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Landmark touring exhibition features over 100 works spanning 25 years, including works from the artist’s personal archive on view for the first time

(Boston, MA—March 30, 2026)  In April 2026, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens Derrick Adams: View Master, the first survey of New York-based multidisciplinary artist Derrick Adams (b. 1970, Baltimore). The exhibition presents over 100 works spanning 25 years of the artist’s practice, including never-before-seen works from Adams’s personal archive, immersive exhibition design created by the artist, and new works debuting at the ICA. Adams’s paintings, sculptures, collages, performances, videos, and public projects celebrate the richness and complexity of everyday Black American life, and over the past two decades, have transformed these moments into a distinct iconography. The exhibition is organized by Dexter Wimberly, Independent Curator, and Tessa Bachi Haas, Assistant Curator, ICA/Boston. Derrick Adams: View Master opens at the ICA, where it will be on view from April 16 to September 7, 2026, before traveling to the Queens Museum in New York (Fall 2027). 

At the ICA, the artist’s work will extend beyond the galleries with the museum’s first major facade commission—a monumental installation wrapping the exterior of the ICA building. The commission offers Adams’s bold reimagining of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) test pattern, also known as television color bars. The exhibition grows in June with the addition of the artist’s Funtime Unicorn riders—a collection of interactive sculptures positioned near the museum’s entrance for visitors to engage and play with. The facade commission will be on view from mid-April 2026 through April 2027 and the Funtime Unicorns will be on view from June 2026 through September 2026. 

“Television was my first classroom. Since 2014, I have incorporated color bars into my work as background and wall treatment to explore pivotal shifts and moments in Black television from the 1970s through the 1990s,” said Adams. “The color bars signal that something has been switched ‘on.’ Wrapping the ICA’s facade in this vibrant pattern sparks a necessary dialogue about representation in contemporary culture and the systems that shape how we see.” 

“Whether through intimate portraits or large-scale public projects, Adams offers compelling narratives of affirmation and celebration. His engaging and uplifting work, including the first major artwork to occupy the ICA’s facade, invites audiences from across the city to experience Adams’s joyful and visionary practice,” said Nora Burnett Abrams, Ellen Matilda Poss Director at the ICA. “We envision this as the first of many exterior projects to come, bringing art outside the museum to expand our welcome and engage the public in new and meaningful ways.” 

Derrick Adams’s work centers Black subjects depicted in vibrant scenes of rest, recreation, and self-care. Play is a central theme in Adams’s practice. Braving the Path, 2023, depicts a young Black child riding a Funtime Unicorn, referencing the interactive sculptures that Adams will stage outside of the ICA. His vibrant explorations of contemporary life convey a palpable sense of power, referencing many pop culture moments. In another work, Only Happy Thoughts, 2024, Adams portrays a Black woman adorned with bright blue eye shadow and Tootsie Roll candies alongside African masks and elements drawn from Black art traditions. This painting is one of several vibrant and multifaceted portraits that convey his serio-comedic storytelling, establishing situations starring both real and imagined characters through humorous juxtapositions. In one of Adams’s interactive, sculptural works, Cool Down Bench (RBG), 2023, the artist recalls childhood memories of neighborhood ice cream trucks with a large-scale, functional sculpture modeled after the popular red, white, and blue ice pops. However, in this instance, the bench features the colors of the Pan-African flag—red, black, and green—representative of Black liberation.

“Adams’s use of bold colors, dynamic compositions, and layered textures creates a powerful visual impact that underscores the depth of the Black experience,” said Wimberly and Haas. “His work invites visitors to see the beauty and strength in the everyday lives of Black people with a sense of humor and whimsy.” 

In Derrick Adams: View Master, the artist invites visitors to engage with a world where cultural and creative freedom is essential. The exhibition’s sub-title, View Master, is an ode to the toy that the Black inventor Charles Harrison redesigned in 1958 and reflects Adams’s distinct ability to capture the Black gaze. For the ICA’s presentation, Adams debuts a new work titled View Master, 2025, a large 6 x 8-foot painting featuring a view master—a stereo picture-viewing system that creates the illusion of a 3D world. Adams’s worldbuilding extends to the galleries, where wallpapers designed by the artist create an immersive visual experience for visitors. Derrick Adams: View Master is a testament to Adams’s commitment to expanding the conversation around what it means to live and thrive in today’s world.

The exhibition unfolds across five thematic and interconnected sections: “The Urban Landscape,” “Domestic Space & Family Life,” “Play,” “Performance,” and “Television & Media.” 

