffrey Wilks, the Jennifer Epstein Fund for Women Artists, and the ICA’s Avant Guardian Society.
Didier William, Cursed Grounds: Cursed Borders, 2021. Acrylic, oil, ink, and wood carving on panel. 60 × 106 inches (152.4 × 269.3 cm). Private collection. Courtesy of James Fuentes Gallery. © Didier William
Suchitra Mattai, An Ocean Cradle, 2022. Vintage saris, fabric, and ghungroo bells. 10 × 15 feet (3 × 4.6 m). Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects. Photo by Wes Magyar. © Suchitra Mattai
Jeannette Ehlers, Black Bullets (still), 2012. Video (black-and-white, sound; 4:33 minutes). Sound: Trevor Mathison; Technical Assistance: Markus von Platen; Camera: Jette Ellgaard & Jeannette Ehlers. Private collection. Courtesy the artist. © Jeannette Ehlers
Christopher Cozier, Gas Men (still), 2014. Two-channel HD video (color, sound; 2:07 minutes). Display dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist. © Christopher Cozier
(Boston, MA—Sept. 12, 2023) This October, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today. This major group exhibition is an innovative rethinking of “Caribbean art,” focusing on art of the Caribbean diaspora and featuring an intergenerational group of 28 artists who live and work across the globe. Challenging conventional ideas about the region, Forecast Form reveals the Caribbean as a place defined not by geography, language, or ethnicity, but by constant exchange, displacement, and movement. The exhibition is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The ICA’s presentation of Forecast Form is coordinated by Jeffrey De Blois, Associate Curator and Publications Manager, and will be on view from October 5, 2023, through February 25, 2024.
“Forecast Form is a far-reaching, stimulating exhibition of art from the Caribbean and its diaspora. With works by 28 artists from around the world, it is full of new ideas: formal, conceptual and experiential. We’re very excited to share this with audiences from, connected to or new to Caribbean contemporary art,” said Jill Medvedow, the ICA’s Ellen Matilda Poss Director.
“The concept of diaspora—the movement or displacement of people through migration from one location to another—provides a powerful framework for understanding “Caribbean art” in the context of Forecast Form and beyond,” said De Blois. “This concept allows for the artworks in the exhibition to be framed through ideas of movement and transformation, exceeding the limitations of geographic boundaries.”
Forecast Form takes the 1990s, when debates around identity and difference featured front and center, as a cultural backdrop. This decade—a period of profound social, political, and economic transformation globally—also had a major effect on art from the Caribbean, and in the cultural sector gave rise to a Pan-Caribbean art exhibition model that attempted to represent the region’s complex colonial histories through art. In contrast, Forecast Form focuses on the affinities shared between works made by artists who have ties to the region yet hold diverse personal identities, geographies, and histories. Using the weather’s constant movement as a metaphor for analyzing artistic practices, this expansive exhibition reveals new modes of thinking about identity and place. Through a deeply innovative exploration of form, Forecast Form positions the region as a place where the past, the present, and the future meet.
The ICA’s presentation of Forecast Form debuts a new work by Teresita Fernández, Manigua(Mirror) (2023). The word manigua is often used to describe a dense forest or swamp; a chaotic entanglement or an impenetrable place. Inspired by this definition and Wilfredo Lam’s painting, The Jungle (1943), Fernández’s manigua is a space of refuge. Through evocative materials such as charcoal and black sand, and wielding the symbolic power of the palm tree, Manigua(Mirror) conjures an image of a Caribbean landscape as a site of resistance.
Other works in the exhibition include:
This comprehensive group exhibition features 28 artists from across the diaspora: Candida Alvarez, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker, Christopher Cozier, Julien Creuzet, Maksaens Denis, Peter Doig, Jeannette Ehlers, Alia Farid, Teresita Fernández, Rafael Ferrer, Denzil Forrester, Joscelyn Gardner, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Deborah Jack, Engel Leonardo, Daniel Lind-Ramos, Suchitra Mattai, Ana Mendieta, Lorraine O’Grady, Ebony G. Patterson, Keith Piper, Freddy Rodríguez, Zilia Sánchez, Adán Vallecillo, Cosmo Whyte, and Didier William.
The exhibition is accompanied by a substantial 288-page catalogue featuring groundbreaking scholarship as well as extensive plate sections reproducing exhibition artworks.
