The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) announces its exhibition schedule into 2017. Upcoming exhibitions include a major solo show of Walid Raad opening this February and an exhibition celebrating the museum’s first decade of collecting opening in August. For more information, please contact Kate Shamon, kshamon@icaboston.org, 617-478-3143.
Walid Raad
Feb. 24 – May 30, 2016
The ICA opens a comprehensive survey of the artist Walid Raad, a pivotal figure in contemporary art whose work investigates the ways in which we represent, remember, and make sense of history. The exhibition brings together nearly 150 works across various mediums—including photography, video, sculpture, and performance. Informed by his upbringing in Lebanon during the civil war (1975–90) and by the socioeconomic and military policies that have shaped the Middle East in the past few decades, Raad’s work is dedicated to exploring archives and photographic documents in the public realm, the role of memory and narrative within discourses of conflict, and the construction of histories of art in the Arab world. The exhibition is accompanied by a scholarly publication. This exhibition is organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The exhibition is curated by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, with Katerina Stathopoulou, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Boston presentation is coordinated by Jeffrey De Blois, Curatorial Assistant, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. Following its presentation in Boston, the exhibition will travel to the Museo Jumex, Mexico City (Oct. 13, 2016–Jan.14, 2017).
Geoffrey Farmer
April 13 — July 17, 2016
Geoffrey Farmer is best known for his installations and sculptural photo collages. Three large-scale works—two “paper works” and a new major film work—create the foundation for this exhibition. Each spectacular composition begins to chart the historical contours of our image-saturated contemporary culture, and suggest recurring cultural themes and formal patterns. Farmer uses movement, sound, animation, puppet characters, and a panoply of highly choreographed bodies and characters to investigate world history from the different angles of its photographic and sculptural accounts. Organized by Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator, with Jessica Hong, Curatorial Assistant.
Nalini Malani: In Search of Vanished Blood
July 1 – Oct. 16, 2016
Nalini Malani is India’s foremost video and installation artist and committed activist for women’s rights. This exhibition centers on her signature multi-media work, In Search of Vanished Blood (2012), accompanied by a selection of related works on paper. The work is comprised of six video projections streamed around the room through five hand-painted Mylar cylinders. As the cylinders rotate, colorful and layered iconography from Eastern and Western cultures is projected onto the walls, creating an arresting environment reminiscent of lantern slide presentations and other proto-cinema experiments in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Jessica Hong, Curatorial Assistant.
Liz Deschenes
July 1 – Oct. 16, 2016
This exhibition is the first museum survey of the Boston-born, New York-based artist Liz Deschenes. Deschenes is known for her lushly beautiful and meditative work in photography and sculpture. Since the early 1990s, she has produced a singular and influential body of work that probes the relationship between the mechanics of seeing, image-making processes, and modes of display. In addition to making discrete two-dimensional works, the artist has created carefully calibrated installations that blur the lines between photography and sculpture. On the occasion of her first museum survey, the artist will create a new site-specific work. The exhibition is accompanied by a scholarly publication. Organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Jessica Hong, Curatorial Assistant.
First Light: A Decade of Collecting at the ICA
Aug. 17, 2016 – Jan. 15, 2017
Coinciding with the ten year anniversary of the ICA’s move to its iconic waterfront building, this exhibition celebrates the museum’s first decade of collecting. Drawn entirely from the ICA’s collection, the exhibition will feature significant new acquisitions. Conceived as a series of interrelated and rotating stand-alone exhibitions, this presentation will highlight major singular works from the collection, including a monumental cut-paper silhouette tableau by Kara Walker, a spotlight on the Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women, groupings of work by artists such as Louise Bourgeois and Nan Goldin, and thematic and art-historical groupings featuring the work of artists as diverse as Paul Chan, Sharon Hayes, Sherrie Levine, and Cornelia Parker. A new multi-media microsite will be created to mark the occasion. This exhibition is organized by ICA’s curatorial department under the leadership of Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Jessica Hong, Curatorial Assistant.
The Artist’s Museum
Nov. 16, 2016 – March 26, 2017
The Artist’s Museum presents immersive installations that feature collections of art, artifacts, and natural material to create distinct models from each artist’s world. Employing the language of museum display, the artists chart the recurrence of forms and themes across cultures and history, revealing unexpected relationships and affinities and engaging a variety of disciplines and subjects, from dance, music, and design, to gender, sexuality, and technology. The exhibition is accompanied by a scholarly publication. Among the artists included are Rosa Barba, Carol Bove, Anna Craycroft, Mark Leckey, Pierre Leguillon, Goshka Macuga, and Christian Marclay. Organized by Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator, with Jeffrey De Blois, Curatorial Assistant.