Born in Baltimore and based in New York, Adams is finely attuned to the architecture of everyday city life: the streets, storefronts, and public spaces that frame The Urban Landscape. His work pulses with the city’s visual rhythms, where signs, awnings, and scaffolding create a layered language. In Adams’s hands, these elements become active participants — they shape identity, hold memory, build community, and capture the perpetual change of the city. Storefronts and stoops become platforms for performance and self-determination, and everyday scenes become monuments honoring Black experiences. This artist-designed wallpaper includes several references to the Negro Motorist Green Book. It was published between 1936 and 1966 by Victor Hugo, a U.S. Postal Service Worker, and guided Black travelers across North America to safe destinations during the violent and racially segregated Jim Crow Era. For Adams, the Negro Motorist Green Book is both a landmark of Black American history and a framework to consider travel, rest, and leisure within shifting social and political terrain.

Domestic Space & Family Life are recurring themes across Adams’s work. He creates scenes that are deeply personal, where figures lounge, strike poses, and gather within graphic, pattern-rich interiors. This new, site-specific wallpaper depicts a kitchen, living room, family room, bedroom, and bathroom. Transforming the gallery into a vivid domestic stage, this section explores how our homes, objects, and the people we live with are active and vital expressions of identity, containers of memory, and beacons of cultural inheritance. Here is where taste, care, aspiration, and the most radical ideas can take form. For people whose identities and experiences often face erasure in public life, Adams suggests that the power to design one’s environment becomes a potent act of shaping one’s reality.

Play is central to Adams’s practice. In this section, lively carnivals, birthday picnics, pool parties, and family gatherings burst with color and joy. The artist’s background teaching elementary and middle school frames play as a political act. This wallpaper features imagery from America’s Playground: DC, the installation that Adams designed on the National Mall in 2024. The location in Washington, D.C carries deep resonance: it was home to the first desegregated playground in the country. The artist sees playgrounds as early arenas of negotiation — where rules are tested, identities are formed, and power dynamics are explored. This section features a new work from Adams’s iconic Floater series depicts a figure reclining in a pool float — unguarded, radiant, and fully at ease. By elevating these everyday scenes to monumental status, Adams celebrates play, pleasure, and leisure as forms of resistance and vital expressions of freedom.   

Performance is a foundational yet lesser-known aspect of Adams’s career. Many works across the exhibition reference stage and cinema through scale, composition, and a unique cast of characters. This gallery brings together more than twenty years of Adams’s performance practice, evoking poetry, hip-hop, church, and theater. For him, performance is both entertainment and a complex negotiation of agency for many Black and brown communities. It becomes shield and spotlight, where stereotypes are dismantled, and new stories are told. Through performance, Adams honors the creativity, agility, and resilience required to navigate a world that often diminishes Black life, asserting a presence that demands recognition and envisions a brighter future.

Television & Media have long been at the heart of Adams’s practice — he affectionately calls TV his “first classroom.” The colorful pattern on the adjacent wall references the iconic Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) test pattern — better known as TV color bars — the graphic grid once used to calibrate TV screens across America when the artist was a child in the 1970s. Since 2014, Adams has sampled and remixed these patterns in his work, tracing pivotal moments in Black television from the 1970s through the 1990s. This section of his practice explores how media shapes identity, representation, beauty standards, and power in our ever-changing landscape — a particularly urgent discussion given the funding cuts plaguing public broadcasting in the United States, and the use of media as a potent political weapon.

Monograph 
The exhibition follows Adams’s first-ever monograph, featuring 150 of the artist’s most significant works to date. Published by Phaidon and Monacelli, the book also includes essays by Hallie Ringle, Salamishah Tillet, and Dexter Wimberly, and an interview by Sandra Jackson-Dumont. 

Retail 
The ICA Store is collaborating with Adams to bring artist-designed products to the museum store. Some of these products include: 

  • A custom Retroviewer that will include reels of artwork from the exhibition 
  • A limited-edition straw bag featuring an artwork from Adams’s iconic Floater series 
  • A baseball cap embroidered with Adams’s View Master 
  • A bag featuring the same SMPTE test pattern that will cover the museum’s facade 
  • A t-shirt featuring Adams’s Funtime Unicorn 
  • An enamel pin of Adams’s View Master 

Press Preview  
Media are invited to attend the press preview for Derrick Adams: View Master on Tuesday, April 14, at 9:30 AM. RSVP to press@icaboston.org. 

Media Contact: Theresa Romualdez, press@icaboston.org 

Digital Press Kit: https://bit.ly/DerrickAdams 

Credits 
Derrick Adams: View Master is organized by Dexter Wimberly, Guest Curator, and Tessa Bachi Haas, Assistant Curator, ICA/Boston. 

Leadership support is provided by a sponsorship circle including Adelle Chang and Eddie Yoon, The FLAG Art Foundation, Mathieu O. Gaulin, Girlfriend Fund, John and Rachel Hanselman, and Patrick Planeta and Santiago Varela. 

Additional support is provided by Boston Building Wraps, Jean-François and Nathalie Ducrest, Georgia and Jesse Feldman, Gagosian, Melissa Gilliam and William Grobman, Christine and Alan Huber, Stephanie and Tim Ingrassia, Natalie and Jake Lemle, Barbara H. Lloyd, Michelle Morphew, Mark and Marie Schwartz, and the Brizius Family Fund for Artists. 

