Multi-disciplinary artist Emily Wells will create an evocative one-night experience merging pop, chamber music, and visual art in a live performance of Regards to the End, her 2022 album. This performance will be the fullest live realization to date of the ambitious set of 10 works presented as expanded cinema with 12-piece orchestration. Regards to the End is informed by the lives and work of American choreographers and visual artists, particularly those with ties to the AIDS crisis working in the 1980s and 1990s (Kiki Smith, Bill T. Jones, Arnie Zane, David Wojnarowicz, Alvin Baltrop, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Jenny Holzer, Nayland Blake). Centrally, the work is built from the question, “What can artists working at the beginning of the AIDS crisis teach us about how to be artists, people, living and working during climate catastrophe?” The answers often point to a simple truth: we need each other.

This evening will feature Wells, Boston Symphony Orchestra musicians, and Emily’s video work, which utilizes archival footage of early AIDS activism in America, clips of modern and contemporary dance, and captured moments of extreme climate events. She will also be joined on stage by drummer and composer Ian Chang and multi-instrumentalist and singer David Baldwin. The show will be lit and designed by Tuçe Yasak.

Accessibility

  • Accessible and companion seating can be selected when purchasing tickets online, or at the Box Office at 617-478-3100 or visitorservices@icaboston.org.
  • Assistive listening devices are available for all theater programs at the theater entrance.
  • A link to live captioning will be shared by the day of the event and will be available in the theater.
  • ASL interpretation is available by advance request; please contact the Box Office at 617-478-3100 or visitorservices@icaboston.org to make a request.

Are there other access accommodations that would be useful to help you fully participate in this program? Let us know at accessibility@icaboston.org or learn more about Accessibility at the ICA at icaboston.org/accessibility.

Boston Symphony Orchestra logo featuring stylized text and a circular graphic resembling a musical instrument, possibly a horn, on the left side.

Jazz Urbane Cafe returns to the ICA with a thrilling evening of music featuring some of Boston’s best and most beloved musicians. The enormously gifted pianist Estefanía Núñez Villamandos will open the concert with a solo piano set of music inspired and influenced by her Cuban heritage. Bassist Ron Reid will take center stage with his Liberty Quintet to perform alongside sax legend Stanley Strickland. The Greg Groover Jr. Quartet will close out the evening with music to elevate and nourish the soul.

Celebrate the soon-to-open home of Jazz Urbane Cafe in Nubian Square and hear a preview of what’s to come at the ICA.

Accessibility

  • Accessible seating is available first-come first-served and may be selected upon theater entry. Please contact our Visitor Services team at visitorservices@icaboston.org or 617-478-3100 for more information.
  • Assistive listening devices are available for all theater programs at the theater entrance.
  • A link to live captioning will be shared by the day of the event and will be available in the theater.
  • ASL interpretation is available by advance request; please contact our Visitors Services team at 617-478-3100 or visitorservices@icaboston.org to make a request.

Are there other access accommodations that would be useful to help you fully participate in this program? Let us know at accessibility@icaboston.org or learn more about Accessibility at the ICA at icaboston.org/accessibility.

Jazz Urbane Cafe logo

[Project Creatine] is a theatrical memoir written for the unique talents of operatic tenor and drag performer Jordan Weatherson Pitts/Creatine Price. Combining opera and drag, this performance goes beyond the limitations of either genre, offering a story of perseverance and radical self-definition in an age when many are legally forbidden to exist as they are. [Project Creatine] (working title) makes profoundly audible one person’s struggle to actualize a reality without fear or doubt that they are worthy of life.

Conceived and performed by Jordan Weatherston Pitts (aka Creatine Price)

Music by Samuel Beebe

Libretto by Lex Brown and Jordan Weatherston Pitts

Accessibility

  • Accessible seating is available first-come first-served and may be selected upon theater entry. Please contact our Visitor Services team at visitorservices@icaboston.org or 617-478-3100 for more information.
  • Assistive listening devices are available for all theater programs at the theater entrance.
  • A link to live captioning will be shared by the day of the event and will be available in the theater.
  • ASL interpretation is available by advance request; please contact our Visitors Services team at 617-478-3100 or visitorservices@icaboston.org to make a request.

Are there other access accommodations that would be useful to help you fully participate in this program? Let us know at accessibility@icaboston.org or learn more about Accessibility at the ICA at icaboston.org/accessibility.