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
Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today was organized by Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
Major support for Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today was provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
The exhibition is curated by Carla Acevedo-Yates, Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator, with Iris Colburn, Curatorial Assistant, Isabel Casso, former Susman Curatorial Fellow, and Nolan Jimbo, Susman Curatorial Fellow.
The ICA/Boston presentation is coordinated by Jeffrey De Blois, Associate Curator and Publications Manager.
With warmest thanks, we gratefully acknowledge the generosity of the ICA’s Avant Guardian Society in making this exhibition possible.
Photo by Jonathan Javier Dorado
(Boston, MA—AUGUST 22, 2023)—The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) announces the appointment of Erika Umali as the museum’s first Curator of Collections. In this newly created role, supported by the Leadership in Arts Museums initiative, Umali will lead strategy, acquisitions and exhibitions for the ICA’s collection, as well as expanding access and visibility for the collection through public exhibitions and programming, publishing initiatives, and digital platforms. The ICA’s collection, begun in 2006, has strong representation of women artists and artists of color, and reflects the exhibition program at the museum.
“We are thrilled to welcome Erika to our curatorial team, to learn from her, and to work together to make the collection an integral, driving programmatic force at the ICA,” said Ruth Erickson, Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs. “The role of Curator of Collections will expand our capacity and support our commitment to reflect strong, diverse voices and perspectives in our collection and in all aspects of our work.”
“I am elated to join the ICA’s curatorial team at such a transformational moment in the development of the collection,” added Umali. “I look forward to collaborating with the brilliant team here to support their ambitious and thought-provoking programming, and to contribute towards building a leading collection of contemporary art that fully reflects the diverse narratives and histories of the world around us.”
Since the ICA began a permanent collection in 2006, the museum has built a forward-thinking, 20th and 21st-century collection, distinguished by its representation of women artists and commitment to diversity. The collection has greatly expanded in recent years, with the addition of major acquisitions by Yayoi Kusama, John Akomfrah, Firelei Báez, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, and Barbara Kruger, among many others. The full collection is available here.
Umali comes to the ICA from the Brooklyn Museum, where she served as the inaugural Assistant Curator of the Collection and oversaw thousands of acquisitions. Alongside this, she also organized several exhibitions including Jeffrey Gibson: When Fire Is Applied to a Stone It Cracks, Brooklyn Abstraction: Four Artists, Four Walls, featuring installations by Maya Hayuk, José Parlá, Kennedy Yanko, and the late Leon Polk Smith, and Art Breaks, a collaboration between MTV and the Brooklyn Museum. Prior to her role as Assistant Curator of the Collection, Umali served as the Brooklyn Museum’s Mellon Curatorial Fellow.
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. Follow the ICA on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
The Curator of Collections position is supported by Leadership in Arts Museums, an initiative to create more racial equity in arts museum leadership led by the Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Pilot House Philanthropy and Alice L. Walton Foundation.
Leadership in Arts Museums is a $11+ million initiative over the next five years to invest in a variety of efforts to create more racial equity in art museum leadership. A partnership between the Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Pilot House Philanthropy and Alice L. Walton Foundation, the initiative provides funding to museums to increase leadership roles such as curators, conservators, collections managers, community engagement staff, and educators in a manner designed to advance the goal of racial equity.
Photo by Mel Taing
(Boston, MA—JULY 18, 2023) – The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) announces the promotion of Anni A. Pullagura to Assistant Curator. In her new position, Pullagura will have an expanded role in the ICA’s curatorial and exhibition program, deepen her involvement with the ICA’s educational initiatives, and oversee curatorial internships. Among her significant projects at the museum, Pullagura assisted in the organization of Simone Leigh: Sovereignty, the ICA’s commission for the 59th Venice Biennale as well as the nationally touring survey exhibition Simone Leigh and its accompanying publication. Pullagura has also organized the forthcoming 2023 James and Audrey Foster Prize exhibition opening Aug. 24, 2023, and is contributing towards the first U.S. museum survey of Charles Atlas, opening in 2024.
“Since first joining as a curatorial fellow, Anni has been an indispensable part of the ICA’s curatorial department distinguishing herself with deep intelligence and equanimity,” said Ruth Erickson, recently appointed Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs. “In her time at the ICA, Pullagura has made many important contributions to the museum’s curatorial program and permanent collection, while developing a thoughtful body of scholarship on American art, empathy, and museums.”