With warmest thanks, we gratefully acknowledge the generosity of the ICA’s Avant Guardian Society in making this exhibition possible. 

Logo for The FLAG Art Foundation. The word FLAG is in white capital letters on a red, trapezoid-shaped background, while The and Art Foundation are in black text on a light gray background, similar to the bold style seen at ICA Boston.
Logo of girlfriend DONOR ADVISED FUND with stylized abstract shapes in green, orange, and pink to the left of the text, reminiscent of Tau Lewis' vibrant style exhibited at ICA Boston.
Gagosian logo

Lucy Raven: Rounds presents a new large-scale kinetic sculpture co-commissioned by the ICA/Boston and Barbican Centre 

(Boston, MA—March 19, 2026) This summer, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens its 2026 Watershed season with Lucy Raven: Rounds, on view May 21 through Sep. 7, 2026. The exhibition marks the United States’ premiere of Hardpan, 2025, a large-scale kinetic sculpture co-commissioned with Barbican Centre, London, and Murderers Bar, 2025, the final installment in Raven’s series The Drumfire. Sited at the ICA Watershed, the exhibition is organized by Ruth Erickson, Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the ICA, with Meghan Clare Considine, Curatorial Assistant at the ICA.    

“We are thrilled to present the U. S. premiere of Raven’s Hardpan and Murderers Bar, two riveting and ambitious immersive works at the Watershed,” said Nora Burnett Abrams, Ellen Matilda Poss Director at the ICA. “Presented in the industrial setting of the Watershed, a former copper pipe and sheet metal factory located on a working shipyard at the edge of the Boston Harbor, Lucy Raven: Rounds invites visitors to consider the social and political impact of industrial progress and expansion through an immersive experience.”  

Raven’s wide-ranging practice encompasses film, installation, sculpture, photography, and drawing. Across these media, she examines the dynamics of material transformation, and the entwined histories of image capture technologies and infrastructural systems. Anchored by four moving image installations, the body of work that comprises The Drumfire explores themes of pressure, force, and cycles of violence in the (de- and re-)formation of the Western United States, including: the transformation of solid rock into concrete in Ready Mix, 2021; the accumulation of shock waves caused by explosive blasts in Demolition of a Wall (Album 1), and (Album 2), both 2022; and the propulsive effects of fluid dynamics and water in Murderers Bar, 2025.    

Raven created Murderers Bar on the occasion of the largest dam removal and river restoration project in American history. In the film, dynamite is installed inside Copco 1, a large-scale concrete gravity dam in Northern California. After its detonation, the camera follows the rush of the river 200 miles to the Pacific Ocean and then turns upstream to return to the drained reservoir behind the dam—a stark landscape of sediment that will be transformed in years to come. Projected on a large-scale curved vertical screen, the installation visualizes the landscape’s transformation at a monumental scale. The installation is accompanied by an immersive, four-channel soundtrack composed and performed by Raven’s frequent collaborator Deantoni Parks, echoing the senses of force, rupture, and turbulence in the film.   

The exhibition also premieres Raven’s newly commissioned kinetic light sculpture, Hardpan. As with rotating devices that utilize centrifugal force—to separate solids and liquids, or to increase pressure and scale through acceleration—Hardpan spins an electronic arm, sweeping light around an aluminum and concrete enclosure and pushing light into the exhibition space.

“The artworks in Rounds are united in the artist’s exploration of force, extreme speed, and fluid dynamics,” said Erickson and Considine. “In Murderers Bar, Raven uses a range of aerial and underwater imaging strategies, finding form in the material transformation of land and landscapes; and in Hardpan, this visual experience is brought off the screen for visitors to physically experience.” 

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 
Lucy Raven: Rounds is organized by Ruth Erickson, Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, with Meghan Clare Considine, Curatorial Assistant. 

Hardpan is co-commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston and Barbican, London. 

This exhibition is supported by an anonymous donor and the Jennifer Epstein Fund for Women Artists. 

Simpson’s work will be included in the ICA’s upcoming collection exhibition titled To My Best Friend

(Boston, MA—Dec. 10, 2025) The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) is pleased to announce Lorna Simpson (b. 1960, New York) as the 2026 recipient of the Meraki Artist Award. Known for her pioneering approach to conceptual photography in the 1980s and 1990s, Simpson has expanded the boundaries and possibilities of representation for more than 40 years. Her text and image works undermine widely held assumptions about race and gender within American culture, encouraging audiences to re-examine these ideas and unconscious classifications. In her more recent body of vibrant, large-scale paintings, Simpson probes the complexities of memory, history, and experience, while innovatively experimenting with diverse media. Simpson’s continued commitment to experimentation has made her a visionary and one of the most widely admired artists of our time. Her work To My Best Friend, 2013, will be on view at the ICA as part of a collection exhibition of the same name, opening on Jan. 23, 2026. 

