Charles Gaines (born 1944 in Charleston, SC) is an American conceptual artist widely recognized for his explorations of systems and structures through drawing, photography, and video. Since the 1970s, he has been a pivotal figure in the field of conceptual art, employing mathematical formulas and algorithmic methods to create wide-ranging artworks that interrogate relationships between the objective and subjective realms. Through his work and teaching, Gaines has been influential to a younger generation of artists, especially those invested in interrogating social issues through modes of abstraction. 

The image of the tree has been at the heart of Gaines’s practice since the 1970s. Numbers and Trees: Charleston Series 1, Tree #5, Tranquil Drive pictures 150-year-old pecan trees photographed on the Boone Hall Plantation in Charleston County, SC, near where the artist was born and lived until he was five years old. In this series, Gaines makes an important formal innovation by reversing the painted layers of image and grid that have defined his work. Rather than the colorful grid overlaying the photographic image, Gaines suspends an acrylic sheet with the black-and-white image of the rugged trees draped in Spanish moss over a grid of “leaves” painted in blues, reds, and purples. This approach brings the tree’s many details to the foreground, producing a dramatic effect that lends the work a more gothic and solemn mood. Given the site of these pecan trees on a former plantation, and the association of trees with lynching, this work subtly consolidates and presents information to great emotional effect. While Gaines’s engagement with systems may not appear overtly political, it has been the means through which the artist has analyzed and made visible structures of power, including racial categorization, patterns of political speech, and ideology. As Gaines explains: “I use systems in order to provoke the issues around representation.”

One of the most influential artists working today, Carrie Mae Weems (Born 1953 in Portland, OR) draws on photography, installation, text, and video, among other mediums, to investigate history, identity, and power. Through her work, Weems offers incisive critiques with a keen attention to the archive and observational methods, and she has produced numerous series addressing structural injustices and histories that have defined American culture.

Weems’s Blues and Pinks works are components of the larger installation The Push, The Call, The Scream, The Dream (2020), which pairs the artist’s own photographs with archival images from the 1960s. In Blues and Pinks 3, Weems appropriates photographs by American photojournalist Charles Moore depicting violence against protestors at the 1963 Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, Alabama. She selects portions of Moore’s photographs, highlighting the violence against peaceful Black protestors from the law enforcement sent to suppress them, and arranges the grouped images diagonally. Through both her selection and arrangement, Weems emphasizes the use of force—both anticipated and felt—as dogs bark and bare their teeth, officers swing batons, and concentrated jets of water pummel protestors recoiling in anticipation and experience of pain. She colors the black-and-white photographs blue and pink, colors that have multiple resonances for Weems, from her care for the protestors to the evocation of bruised skin. This work reflects long-running concerns in Weems’s practice, such as the media’s representation of African Americans, mining the archive, and innovative forms of photographic installation.

In her series titled Lost in My Life, Rachel Perry (Born 1962 in Tokyo) “pirates” her own bodies of work and redeploys them in the context of performative self-portraits. For Perry, these works pay homage to “the endless organizing, cleaning, and shopping that form the business of living.” Invested in a rigorous yet playful conceptualism across her practice, Perry uses what she calls the “detritus of everyday life” as both material and inspiration. Between 2014 and 2016, Perry embarked on a series of Chiral Drawings as an attempt to make a drawing using every single pen, pencil, crayon, colored pencil, and marker she owned. Chirality refers to the phenomenon of an image or object being different from its mirror image. Perry used her right and left hands respectively to attempt draw the same line, resulting in an imperfect mirror image. In Lost in My Life (Chiral Lines 3), Perry uses one of her Chiral Drawings as a backdrop for large-scale photographic self-portrait and obscures her face with another drawing on paper. Other works from the series feature self-portraits with key materials from previous projects, including receipts, twist ties, and tinfoil.

Rania Matar (Born 1964 in Beirut) grapples with issues of personal and collective identity in her work. Born in Lebanon, Matar has lived in the United States since 1984. Drawing on her cultural background, cross-cultural experiences, and personal narrative, she has produced photographic series focused on womanhood, adolescence, and periods of individual evolution.