Pullagura became Curatorial Assistant in 2020, after joining the ICA as a Curatorial Fellow in 2018. At the ICA, she has organized Jordan Nassar; Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca: Swinguerra; The Worlds We Make; and i’m yours: Encounters with Art in Our Time. She has also supported the management of the permanent collection and assisted in the organization of Deana Lawson; A Place for Me: Figurative Painting Now; Revival: Materials and Monumental Forms; William Forsythe: Choreographic Objects; and When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art.
In 2022, Pullagura received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Brown University, and is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including the Center for Curatorial Leadership/Mellon Foundation Seminar in Curatorial Practice Fellowship and the Professional Alliance for Curators of Color Fellowship from the Association of Art Museum Curators. She currently serves on the Art of the Americas Advisory Think Tank at Harvard Art Museums. In addition to presenting regularly at the American Studies Association, Black Portraiture[s], and the College Art Association, among others, her writing has appeared in Art Journal; The Journal of American History; and Journal of Visual Culture, as well as in numerous exhibition catalogues. Prior to the ICA, Pullagura held positions at the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University, Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, High Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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. Follow the ICA on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
Tammy Nguyen, Ralph Waldo Emerson (detail), 2023. Watercolor, vinyl paint, ink, screen printing ink, pastel, and metal leaf on paper stretched over panel. 100 x 60 inches (254 x 152.4 cm). Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London. © Tammy Nguyen
(Boston, MA—JUNE 27, 2023) On August 24, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens Tammy Nguyen, the artist’s first solo museum presentation in the United States. Tammy Nguyen’s (b. 1984, San Francisco) gilded paintings are composite images that reconsider lesser-known histories against the backdrop of lush landscapes and varied symbols of violent conquest or soft power. For the ICA, the artist has created an interconnected body of 14 paintings, works on paper, and artist books. Inspired by East Asian landscape painting, these works are all related to the relationship between people and nature, landscape and wilderness, as articulated in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s influential 1836 essay Nature, written in Concord, Massachusetts. Nguyen maps how ideas Emerson penned nearly 200 years ago have echoed across time and space to influence U.S. policies abroad, with a focus on Vietnam. Organized by Jeffrey De Blois, ICA Associate Curator and Publications Manager, the exhibition is on view through January 28, 2024.
“Nguyen’s unique paintings are both portraits and landscapes, in which figure and ground are collapsed together, equating humans to nature as in Emerson’s essay. Her new body of work explores the lasting influence of Emerson, a figure associated closely with Massachusetts, on ideas about nature that are still prevalent today,” said De Blois.
Nguyen’s new works are tied together by the line “what is a farm but a mute gospel?” from Nature, which intimates Emerson’s idea that God is reflected everywhere in nature. Dense layers of foliage combine plants and trees of the U.S. Northeast with the flora and fauna of tropical environments to create jungle-like landscapes where everything is interwoven. Emerson is one of the figures who recurs throughout the new works, along with Jesus, Demeter, and Ngô Đình Diệm.
Nguyen presents these seemingly disparate figures in parallel, connecting them using different seasons as experienced in the Northeast to create a new narrative around these known symbols. Jesus appears in the figure of the Christ of Vũng Tàu, a 105-foot statue in Vietnam on the top of Mount Nhỏ—both a legacy of colonialism and a path to salvation. Here, the Christ of Vũng Tàu suggests literally the Emersonian connection between God and landscape. Demeter features as the Ancient Greek goddess of harvest and agriculture, and, later, the patron saint of agriculture. Even after paganism was banned throughout the Roman Empire, farmers continued to pray to her as “Saint Demetra.” Ngô Đình Diệm was the first president of South Vietnam from 1955 until he was captured and assassinated during the 1963 South Vietnamese coup. Diệm opened the door to U.S. involvement in Vietnam as part of his nation-building projects, including land reform, a topic that Nguyen explores across her new body of work.
Nguyen’s vibrant paintings—whose symphonic space is made through overlaying painting, printing, drawing, metal leafing, and rubber stamping with custom-made tools—combine pictorial strategies of reflection and mirroring, drawn from Emerson’s philosophy of nature. In one large-scale painting, Nguyen mythologizes three figures involved in Vietnamese land reform programs whose passport photos she found in the National Archives of the United States. Their countenances are halved across the panels, portrayed against a panoramic landscape of mountains and overlaid with text drawn from documents found in archives. In another, a disc plow and illustrations of Vietnamese farmers found in the archives are juxtaposed with a depiction of the Battle of Lexington and Daniel Chester French’s The Minute Man (1874), a statue in Concord that depicts the revolutionary solider stepping away from his plow.