“I am incredibly grateful to be recognized as the next Meraki Artist Award recipient,” said Simpson. “It is an honor to receive an award that celebrates the creativity and care of today’s artists.”  

The $100,000 annual Meraki Artist Award is generously funded by Fotene Demoulas and recognizes the artistic achievements of women artists. Taking inspiration from the Greek word “meraki,” which means to do something with soul, love, or creativity, the Meraki Artist Award was established in 2025 to support the ICA’s efforts in exhibiting, presenting, and collecting the work of visionary artists. Simpson will accept the Meraki Artist Award at the museum’s annual Women’s Luncheon on Apr. 27, 2026. 

“I’m proud to partner with the ICA to recognize the important contributions of Lorna Simpson through the Meraki Artist Award,” said Demoulas. “It is with great joy that I congratulate Lorna, whose powerful and innovative work challenges us to question and imagine a better world.”  

“It is a joy to celebrate the work and practice of one of the most resonant and inspiring artists working today, Lorna Simpson, who embodies the spirit of the Meraki Artist Award and its celebration of artists who illuminate new ways of seeing the world,” said Nora Burnett Abrams, Ellen Matilda Poss Director at the ICA. “We are so excited to celebrate Lorna’s powerful and thought-provoking practice and her vision, at once rigorous, lyrical, and deeply human, as the award’s 2026 recipient.” 

In January 2026, the ICA will present To My Best Friend, a collection-focused exhibition featuring works given, promised, or lent by Demoulas and Tom Coté. The artworks included represent multiple generations, styles, media, and thematic concerns, featuring stunning works by 17 of today’s leading artists. Simpson’s installation of the same name features more than 100 found elements, including 85 found photobooth images—an early democratic form of self-representation. Much like the title of Simpson’s work, the exhibition evokes the warmth and reciprocity at the heart of the relationships the ICA has built between artists, audiences, and collectors. 

About Lorna Simpson 
Lorna Simpson came to prominence in the early 1990s with her pioneering approach to conceptual photography. Simpson’s early work raised questions about the nature of representation, identity, gender, race, and history that continue to drive the artist’s expanding and multi-disciplinary practice today. Over the past 30 years, Simpson has continued to probe these questions while expanding her practice to encompass various media including film and video, collage, drawing, painting, and sculpture. Her works have been exhibited at and are in the collections of many major museums internationally and she was awarded the J. Paul Getty Medal in 2019. Lorna Simpson is represented by Hauser & Wirth. 

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 long-time ICA trustee and supporter Fotene Demoulas. The artist is 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 

The exhibition includes works by Olga de Amaral, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Mickalene Thomas, and Meraki Artist Award recipients Lorna Simpson and Sarah Sze

(Boston, MA—Dec. 10, 2025) The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) presents To My Best Friend, a collection-focused exhibition featuring stunning works by 17 of today’s leading artists. This exhibition features works gifted and promised to the ICA by longtime supporters of the museum, Fotene Demoulas and Tom Coté. Committed to supporting artists at every stage of their career through exhibitions, publications, and museum acquisitions, Demoulas and Coté have foregrounded the visionary work of historically-underrepresented and women artists through their philanthropy. The included artworks represent 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. To My Best Friend opens with 20 works by 17 women artists—including several recent acquisitions on view for the first time—by artists Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Olga de Amaral, Huma Bhabha, Charline von Heyl, Roni Horn, Deana Lawson, Laura Owens, R. H. Quaytman, Deborah Roberts, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Rose B. Simpson, Becky Suss, Mickalene Thomas, Vivian Suter, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and Meraki Artist Award recipients Lorna Simpson and Sarah Sze. The exhibition borrows its title from an installation by Lorna Simpson which opens the show and features more than 100 found elements, including 85 found photobooth images—an early democratic form of self-representation. Much like the title of this artwork, To My Best Friend evokes the warmth and reciprocity at the heart of the relationships the ICA has built between artists, audiences, and collectors. The exhibition is organized by Erika Umali, Curator of Collections at the ICA, and will be on view from Jan. 23, through Dec. 31, 2026.

“The ICA has a very long history of presenting the work of women and underrepresented artists,” said Nora Abrams, Ellen Matilda Poss Director at the ICA. “And, we have been able to build a diverse collection based on this ethos because of our generous supporters in and around Boston. We are so grateful for Fotene’s and Tom’s support towards this vision.”

“It is with great pleasure that I have continued to support the ICA in presenting and acquiring the work of women artists at every stage of their career,” said Demoulas. “I am excited to see works from the past 20 years reflected in this exhibition.” 

To My Best Friend draws primarily from the ICA Collection. The ICA has a long exhibition history of presenting women artists, queer artists, and artists of color; and since the museum started collecting in 2006, it has continued to reflect the same ethos. Today, 60% of the collection is made up of women artists and over 40% of the artists in the collection identify as BIPOC. 