Since 2005, Matar has collaborated with Samira, a third-generation Palestinian refugee who Matar met at the Bourj El-Barajneh Camp on the outskirts of Beirut. While the earliest images are taken inside the refugee camp, later images record Samira and Matar on ventures outside Bourg El-Barajneh, taking photographs near the sea and in other areas around Beirut. Taken across almost twenty years, Matar’s poetic photographs capture Samira growing up. The moments Matar and Samira share in these photographs are contemplative and tender, capturing states of being and transformation.

Samira at 13, Bourj El-Barajneh Refugee Camp, Beirut was taken eight years after Matar first photographed Samira. This portrait captures Samira’s growth and development, her emergence into adolescence, and the progression of her identity. Viewers are drawn to the image through striking details, such as the colorful interior environment, the interplay of different hues of blue, and the visual rhyme between the bedazzled bow on the subject’s shirt and the textiles beside her. Most significant, perhaps, is the sitter’s penetrating gaze, which suggests self-possession and confidence as she meets the eyes of her viewers. This photograph serves as a bridge between two other images of Samira in the ICA’s collection, creating a formal echo with how Samira herself spans childhood and adulthood.

Rania Matar (Born 1964 in Beirut) grapples with issues of personal and collective identity in her work. Born in Lebanon, Matar has lived in the United States since 1984. Drawing on her cultural background, cross-cultural experiences, and personal narrative, she has produced photographic series focused on womanhood, adolescence, and periods of individual evolution.

Since 2005, Matar has collaborated with Samira, a third-generation Palestinian refugee who Matar met at the Bourj El-Barajneh Camp on the outskirts of Beirut. While the earliest images are taken inside the refugee camp, later images record Samira and Matar on ventures outside Bourg El-Barajneh, taking photographs near the sea and in other areas around Beirut. Taken across almost twenty years, Matar’s poetic photographs capture Samira growing up. The moments Matar and Samira share in these photographs are contemplative and tender, capturing states of being and transformation.

Samira, Hasna, and Wafa’a, Bourj El-Barajneh Refugee Camp, Beirut is the first image in this body of work, taken when Matar first met Samira. In the photograph, Samira is flanked by family members as her mother extends a tray with tea and snacks. More than just marking the beginning of Matar and Samira’s extensive relationship, the image centers themes of hospitality and hope within difficult material circumstances. It also speaks to the relationships among daughters, sisters, and mothers—a long-running theme in Matar’s practice.

Rania Matar (Born 1964 in Beirut) grapples with issues of personal and collective identity in her work. Born in Lebanon, Matar has lived in the United States since 1984. Drawing on her cultural background, cross-cultural experiences, and personal narrative, she has produced photographic series focused on womanhood, adolescence, and periods of individual evolution.

Since 2005, Matar has collaborated with Samira, a third-generation Palestinian refugee who Matar met at the Bourj El-Barajneh Camp on the outskirts of Beirut. While the earliest images are taken inside the refugee camp, later images record Samira and Matar on ventures outside Bourg El-Barajneh, taking photographs near the sea and in other areas around Beirut. Taken across almost twenty years, Matar’s poetic photographs capture Samira growing up. The moments Matar and Samira share in these photographs are contemplative and tender, capturing states of being and transformation.

Samira, Jnah, Beirut, Lebanon reflects Matar and Samira’s travels outside the refugee camp to create portraits. Here, Samira is centered and set within a field of tall grasses and budding wildflowers, the Mediterranean Sea just barely visible in the background. The natural setting’s sense of freedom and openness is undercut by tangled rings of razor wire. This image, taken by peering through these barriers, raises central questions of freedom and movement as they shape Samira and Matar’s lives.

For more than two decades, acclaimed photographer An-My Lê (Born 1960 in Saigon, Vietnam) has created arresting, poetic photographic series that address the power and theater of war and politics. Informed by the histories of landscape photography, documentary reportage, and conflict journalism, Lê’s work offers a reflection on how reality and myth are portrayed and contested.  

Since 2015, Lê’s ongoing Silent General series documents a wide range of events marking the fever pitch of American political and social conflict, from the removal of Confederate monuments to immigration and gun control. Prompted by horrific mass shooting and murder in 2015 of nine Black churchgoers at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC, Lê embarked upon an extended road trip to record the complexity of the unfolding moment in the United States and its relationships to longer histories. 