Emerson, Jesus, Demeter, and Diệm appear again in the artist’s four collage-based works on paper. The texture and specificity of these works are taken from documents, including propaganda, found in the National Archives related to land reform programs in Vietnam. Across these works, she also includes the words from Ca Dao, propagandistic folk songs promoting land reform that circulated the countryside.
Finally, four unique artist books—discrete objects unto themselves and the heart of Nguyen’s practice—are also tied to the four seasons and the recurring figures central to this body of work. The artist books are constructed to resemble the mountainous landscapes pictured throughout, tying together Emerson’s conception of landscape and how the Vietnamese landscape was conceived as part of land reform, especially through the lens of the U.S. involvement.
Artist Biography
Tammy Nguyen lives and works in Easton, Connecticut. Nguyen has a M.F.A. in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University, and a B.F.A. from Cooper Union. After finishing at Cooper Union, she received a Fulbright Scholarship to study lacquer painting in Vietnam, where she remained for three years. She is Assistant Professor of Art at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. She is the founder of independent publishing imprint Passenger Pigeon Press. Nguyen’s work has been included in numerous exhibitions, including Still Present!, 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Germany, and Greater New York 2021, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York. Nguyen’s artist books are in many notable collections, including Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT; Clark Art Institute Library, Williamstown, MA; Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art Library, New York; New York Public Library; Philadelphia Museum of Art Library, Philadelphia; and the Whitney Museum of American Art Library, New York. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts. Nguyen’s first novel, O, was published in 2022 with Ugly Duckling Presse.
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
Organized by Jeffrey De Blois, Associate Curator and Publications Manager.
Guadalupe Maravilla, Mariposa Relámpago, 2023. Courtesy of Guadalupe Maravilla and P·P·O·W, New York. © Guadalupe Maravilla
Guadalupe Maravilla, Mariposa Relámpago, 2023. Courtesy of Guadalupe Maravilla and P·P·O·W, New York. Photo by GLR Estudio Gerardo & Eduardo Lopez. © Guadalupe Maravilla
Guadalupe Maravilla, Mariposa Relámpago, 2023. Courtesy of Guadalupe Maravilla and P·P·O·W, New York. Photo by GLR Estudio Gerardo & Eduardo Lopez. © Guadalupe Maravilla
Guadalupe Maravilla, Mariposa Relámpago, 2023. Courtesy of Guadalupe Maravilla and P·P·O·W, New York. Photo by GLR Estudio Gerardo & Eduardo Lopez. © Guadalupe Maravilla
Guadalupe Maravilla, Mariposa Relámpago, 2023. Courtesy of Guadalupe Maravilla and P·P·O·W, New York. Photo by GLR Estudio Gerardo & Eduardo Lopez. © Guadalupe Maravilla
Guadalupe Maravilla, Mariposa Relámpago, 2023. Courtesy of Guadalupe Maravilla and P·P·O·W, New York. Photo by GLR Estudio Gerardo & Eduardo Lopez. © Guadalupe Maravilla
Guadalupe Maravilla, Mariposa Relámpago, 2023. Courtesy of Guadalupe Maravilla and P·P·O·W, New York. Photo by GLR Estudio Gerardo & Eduardo Lopez. © Guadalupe Maravilla
Guadalupe Maravilla, Mariposa Relámpago, 2023. Courtesy of Guadalupe Maravilla and P·P·O·W, New York. Photo by GLR Estudio Gerardo & Eduardo Lopez. © Guadalupe Maravilla
Guadalupe Maravilla, Mariposa Relámpago, 2023. Courtesy of Guadalupe Maravilla and P·P·O·W, New York. Photo by GLR Estudio Gerardo & Eduardo Lopez. © Guadalupe Maravilla
Guadalupe Maravilla, Mariposa Relámpago, 2023. Courtesy of Guadalupe Maravilla and P·P·O·W, New York. Photo by GLR Estudio Gerardo & Eduardo Lopez. © Guadalupe Maravilla
Guadalupe Maravilla, Mariposa Relámpago, 2023. Courtesy of Guadalupe Maravilla and P·P·O·W, New York. Photo by GLR Estudio Gerardo & Eduardo Lopez. © Guadalupe Maravilla
Guadalupe Maravilla, Mariposa Relámpago, 2023. Courtesy of Guadalupe Maravilla and P·P·O·W, New York. Photo by GLR Estudio Gerardo & Eduardo Lopez. © Guadalupe Maravilla
Guadalupe Maravilla, Mariposa Relámpago, 2023. Courtesy of Guadalupe Maravilla and P·P·O·W, New York. Photo by GLR Estudio Gerardo & Eduardo Lopez. © Guadalupe Maravilla
Guadalupe Maravilla, Disease Thrower #14, 2021. Cast aluminum, steel tubing, assorted welded details, 86 × 143 × 79 inches (218.4 × 363.2 × 200.7 cm). Installation view of Guadalupe Maravilla: Purring Monsters with Mirrors on Their Backs at MCA Denver Courtesy of Guadalupe Maravilla and P·P·O·W, New York. Photo by Wes Magyar. © Guadalupe Maravilla