A sampling of the works that will be presented include:  

  • Surround Sound (After Studio), 2019, by 2025 Meraki Artist Award recipient Sarah Sze (born 1969 in Boston). Sze uses everyday materials to explore the built environment and our increasingly image-saturated world. In this over 8-foot-tall work, Sze layers images of speakers, Post-it notes, and mirrored surfaces to capture the unique sonic, physical, and aesthetic space of the artist’s studio. As Sze said in the same year this painting was made: “In the age of the image, a painting is a sculpture.” 
  • Bruma W, 2018, by Olga de Amaral (born 1932 in Bogotá, Colombia). Known for her large-scale, abstract, fiber-based works, Amaral brings together local traditions and global developments in the art world through her innovative weavings. In Bruma W, part of the artist’s Brumas series, linen threads cascade from a wooden panel to create an optical effect that recalls the work’s title, Bruma, the Spanish word for mist. Discussing her practice, Amaral notes: “As I build surfaces, I create spaces of meditation, contemplation, and reflection. Every small unit that forms the surface is not only significant in itself, but is also deeply resonant of the whole. Likewise, the whole is deeply resonant of each individual element.” 
  • Guitar Gangster, 2013, by artist Charline von Heyl (born 1960 in Mainz, Germany). Heyl’s paintings encourage dialogue between painting and abstraction. In this large-scale painting, the artist combines architectonic and organic forms and bright expanses of color to give the work dynamic energy. About her work, Heyl says: “It is about the feeling that painting can give—when you can’t stop looking because there is something that you want to find out, that you want to understand.” 

Exhibition credits: 
To My Best Friend is organized by Erika Umali, Curator of Collections at the ICA. 

This exhibition is funded, in part, with support from Leadership in Arts Museums, an initiative to create more racial equity in art museum leadership, supported by the Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Pilot House Philanthropy, and Alice L. Walton Foundation. 

Media Contact: Theresa Romualdez, press@icaboston.org 

Featuring five decades of work by 39 artists, the exhibition illuminates a living archive of creative resistance, cultural memory, and Black artistic excellence

(Boston, MA—December 3, 2025) In February 2026, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens Say It Loud: AAMARP, 1977 to Now, an exhibition dedicated to Boston’s African American Master Artists-in-Residence Program (AAMARP). A vital outgrowth of the Black Arts Movement, AAMARP was founded by artist, educator, and activist Dana C. Chandler Jr. at Northeastern University in 1977, making it one of the few longstanding residency programs for Black artists in the United States. Tracing the evolution of AAMARP through the artists’ voices, their engagement with global artistic and political movements, and their deep-rooted sense of community, the exhibition illuminates a living archive of creative resistance, cultural memory, and Black artistic excellence over five decades. Say It Loud: AAMARP, 1977 to Now features more than 60 works by 39 artists spanning generations and mediums, including figurative and abstract painting, collage, woodworking, experimental textile art, street photography, public murals, and more. Accompanied by a scholarly publication, the exhibition is on view from Feb. 12—Aug. 2, 2026, and is organized by Jeffrey De Blois, the Mannion Family Curator at the ICA, with Meghan Clare Considine, Curatorial Assistant at the ICA. 

“AAMARP was created to be a center of excellence in multicultural visual and performing arts, and an enriching environment to nurture and support artists of African descent,” said artist and AAMARP Director, Reginald L. Jackson, PhD. “AAMARP continues to be a visual arts resource and ambassador of goodwill to the local, national, and international art community, and remains a prominent center for discussion of African diasporic cultural growth and development.”  

“AAMARP proudly continues the legacy of earlier Black artistic guilds—including the Harlem Renaissance, Spiral, Weusi, Obassi, and AfriCOBRA—to intentionally utilize aesthetics and creative expression to advance Black liberation across all periods of time and geographic locations,” said L’Merchie Frazier, an AAMARP artist and educator.  

“The ICA is very proud to present the first museum survey of AAMARP, which highlights the diversity of approaches long championed by AAMARP artists and positions Boston as a key nodal point in the regional histories of the Black Arts Movement that scholars are charting today,” said Nora Burnett Abrams, Ellen Matilda Poss Director of the ICA. 

In founding AAMARP, Chandler’s vision was for a Black artist-run visual arts complex—including exhibition and studio spaces as well as a community center—whose program would provide a “living focus” on the “diverse dynamics of African American aesthetics.” He selected an initial group of artists for the program “with an eye towards a diversity of visual arts disciplines and aesthetics,” and included some of the Boston area’s most prominent Black artists, such as Ellen Banks, Calvin Burnett, and John Wilson. Now housed in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood, AAMARP’s programmatic offerings include dance, poetry readings, artist talks, workshops, award ceremonies, and, as in the past, regular student group visits. 