In Fragment IX: Jefferson Davis Monument, Homeland Security Storage, New Orleans, Louisiana, from Silent General a bronze portrait of Jefferson Davis (1808–1889)—a vocal advocate of slavery and the first and only president of the Confederate States of America, which existed from 1861 to 1865—is shown wrapped, crated, and sequestered in storage. Here, the artist captures the intense contestation around monuments and history, their relationships to white supremacy and white Christian nationalism, and a widespread public reckoning of race and power in the United States. As Lê has done for years, she evokes layers of contested histories through her seemingly everyday scenes, posing questions about not only what is represented, but how and for whom. 

For more than two decades, acclaimed photographer An-My Lê (born 1960 in Saigon, Vietnam) has created arresting, poetic photographic series that address the power and theater of war and politics. Informed by the histories of landscape photography, documentary reportage, and conflict journalism, Lê’s work offers a reflection on how reality and myth are portrayed and contested.

Since 2015, Lê’s ongoing Silent General series documents a wide range of events marking the fever pitch of American political and social conflict, from the removal of Confederate monuments to immigration and gun control. Prompted by the horrific mass shooting and murder in 2015 of nine Black churchgoers at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC, Lê embarked upon an extended road trip to record the complexity of the unfolding moment in the United States and its relationships to longer histories.

Fragment IV: General Robert E. Lee Monument, New Orleans, Louisiana, from Silent General locates a monument of Confederate General Robert E. Lee (1807–1870) at the end of a tree-lined street partially under construction in New Orleans. The statue was later taken down by official order and moved to an undisclosed location in 2017. Lê’s photograph evokes the ideological shifts of this transitional moment, as the elegant street with its streetlamp of an earlier time undergoes reconstruction. Here, the artist captures the intense contestation around monuments and history, their relationships to white supremacy and white Christian nationalism, and a widespread public reckoning of race and power in the United States. 

An acclaimed artist working primarily in the media of photography, film, and video, Shirin Neshat (Born 1957 in Qazvin, Iran) creates art that contends primarily with the experiences and struggles of Iranian women through the lens of religion, femininity, and modernity. Neshat’s film and photographs are concerned with the social relationships between women and men in Muslim societies and prompt important questions on representations of Muslim women in contemporary art. The photograph Untitled is from a series made the same year titled Passage, depicting scenes from Neshat’s single-channel video Passage from 2001. With an accompanying score by the composer Philip Glass (who originally commissioned Passage), the video was originally shot on 35mm film in the Moroccan seaside city Essaouira, and in the Moroccan desert at a halfway point between Marrakesh and Casablanca. The video is composed in three parts: the first follows a group of men carrying a body prepared for burial; the second, a group of women preparing a place for burial by digging into the ground with their hands; and the third, a young girl playing alone as the burial concludes with a funeral pyre. This photograph draws from the second part of the film, showing the women in a tight circle on their hands and knees, conflating the forms of their huddled bodies with the dry, rocky landscape. Likewise, their tightly gathered bodies resemble the form of the funeral pyre, layering nuanced meaning through these visual metaphors on the role of gender, performance, and ritual. 

Sandra Cinto (Born 1968 in Santo Andre, Brazil) rose to prominence in the late 1980s. In her drawing-based work, she develops the possibilities of line at an architectural scale, and brings attention to the multiple layers of visual experience. Cinto often depicts the landscape in spare yet florid compositions that invoke the sublime and emphasize turbulence in seascapes, rainstorms, and blustery skies. She is frequently commissioned to create large-scale, site-specific works in which she drapes spaces in wide swaths of lush, blue-tinted drawings, pushing the limits of the medium. In these spiraling, expansive works, Cinto offers the rigors of travel across challenging terrain as a metaphor for human ambition.

​Although Cinto is less known for her photographic work, the medium allows her to explore many of the themes that inform her environmental works, namely, the play between flatness and depth, transparency and opacity, and drawing and three-dimensional space. In Untitled, a ghostly bluish-green hand floats within the frame against an indeterminate background. The glass separating the viewer from the image has been streaked and scored by longitudinal etching marks, as if the glass had been shattered, rupturing the serenity of the milky composition. The hand’s tensely curled and truncated fingers, coupled with the scarred glass that encases it, lend the work an eerie, disquieting air.

​This multimedia work by Cinto builds on the ICA/Boston’s growing collection of late twentieth-century photography and artworks that dissolve the divide between photography, sculpture, and painting, such as those by Gilbert and George, Leslie Hewitt, and Annette Lemieux. It also adds to the ICA’s burgeoning collection of Latin American art.