Guadalupe Maravilla, Disease Thrower #14, 2021. Cast aluminum, steel tubing, assorted welded details, 86 × 143 × 79 inches (218.4 × 363.2 × 200.7 cm). Installation view of Guadalupe Maravilla: Purring Monsters with Mirrors on Their Backs at MCA Denver Courtesy of Guadalupe Maravilla and P·P·O·W, New York. Photo by Wes Magyar. © Guadalupe Maravilla
Guadalupe Maravilla, Disease Thrower #14, 2021. Cast aluminum, steel tubing, assorted welded details, 86 × 143 × 79 inches (218.4 × 363.2 × 200.7 cm). Installation view of Guadalupe Maravilla: Purring Monsters with Mirrors on Their Backs at MCA Denver Courtesy of Guadalupe Maravilla and P·P·O·W, New York. Photo by Wes Magyar. © Guadalupe Maravilla
(Boston, MA—May 4, 2023) The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) will open the next season of the Watershed with a monumental installation by Guadalupe Maravilla (b. 1976, El Salvador). In Guadalupe Maravilla: Mariposa Relámpago, Maravilla expands on the Disease Thrower series with a newly commissioned sculpture: Mariposa Relámpago (Lightning Butterfly), the artist’s largest artwork to date. Once a school bus in the United States, Mariposa Relámpago had a second life as a transportation bus in El Salvador, and has now been transformed into a vibrational healing instrument by the artist. Drawing on his personal story of migration, illness, and recovery, Maravilla combines sculpture, painting, performative acts, and installation to create works grounded in activism and healing. The exhibition will also feature several additional artworks including: 8 new retablo paintings, Migratory Birds Riding the Celestial Serpent, 2021; Disease Thrower #0, #00, and #14, and a site-specific Tripa Chuca wall drawing, made in collaboration with an East Boston-based resident. On view May 25—September 4, 2023, Guadalupe Maravilla: Mariposa Relámpago is organized by Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Senior Curator, with Yutong Shi, Curatorial Assistant.
In conjunction with the exhibition, the artist will lead free Sound Baths on June 10 and August 13. The ICA is also working closely with long-time community partner East Boston Neighborhood Health Center (EBNHC) and members of the East Boston Community Healing Center Project on several public programs during the exhibition’s run (full schedule and details below).
“Over the past five years, the Watershed has provided unprecedented opportunities for artists to engage with issues of community concern through immersive works of art. With its focus on healing and migration, Guadalupe Maravilla’s ambitious, large-scale installation, including a transformed school bus, is uniquely suited for the Watershed,” said Jill Medvedow, the ICA’s Ellen Matilda Poss Director. “We look forward to welcoming audiences to experience the artist’s unique vision and ideas around community-based care and regeneration.”
“Maravilla’s installations are amalgamations of animals, spirits, plants, and gongs that create multi-sensory experiences and nurture collective narratives of perseverance and humanity. His work is informed by his own experience recovering from cancer as an adult—an illness he links to the trauma he experienced as an unaccompanied minor migrating from El Salvador and the stresses of being undocumented,” said Erickson.
Guadalupe Maravilla: Mariposa Relámpago draws on Maravilla’s own migration experiences. His sculptures incorporate natural materials, handmade objects, and items collected by the artist while retracing the 3,000-mile migration route that he took as a child fleeing from El Salvador’s civil war to reunite with his parents at the age of eight. The artist explains that he began these trips “to confront trauma in order to heal it” and realized the objects he collected while traveling “were really charged and really powerful from those lands.” His finished artworks contain a cosmology of potent symbols and objects that connect the artist’s personal journey with ancient practices of the indigenous Mayan peoples; diverse spiritual and folk beliefs; and contemporary crises of disease, ecology, and war. The site-specific Tripa Chuca wall drawing is made by the artist and a local resident who shares a similar migration experience of displacement to form an index of cultural exchange. Tripa Chuca is a Salvadoran children’s drawing game in which participants draw lines that never intersect, connecting pairs of numbers to form an abstract pattern.