Embodying the program’s ethos of collaboration and exchange, the exhibition curators worked alongside Chandler before his untimely passing in June of 2025, AAMARP’s executive committee, and active members to plan Say It Loud and its accompanying publication. The book features never-before-published archival materials; new scholarly essays by De Blois and Faye R. Gleisser; a robust annotated chronology compiled by Considine and De Blois; a coda by Connie H. Choi that considers the importance of sustaining Black-run arts spaces; and personal reflections by AAMARP-affiliated artists and community members. 

“When we first discussed the possibility of doing an exhibition about AAMARP with Dana Chandler, he immediately said: ‘Hurry up and do it.’ This sense of urgency, informed by the fact that in-depth institutional recognition was overdue, informed every aspect of our endeavor to highlight the powerful and historically important body of work created by artists affiliated with AAMARP,” said De Blois and Considine. “The exhibition and publication reflect the program’s vibrancy and vitality, highlighting Chandler’s original vision of an artist-run alternative art space, free and open to everyone, where Black art and culture could flourish.” 

Spanning multiple galleries, Say It Loud follows AAMARP’s rich history from its founding in 1977 to today, and the loosely chronological installation echoes the vibrancy of AAMARP’s programmatic offerings. Works in the exhibition include: 

  • Benny Andrews, Nene, 1978. Nene is a collaged oil portrait depicting the artist’s future wife, Nene Humphrey, leisurely resting against a tree at MacDowell, an artist retreat in New Hampshire, where the pair met. In 1980, the work was included in an exhibition of the renowned artist’s work curated by Chandler. The ICA worked closely with the Benny Andrews Estate to identify Nene from archival images. The work has not been presented since the artist died in 2006. 
  • Ellen Banks, Scott Joplin, 1982. An original AAMARP-affiliated artist, Banks was trained in both painting and piano. Her painting, Scott Joplin, is emblematic of her geometric abstractions derived from musical scores, in which colors correspond to pitches, and shapes to durations and tempos. Banks’s commitment to non-figurative painting during AAMARP’s early years was notable because she positioned herself in opposition to the dominant strands of politically-engaged practices that characterized the Black Arts Movement.  
  • Rudolph R. Robinson, TRY BLACK, 1983. Robinson, another original AAMARP affiliate, was a fine arts photographer for the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists in Roxbury and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Robinson’s works include a wide range of subjects, from the nighttime scene TRY BLACK to his Invisible Man/Europe series documenting the growing Black communities there. Robinson was an influential member of the AAMARP program and a mentor to many, including Hakim Raquib, one of the photographers still working at AAMARP today. 
  • Keith Morris Washington, George Armwood: Front Lawn of Judge R. Duer’s Home; Princess Anne, Maryland, 1999. In the late 1990s, thanks to his generous studio space at AAMARP, Keith Morris Washington began an ongoing series of large-scale paintings he called Within Our Gates: Site and Memory in the American Landscape. Each work takes as its subject the site of an American lynching; as the artist says, he is “mediating spaces, investigating a past still present, interrogating tradition, questioning discrepancies extolled in Hudson River / Luminist Painting.” 
  • Susan Thompson, Call of the Ancestors 1 and 2, both 2017. Thompson, a pillar of the program today, has been working at AAMARP since 1985. With Allan Rohan Crite as her mentor, Thompson went from creating wall hangings and costumes for her child’s grade school play, to mastering a range of artistic techniques, especially transforming various fabrics into narrative quilts. Call of the Ancestors 1 and 2 are pieced quilts with applique that are both abstract and meditative. The works feature shadowy, featureless figures against a patchwork landscape, and are strong examples of the creative innovations in fiber arts that have been present at AAMARP since its inception. 

Artists in the exhibition: Benny Andrews, Ellen Banks, Gloretta Baynes*, Calvin Burnett, Ambreen Butt, Dana C. Chandler Jr., Jeff Chandler*, Allan Rohan Crite, Milton Derr, Sharon Dunn, Marlon Forrester*, L’Merchie Frazier*, Tyrone Geter, Ricardo “Deme5” Gomez*, Paul Goodnight, Reginald L. Jackson*, Michael Jones, Shea Justice*, Kofi Kayiga*, Khalid Kodi*, Marcia Lloyd, Vusumuzi Maduna, Bryan McFarlane*, Stanley Pinckney, Hakim Raquib*, James Reuben Reed, Rudolph R. Robinson, Renée Stout, Edward Strickland, Susan Thompson*, Arnold Trachtman, Wen-ti Tsen, Barbara Ward, Keith Morris Washington, Don West*, Rene Westbrook, John Wilson, Richard Yarde, and Theresa-India Young.

*Current AAMARP members 

Credits 
Say It Loud: AAMARP, 1977 to Now is organized by Jeffrey De Blois, Mannion Family Curator, with Meghan Clare Considine, Curatorial Assistant. 

Support for Say It Loud: AAMARP, 1977 to Now is provided by the Terra Foundation for American Art, The Kristen and Kent Lucken Fund for Photography, and The Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Exhibition Fund. 

The publication is supported by Wagner Foundation. 