2017 James and Audrey Foster Prize Exhibition
Feb. 15– July 9, 2017
The James and Audrey Foster Prize is key to the ICA’s efforts to nurture and recognize Boston-area artists of exceptional promise. First established in 1999, the James and Audrey Foster Prize (formerly the ICA Artist Prize) expanded its format when the museum opened its new facility in 2006. James and Audrey Foster, passionate collectors and supporters of contemporary art, endowed the prize, ensuring the ICA’s ability to sustain and grow the program for years to come. This iteration of the ICA’s biennial exhibition of work by Boston-based artists will be organized by Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator, with Jeffrey De Blois, Curatorial Assistant.
Dana Schutz
July 26– Nov. 26, 2017
New York-based artist Dana Schutz has emerged as one of the most prominent painters of her generation. Known for her distinctive visual style characterized by vibrant color and tactile brushwork, her paintings capture imaginary stories, hypothetical situations, and impossible physical feats, such as a figure attempting to eat his own face. Equal parts darkly humorous and surreal, Schutz’s paintings combine abstraction and figuration with expressive imagination, compressing bodies, banal objects, and quotidian scenes into oddly compelling and intriguing pictures. Dana Schutz will be a concise survey of the artist’s paintings made over the past decade, along with a presentation of works on paper. This exhibition is organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Jessica Hong, Curatorial Assistant.
Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 21st-Century Naturalist
Oct. 4, 2017 – Jan. 7, 2018
Acting as traveler, historian, scientist, and artist, Mark Dion has pioneered an influential model of artistic practice that involves research, collaboration, and fieldwork. His process-based work in sculpture, installation, drawing, and public art investigates the construction and display of knowledge about the natural world. The first U.S. survey of the internationally recognized artist, Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 21st-Century Naturalist spans the past 25 years, bringing together many of the artist’s most significant works. The exhibition combines a series of single-room installations with large gallery presentations of sculpture, drawing, and photography, as well as models of major public artworks. Informed by a deep knowledge of history and contemporary issues, these diverse projects illuminate the wondrous, absurd, and macabre outcomes that occur when the natural and cultural worlds collide. This exhibition is organized by Ruth Erickson, Associate Curator, with Jessica Hong, Curatorial Assistant.
ON VIEW
Diane Simpson
Through March 27, 2016
Diane Simpson’s elegantly constructed sculpture evolves from a diverse range of material, clothing, and architectural sources. While elements of her creations appear to effortlessly hang and fold, they are in fact the result of a rigorous approach to construction techniques, reveling in passages of pattern, joinery, and skewed angles that are by turns humorous and psychologically-charged. A concise survey of over thirty years of work, Diane Simpson is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition. Organized by Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator, with Jeffrey De Blois, Curatorial Assistant.
Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian: The Birthday Party
Through March 27, 2016
Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, Hesam Rahmanian live and work communally in a shared house in Dubai. The three Iranian artists—two brothers and their childhood friend—combine their individual work, and that of their friends, in sculpture, painting, drawing, and video, to generate consuming total environments. The ICA invited the trio to create an on-site installation in the gallery, joining the intimacy of the artists’ collective life with their critical engagement of a globalized contemporary culture. This is the first U.S. museum exhibition for the trio. Organized by Ruth Erickson, Associate Curator, with Jeffrey De Blois, Curatorial Assistant.
Ethan Murrow: Seastead
Through Nov. 27, 2016
Ethan Murrow is well known for photorealistic graphite drawings that combine found and invented imagery to form unexpected scenes drenched with humor and irony. At the ICA, Murrow has created a monumental site-specific drawing, in Sharpie, on the Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall. This project is organized by Ruth Erickson, Associate Curator.
Acknowledgments
Walid Raad is organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
This exhibition is curated by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston with Katerina Stathopoulou, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The Boston presentation is coordinated by Jeffrey De Blois, Curatorial Assistant, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston.
Support for the Boston presentation is generously provided by Jean-François and Nathalie Ducrest and The Envoy Hotel.
Major support for The Artist’s Museum is provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The 2017 James and Audrey Foster Prize exhibition and prize are generously endowed by James and Audrey Foster.
Major support for Mark Dion is provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Support for Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian: The Birthday Party is generously provided by Lori and Dennis Baldwin.