Public Programs
Sound Baths | June 10, August 13 at 12:15 PM and 3:30 PM
Maravilla incorporates sound baths into his practice, harnessing the sonic vibrations of healing instruments to create a space for meditation and restoration. Join the artist and other sound healers for an hour-long sound bath at the ICA Watershed. In this immersive, full-body experience, Maravilla will activate the congregation of sculptures including Mariposa Relámpago, which was once a school bus in the United States and had a second life as a transportation bus in El Salvador, and is now a vibrational healing instrument.
Watershed Block Parties | June 17, August 13 from 11 AM to 3 PM
The ICA Watershed’s Block Parties welcome over 900 people from the East Boston neighborhood and surrounding areas to experience art, music, food, and activities at the Watershed. This summer, the ICA is working with EBNHC and the Community Healing Project to lead drumming circles, reiki, yoga, and sound and healing activities at each block party.
Community Workshops | July 16, August 6 at 2 PM
The ICA will be holding two intimate and hands-on workshops with members of the East Boston Community Healing Center Project. In these workshops, healing practitioners will delve into their work through presentations and activities for attendees. The first workshop will be led by Arteterapia, and will focus on the health benefits of Latin American Dance; the second will be led by Nancy Slamet, from the East Boston Neighborhood Health Center and the EASTIE Coalition, alongside other local Qigong instructors, and will highlight the health benefits of Qigong.
Additional Resources
Accompanying Guadalupe Maravilla: Mariposa Relámpago will be a behind-the-scenes video with the artist discussing his process and personal history. The video is produced by Doza Visuals in conjunction with the ICA. The ICA Mobile Guide on the Bloomberg Connects app will feature the artist discussing his practice, symbolism, and personal experience in a series of audio tracks recorded in both English and Spanish.
East Boston Care Collectives
The Watershed’s Harbor Room will feature a presentation on healing practices in East Boston, titled East Boston Care Collectives, including three videos created with East Boston–based community organizations—Eastie Farm, Maverick Landing Community Services, and Veronica Robles Cultural Center—to demonstrate practices they use to promote healing. All videos are produced by Doza Visuals in conjunction with the ICA. The Harbor Room will also include a drop-in artmaking activity co-authored by the East Boston Social Center’s Director of Joy, Krina Patel.
Artist Biography
Guadalupe Maravilla (b. 1976) received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts and his MFA from Hunter College in New York. His recent solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; and the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Olso were critically acclaimed with reviews in the New Yorker, The New York Times, Forbes, and NPR. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Olso; and Tate Modern, London, among others. He has received numerous awards and fellowships including; United States Artists Fellowship, 2023; Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award, 2022; Joan Mitchell Foundation Inaugural Fellowship, 2021; Andrew W. Mellon Foundation & Ford Foundation Latinx Artist Fellowship, 2021; Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, 2019; Soros Fellowship: Art Migration and Public Space, 2019; Joan Mitchell Emerging Artist Grant, 2016; and The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation Award, 2003. He recently became an Art for Justice Artist Fellow, receiving the Art for Justice Grant, 2023. He has since directed this $100k grant to Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where he has been providing free meals and sound baths to undocumented immigrants, cancer survivors, and asylum seekers.
About the Watershed
In 2018, the ICA opened its new ICA Watershed to the public, expanding artistic and educational programming on both sides of Boston Harbor—the Seaport and East Boston. Located in the Boston Harbor Shipyard and Marina, the ICA Watershed transformed a 15,000-square-foot, formerly condemned space into a cultural asset to experience large-scale-art. It has since presented one immersive exhibition each summer, until it was closed to the public in 2020 to support the city and state in their efforts to contain the spread of COVID-19. During the pandemic, it was used as a food distribution site to address a direct need within the East Boston community, which experienced one of the highest rates of COVID-19 in Boston. The cross-harbor connection to the Watershed was designed to deepen the vibrant intersection of contemporary art and civic life in Boston and is central to the ICA’s vision of art, civic life, and urban vitality.
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.
Exhibition Credits
Support for Guadalupe Maravilla: Mariposa Relámpago is generously provided by anonymous donors.
Additional thanks to Guadalupe Maravilla: Mariposa Relámpago media sponsor, El Planeta.