Logo of the Terra Foundation for American Art, with terra in bold lowercase letters and Foundation for American Art in smaller text to the right on a light background.
The image shows the logo for Wagner Foundation, with the foundations name in bold, black, serif font on a light gray background.

Derrick Adams: View Master offers a comprehensive look at 20 years of the artist’s multidisciplinary practice celebrating contemporary Black life and culture

(Boston, MA—November 13, 2025) In April 2026, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens Derrick Adams: View Master, the first survey of New York-based multidisciplinary artist Derrick Adams (b. 1970, Baltimore). The survey exhibition presents more than 100 works spanning over 20 years of the artist’s practice, including never-before-seen works from Adams’s personal archive, immersive exhibition design created by the artist for the ICA, and new works debuting at the ICA. Adams’s paintings, sculptures, collages, performances, videos, and public projects celebrate the richness and complexity of everyday Black American life, and over the past two decades, have transformed these moments into a distinct iconography. On view from April 16 to September 7, 2026, Derrick Adams: View Master is organized by Dexter Wimberly, Independent Curator, with Tessa Bachi Haas, Assistant Curator, ICA/Boston. 

“Whether through intimate portraits or large-scale public projects, Adams offers compelling narratives of affirmation and celebration. His work delights in the everyday moments that define the pursuit of happiness in America. Taken together, the works in this exhibition invite audiences to experience joy and feel uplifted through his engaging and visionary practice,” said Nora Burnett Abrams, Ellen Matilda Poss Director at the ICA. 

Derrick Adams’s work centers Black subjects depicted in vibrant scenes of rest, recreation, and self-care. Play is also a central theme in Adams’s practice. Braving the Path, 2023, depicts a young Black boy riding a Funtime Unicorn, referencing the interactive sculptures that Adams has created and installed across various urban landscapes for passers-by to engage with. His vibrant explorations of contemporary life convey a palpable sense of power, referencing many pop culture moments. In another work, Only Happy Thoughts, 2024, Adams portrays a Black woman adorned with bright blue eye shadow and Tootsie Roll candies alongside African masks and elements drawn from Black art traditions. This painting is one of several vibrant and multifaceted portraits that convey his serio-comedic storytelling, establishing situations starring both real and imagined characters through humorous juxtapositions. In one of Adams’s interactive, sculptural works, Cool Down Bench (RBG), 2023, the artist recalls childhood memories of neighborhood ice cream trucks with a large-scale, functional sculpture modeled after the popular red, white, and blue ice pops. However, in this instance, the bench features the colors of the Pan-African flag—red, black, and green—representative of Black liberation. 

“Adams’s use of bold colors, dynamic compositions, and layered textures creates a powerful visual impact that underscores the depth of the Black experience,” said Wimberly and Haas. “His work invites visitors to see the beauty and strength in the everyday lives of Black people with a sense of humor and whimsy.” 

In Derrick Adams: View Master, Adams invites viewers to engage with a world where cultural and creative freedom is essential. The exhibition’s sub-title, View Master, is an ode to the toy that the Black inventor Charles Harrison redesigned in 1958 and reflects Adams’s distinct ability to capture the Black gaze. For the ICA’s presentation, Adams will debut a new work titled View Master, 2025, a large 6 x 8-foot painting featuring a view master—a stereo picture-viewing system that creates the illusion of a 3D world. Adams’s worldbuilding extends to the galleries, where wallpapers designed by the artist will create an immersive visual experience for visitors.  Derrick Adams: View Master is a testament to Adams’s commitment to expanding the conversation around what it means to live and thrive in today’s world.

The exhibition follows Adams’s first-ever monograph, featuring 150 of the artist’s most significant works to date. Published by Phaidon and Monacelli, the book also includes essays by Hallie Ringle, Salamishah Tillet, and Dexter Wimberly, and an interview by Sandra Jackson-Dumont. 

Media Contact: Theresa Romualdez, press@icaboston.org 

Digital Press Kit: https://bit.ly/DerrickAdams 

Credits
Derrick Adams: View Master is organized by Dexter Wimberly, Guest Curator, and Tessa Bachi Haas, Assistant Curator, ICA/Boston.

Support for Derrick Adams: View Master is provided by Gagosian and the Brizius Family Fund for Artists.

With warmest thanks, we gratefully acknowledge the generosity of the ICA’s Avant Guardian Society in making this exhibition possible.

Gagosian logo

Beyond the galleries, the ICA highlights Indigenous makers in a series of public programs and performances 

(Boston, MA—SEPTEMBER 22, 2025) On October 9, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens An Indigenous Present, a nationally touring, 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 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 careers, 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​.”​ 

At the ICA, An Indigenous Present includes two new commissions that expand the exhibition beyond the galleries. An immersive sound work by Raven Chacon fills ICA’s Founders Gallery overlooking Boston Harbor. A site-specific installation by Caroline Monnet for the museum’s Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall is composed of commercial building materials 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. 

