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Tammy Nguyen creates paintings, works on paper, unique artist books, and publications. In the densely layered symphonic space of her gilded paintings, Nguyen explores contradiction and confusion through intertwining narratives of geopolitical, environmental, and spiritual subjects. Many of her paintings are composite images that reconsider lesser-known histories against the backdrop of lush landscapes teeming with insects, plants, and animals imbued with agency, and varied symbols of violent conquest or soft power. In 2023, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston organized Nguyen’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States.

Ralph Waldo Emerson belongs to a series of works Nguyen made for her ICA exhibition related to the relationship between people and nature, landscape, and wilderness, as articulated in Emerson’s influential essay “Nature,” written in 1836 in Concord, Massachusetts. In the essay, Emerson outlines the spiritual and philosophical basis of transcendentalism, which suggests that God is reflected everywhere in nature and that reality can be understood by interacting directly with nature. This painting is a portrait of Emerson (in many ways the central figure of Nguyen’s exhibition), surrounded by dense layers of foliage combining the plants and trees of the Northeast with the flora and fauna of tropical environments, such as Vietnam. Nguyen portrays Emerson’s body as interchangeable with nature, a literal representation of his philosophical worldview. Nguyen layers the surface of the painting with elements drawn from the U.S. National Archives about land reform programs in Vietnam following the
Vietnam War. The artist poetically maps out how ideas Emerson penned nearly 200 years ago echo across time and space to influence U.S. policies abroad.

Didier William creates fantastical figurative paintings on wooden panels that incorporate carving, collage, and traditional Haitian iconography to explore themes of personal belonging and transnationalism. Throughout his oeuvre, William depicts figures suspended in space as if underwater or floating in the air. The artist notes that the absence of gravity and a stable foundation speaks to both queerness and diaspora as unmoored states that require constant navigation to construct a sense of belonging. In 2023, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston included William’s work in its presentation of Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today.

In Gwo Tet, a large, central figure hunches over a grainy wooden floor, their arms raised above their head in a defensive gesture. To the upper left, four hands extend menacingly from beyond the edges of the panel as if beckoning or casting a spell on the central figure. In Haitian Creole, gwo tét means “big head,” a phrase used pejoratively. William candidly notes that many of his works reconstruct memories of traumatic events. In this case, Gwo Tet depicts an episode where the artist was ridiculed on his walk home from school. The title is not translated to English, a move the artist has linked with a desire to withhold information about his subjects and his memories. In this way, the use of titles in Haitian Creole, or Kreyól, in his work is both a gesture toward Haitian diasporic identity and a way of maintaining a form of privacy. This tension between the knowable and the unknowable is also present in William’s singular iconography. The artist covers his figures in a cloak of carved eyes, a formal device he says liberates them from constant perception. William typically transfers sketches onto wood panels, which he dyes with ink before carving into their surface with a rotary tool. William employs this intervention to layer deeper meaning across his works through carved patterns and collages that echo Haitian textiles from his childhood. Here, William’s ambiguous figures, sexless and ageless, modulate the viewer’s ability to superficially understand them. The work suggests that living with a degree of uncertainty and maintaining anonymity is a right not often afforded to those who fall outside the bounds of white, heteropatriarchal systems.

Zoe Pettijohn Schade creates heavily detailed, labor-intensive, geometric gouache paintings by repeating imagery. Drawing from her own life, memories, and direct observation, Pettijohn Schade creates complex patterns from everyday images to produce layered and dizzying optical experiences. Pettijohn Schade’s work was included in the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston’s exhibition Less is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design (2019).

Attempts at Self Organization: Prevailing Bonds is the culmination of two years of work in which Pettijohn Schade meticulously draws from life using mirror devices that generate internally repeated structures and patterns. The foundational layer of the painting is a marbled pattern that the artist creates using traditional techniques, swirling pigment suspended on a liquid surface and laying paper on the liquid to absorb the patterned color. The artist then paints in gouache the shapes and patterns she observes by placing plants, rocks, a feather, and other materials inside a mirrored polyhedron. As the artist describes, “Mirror symmetry differs from other forms of tiling in that the symmetry—the tiles facing each other as they repeat, has an element of self-regard as well as self-replication.” Her approach lends the work an all-over composition in which no single element stands out, but each tile is entirely unique. In this work, she has paid particular attention to moments when long edges align—or bond. Among these precisely rendered shapes, there are blotches that break up the image’s geometric perfection. Reminiscent of Hermann Rorschach’s psychological tests—during which patients are asked to interpret various inkblots, with their responses being analyzed by the tester to better understand an individual’s subconscious—these shapes interrupt the patterning, inviting viewers to form their own images. Pettijohn Schade outlines the distinct polygons with thin, gilded metallic lines, which create a lattice-like layer that appears and disappears as a viewer moves around the work. Through this series of works, the artist draws upon texts by classical philosophers and theologians, such as Plato and St. Augustine, seeking to explore fundamental questions about the organization of matter and the self.