The exhibition unfolds across several galleries, beginning with a focus on the work of George Morrison and Mary Sully, two important forebearers whose works anchor An Indigenous Present in the first decades of the 20th century. Throughout the exhibition, works by emerging artists are positioned in dialogue with those by more established makers within five sections: 

Section 1 
Ground is the term for both land and a receiving surface that has been prepared for painting. It can be understood as both a generative subject and a visual motif—George Morrison and Teresa Baker evoke the land and light of their ancestral homelands through an interplay of color and form. In this section, artists merge these conceptions of “ground,” using abstraction to visualize sense memories, places, and histories. Section 1 includes artworks by Teresa Baker, Raven Chacon, Sky Hopinka, George Longfish, Caroline Monnet, George Morrison, and Mary Sully. 

Section 2 
This gallery includes works that use abstraction to convey expansive concepts through minimal means. It begins with Kay WalkingStick’s monumental Chief Joseph Series, from the 1970s, a work about the heroic Nez Perce chief. The 27 paintings, arranged in a grid, assert space and accumulate meaning. Other works in this section use similar strategies of repetition, with individual parts inextricable from the whole. Section 2 includes artworks by Sonya Kelliher-Combs, Dakota Mace, Kimowan Metchewais, Caroline Monnet, George Morrison, Mary Sully, and Kay WalkingStick. 

Section 3 
In this gallery, sound is an abstraction that flows through shape, line, and pattern. Following the theory of counterpoint—a composition of two or more voices that are both harmonically interdependent, and distinct in melody and rhythm—the works here converse with one another. Some reference stories, prayers, and singing, evoking the sounds these modes of communication require. Other works portray composers, compositions, and sound patterns. Section 3 includes artworks by Teresa Baker, Raven Chacon, Sky Hopinka, Caroline Monnet, Audie Murray, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and Mary Sully. 

Section 4 
The works in this gallery feature a range of techniques and media that artists use to collapse the distinctions between concept and material. Labored surfaces obscure shapes and images, scale equalizes object and space, and a reduced palette is used to compress space and obscure subjectivity. Section 4 includes artworks by Teresa Baker, Sonya Kelliher-Combs, George Longfish, Kimowan Metchewais, George Morrison, and Kay WalkingStick. 

Section 5 
In this gallery, we see artists merging idea and medium. Anna Tsouhlarakis mixes found and sourced materials in her new large-scale sculpture, and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith smokes and works the surface of a canvas as one would a hide. Both found and sourced materials come with pre-existing associations that artists coax into works that draw from personal and cultural knowledge. Section 5 includes artworks by Teresa Baker, Sonya Kelliher-Combs, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Kimowan Metchewais, Caroline Monnet, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Mary Sully, Anna Tsouhlarakis, and Kay WalkingStick. 

Press Preview 
Media are invited to attend the press preview for An Indigenous Present on Tuesday, October 7, at 9:30am. RSVP to press@icaboston.org 

Programming 
Throughout the run of the exhibition, the ICA will host a series of performances, including a new, multidisciplinary commission by Raven Chacon. On October 11, visitors will experience a full day of the Pulitzer Prize-winning artist’s sound-based works and installations presented throughout the museum. Other programming throughout the run of the exhibition includes a short film series curated by artist Sky Hopinka in the museum’s Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater; an interactive and family-friendly art installation by Mashpee-Wampanoag artist Robert Peters in the ICA Bank of America Art Lab; an Artist’s Voice conversation with artists Caroline Monnet and Sky Hopinka; and many more related events. 

Artist List  
Teresa Baker (Mandan/Hidatsa; born 1985 in Watford City, ND) 
Raven Chacon (Diné; born 1977 at Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation) 
Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation; born 1984 in Bellingham, WA) 
Sonya Kelliher-Combs (Iñupiaq and Koyukon 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 in St. Paul, Alberta) 
Caroline Monnet (Algonquin-Anishinaabe 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 at St. Ignatius Mission, Flathead Reservation, MT; died 2025 in Corrales, NM) 
Mary Sully (Yankton Dakota; born 1896 at Standing Rock Reservation, SD; died 1963 in Omaha, NE) 
Anna Tsouhlarakis (Navajo, Creek, and 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 Mathieu O. Gaulin, Peggy J. Koenig, Barbara H. Lloyd, Kim Sinatra, the Fotene Demoulas Fund for Curatorial Research and Publications, and an anonymous donor. 

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. Follow the ICA on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.  

Media Contact  
Theresa Romualdez, press@icaboston.org 

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: Hidden Battles/Hondo dzakavanzika is on view from Aug. 28, 2025, to Jan. 19, 2026. 

Portia Zvavahera: Hidden Battles/Hondo dzakavanzika 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.   

Media Contact 
Theresa Romualdez, press@icaboston.org

Credits 
Portia Zvavahera is organized by Ruth Erickson, Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, with Meghan Clare Considine, Curatorial Assistant.  

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 

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