Josephine Halvorson’s painting practice focuses on place and the careful acts of observation and transcription. Working outdoors, Halvorson selects a particular site, sets up her tools and materials, and takes in her surroundings, translating what she sees into painted marks. The resulting paintings capture the heterogeneity and brilliance of the mundane, revealing each square inch of earth to hold countless colors, shapes, and textures. 

Station Meter is from a body of paintings (many of which were made during the COVID-19 pandemic), centered on artistic genres of still life and memento mori, which “hover between liveliness and decay,” according to the artist. Halvorson settles on many of her subjects—often overlooked scenes that appear to hold little value otherwise—during her walks and travels, drawn primarily to seemingly forgotten corners of different environments. It is Halvorson’s deep investment in her subjects through which she locates the latent meaning of each scene. She spends hours looking closely and working in a vérité style in order “to make a painting that remembers better than I can,” says Halvorson.  

Station Meter centers on a watt hour meter, a device that measures and records the electric power flowing through a circuit over time. The meter is mounted on a weathered piece of wood whose brilliant blue paint is peeling, its appearance neglected. The mounted meter is represented frontally and crowds the canvas against a backdrop of train tracks, an overpass, and electrical lines, conveyed through an economy of means in very little space. As in many of Halvorson’s works, the meter is painted with a poetic exactitude that renders it with a quiet dignity. It appears to suggest that despite being overlooked, the work nevertheless must go on. The passing and measuring of time apparent in the scene are analogous to Halvorson’s investment in moments of beauty that often go unnoticed. 

Aubrey Levinthal’s figurative paintings and still lifes suggest meditative and melancholic atmosphere that offer less a portrait of her subjects than an evocation of an emotional state, expressing her interest in what she calls the “uncanny in our everyday lives.” Drawing on scenes and experiences from her life, she slowly builds up layers of thin, semitransparent washes of paint on panel and then scrapes them down with a razor, lending her works an ethereal quality as if seen through the haze of time.  

In her most recent body of work, Levinthal shifts from a focus on her private life to encounters in the public sphere, all while continuing her emphasis on intimacy, close observation, and restrained compositions. In Airport, two figures sit facing one another at a small, circular table against the unmistakable setting of an airport terminal—its enormous windows opening to a gray tarmac and cloudy sky. One of the most striking features of this work is the merged faces of the seated couple: the bearded face of the rear figure joins the turned face of the closest figure to create a singular tonal plane, where the subtlest brushstrokes both define and defy the edges of the two figures. Likely a portrait of the artist and her husband, the painting reflects Levinthal’s characteristic use of distortion to heighten the mood and convey narratives within her paintings. “I hope my work is a real, tender accounting of my particular visual life,” says the artist. “The paintings can be inventive and distorted, as I often work from memory and through process, but I want them to carry resonance of my experience, which happens to be as a painter, woman, and mother.” 

For over twenty years, São Paulo-based artist Rivane Neuenschwander has honed a distinct multimedia practice that investigates the roles of collaboration and chance in the creative act. Whether in film, photography, or installation, Neuenschwander is principally concerned with what she calls “ethereal materialism,” or the role that ephemeral or everyday materials have in creating momentary experiences of wonder, chance, and enchantment in public space. The installation Um festival embananado is the sixth installment of a series of works Neuenschwander began making in 2004 titled Zé Carioca. The series title is a reference to the comic character José “Zé” Carioca, a dapper Brazilian parrot first created in 1941 by cartoonist José Carlos de Brito. The next year, the character was famously adapted by the Walt Disney Company as a companion of Donald Duck and later of Mickey Mouse. The creation of Disney’s new character was an extension of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, which sought to maintain strategic relations in the Americas—in this case through popular culture. Frequently featured in comic strips, animated films, and television shows, Zé Carioca has become synonymous with Brazilian culture even as the character’s stereotypical traits as a suave, streetwise malandro (rascal) speak to the complicated history of American political interference in Latin America in the twentieth century. In her series, Neuenschwander creates mural blocks of Zé Carioca’s comic panels stripped of the original text and image, leaving only vibrant, Technicolor squares and blank speech bubbles. The artist then invites the public to continue the artwork by writing or drawing directly on the murals. The result is a collective form of social and individual expression determined entirely by the chance encounter in public space. 

New York-based artist María Berrío crafts her large-scale, watercolor paintings through a meticulous process of collaging and painting torn pieces of Japanese paper. The Conference of the Sparrows is part of Berrío’s most recent series, The Children’s Crusade, which blends the history of the Children’s Crusade of 1212 CE with the contemporary mass movement of peoples across borders. Berrío frames her series as a fictional tale, with each painting and its descriptive text serving as a scene from an unfolding story. In The Conference of the Sparrows, a family appears on a boat in a vast expanse of dappled water. As in many of Berrío’s works, this painting merges recognizable and iconic imagery with flights of imagination and fantasy. The blue wooden boat resembles those used by many migrants crossing the Mediterranean, its hull filled with domestic items, foodstuff, and figural details. These realistic elements merge with the otherworldly, including a nude, winged central figure that appears like an angel or a ship’s figurehead, hovering over a plastic bucket and conjuring safe passage. About this work, the artist writes: “To make the crossing required as much hope and courage as it did desperation, or nearly so. But the children had been assured that their gods would look over them. Their faith in a better world to come would protect them.” 

The work of Marlene Dumas explores the thematic relationships between parenthood, sexuality, and death. Using a wide range of photographic source material, from her own Polaroids to newspaper images and pornography, Dumas creates paintings and drawings that are focused largely on the human body or face. She considers her source images to be political in their contemporaneity, showing the psychological realities of the era in which they were taken. She works in the tradition of portraiture, but she subordinates the aspect of individual appearance to the sitter’s mental and emotional state.

The Messengers reveals the fragile cycles of life in a four-panel painting that depicts three skeletons alongside a young child. While the anatomy is not detailed, Dumas creates a compressed intensity by scaling her figures to the height of the narrow canvasses and installing them close to the floor so they share our viewing space. Dumas made this painting when she was a new parent: the figure to the right is her daughter Helena. In contrast to the three small children sheepishly crowding around one of the skeletons, Helena turns her larger-than-life gaze directly toward us. Images of pregnant women and children recur in Dumas’s work, and Helena is a frequent subject. The Messengers is typical of Dumas’s way of suggesting that motherhood and childhood are not as distant from issues of mortality as we might think. The size and postures of the skeletons and Helena are the same, and the skeleton beside her holds a small figure near its pubis as though it had just given birth; the association emphasizes the inexorability of the cycle of life and death.

The striking and monumental The Messengers strengthens the representation of Dumas’s work in the ICA/Boston collection, which also includes her German Witch, 2000.

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During an artistic career lasting only from the mid-1960s until her untimely death in 1977, Ree Morton produced work of remarkable breadth. While she achieved notable success in the 1970s, after her death she largely fell out of the art-historical purview, only to be “rediscovered” in recent years through her inclusion in such exhibitions as WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007). From delicate pencil drawings to expansive sculptural installations, her work forges unlikely partnerships between such aesthetic and political practices as minimalism, feminism, and regionalism. The modular units familiar from minimalism are not the clean products of industry, but ribbons, curtains, portraits, hand-painted logs, ladders, and other forms associated with craft and the decorative. In merging the formal concision and conceptual rigor of minimalism with kitsch and Americana, Morton makes it difficult to pin down interpretation of her work.

Completed toward the end of Morton’s life, Regional Piece is one of several works in which she stacked a horizontal painting depicting a sunset over water above another showing a tropical fish underwater. Despite their disparate imagery and spatial disjunctiveness, the paintings in Regional Piece have striking parallels, starting with a shared palette: in both, a bright orange contrasts with a brushy blue and green. A red rectangle—comparable in proportions to the canvas—interrupts each scene, floating on top with no apparent connection to the subject. A curtain-like length of green celastic draped over the two canvases makes reference to the theater and the domestic realm, amplifying the paintings’ kitsch character.

Regional Piece contributes to the ICA/Boston’s expanding collection of paintings, especially those that demonstrate transformations in the medium since the 1970s. It joins works by Jason Middlebrook and Matthew Ritchie that play with framing devices and the relationships between abstraction and representation. And, like works in the collection by Ambreen Butt, Louise Bourgeois, and Cindy Sherman, it supports the effort to examine and redirect the position of women in art and art history.

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Dana Schutz paints abstracted figures in the midst of outlandish, gruesome, or humiliating situations. She begins by visualizing an absurd or impossible event––figures eating their own faces, carving shapes into their necks, or attempting to smoke cigarettes while swimming underwater––and proceeds to ask herself questions about the theoretical incident. Through these questions, Schutz imagines not only how the given situation might materialize visually, but also the feelings that would be associated with it. The resulting images are imaginative, humorous, and borderline sadistic in the treatment of their subjects. In its bright colors and loose brushstrokes, Schutz’s work recalls cartoons or children’s book illustrations, generating a strange contrast with the sinister circumstances it depicts.

Sneeze shows a graphic illustration of a physical event most sitters would prefer not to have immortalized in a portrait. Mucus from a woman’s nose, portrayed in exaggerated strokes of yellow, green, and blue paint, has sprayed several inches before ricocheting off her open palms. The painting might be called an “anti-portrait”; instead of presenting the sitter as dignified, it shows her at her most unappealing. The painting also departs from traditional portraits by capturing a momentary and involuntary pose that a subject would not have been able to hold long enough to have it documented.

Dana Schutz is an accomplished painter whose canvases have been seen in the tradition of the grotesque represented by artists from Francisco Goya to Willem de Kooning and Francis Bacon. Sneeze joins works by other important quasi-representational contemporary painters in the ICA/Boston collection, including Ree Morton, Joan Semmel, and Amy Sillman.

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