A work of magical realism narrated by and featuring the viewpoints of six women, Marks of RED continues award-winning choreographer Shamel Pitts’s research exploring Black embodiment, aliveness, and human connection. Marks of RED is an Afrofuturistic meditation on the “womb space,” divining the effect that memory has on our experiences, senses, bodies, reality, and imaginative possibilities.

This multidisciplinary work includes scenic designs by Mimi Lien, projection lights by Lucca Del Carlo, and production by TRIBE arts collective. Marks of RED explores the nuanced multiplicity and deep complexity of self-expression and the perceived spaces for regeneration, enfoldment, implosion, rupture, and potential.

About TRIBE

TRIBE’s mission is to cultivate a space of discovery and a platform for artists—specifically artists of color—with huge inspiration from the Afrofuturism movement. This movement states that we have a responsibility through our work to tell new stories and create a brighter future that is different and shines more luminously than our past.

TRIBE (TRI314 Multidisciplinary Visual Performance) is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary arts collective founded by MacArthur “Genius Grant”  Fellow Shamel Pitts in December 2019. The collective is composed of international and local artists working across mediums such as movement, choreography, digital storytelling, lighting design, video mapping projection, poetry, spoken word, cinematography, scenography, dramaturgy, costume styling, and music composition.

itsatribe.org | @itsatribe

Accessibility

  • Accessible and companion seating can be selected when purchasing tickets online, or at the Box Office at 617-478-3100 or visitorservices@icaboston.org.
  • Assistive listening devices are available for all theater programs at the theater entrance.
  • A link to live captioning will be shared by the day of the event and will be available in the theater.
  • ASL interpretation is available by advance request; please contact the Box Office at 617-478-3100 or visitorservices@icaboston.org to make a request.

Are there other access accommodations that would be useful to help you fully participate in this program? Let us know at accessibility@icaboston.org or learn more about Accessibility at the ICA at icaboston.org/accessibility.

Support for Marks of RED is provided, in part, by The David Henry Fund for Performance.

Part video game, part political satire, asses.masses is an epic theatrical experience where the audience takes control. Created by Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim, this wild, witty, immersive performance follows a herd of donkeys trying to get their jobs back after automation has made them obsolete. Can they succeed? That’s up to you. Combining live performance and old-school video game aesthetics, asses.masses unfolds over eight hours in a communal gaming experience designed to be played from beginning to end by a live audience, one person at a time, complete with food and drink. Cheeky, political, and best described as Animal Farm meets Pokemon meets Final Fantasy, asses.masses puts the control(ler) in the audience’s hands and asks them to discover the space between the work that defines us and the play that frees us.

Production Details

Production Detailsasses.masses includes flashing lights, audience participation, violence, crude language, sexual scenarios, and references to drug use, suicide, and police brutality. We recommend it for audience members ages 14 and up. This is not a performance that is suitable for young audiences.

Participation and active spectatorship are a central parts of asses.masses. Join our Herd in any way you can.

This performance is approximately seven hours and 30 minutes with four intermissions.

The duration of the show varies depending on how the audience engages with the game and the choices they make. To get the most out of the experience, we strongly encourage you to stay for the entire performance, from start to finish.

Food will be served throughout the experience, offered during each intermission. Drinks will be available for purchase. Intermissions occur every two episodes, approximately every 90 minutes

About the artists

Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim are conceptual artists exploring urgent questions around the social value of art, digital labor, and the political potential of games. Mixing their backgrounds in performance, philosophy, psychology, and digital media, their collaborations have manifested in video games, participatory installations, digital archives, and card games. Patrick and Milton are the co-founders of the Canadian national video archive of performance and the co-creators behind a performing arts economy trading card game. Their projects have been presented across Canada, in Argentina, Mexico, Europe, and the UK, in English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Catalan.

Accessibility

  • Accessible seating is available first-come first-served and may be selected upon theater entry. Please contact our Visitor Services team at visitorservices@icaboston.org or 617-478-3100 for more information.
  • Assistive listening devices are available for all theater programs at the theater entrance.
  • A link to live captioning will be shared by the day of the event and will be available in the theater.
  • ASL interpretation is available by advance request; please contact our Visitors Services team at 617-478-3100 or visitorservices@icaboston.org to make a request.

Are there other access accommodations that would be useful to help you fully participate in this program? Let us know at accessibility@icaboston.org or learn more about Accessibility at the ICA at icaboston.org/accessibility.

Created with support from Shadbolt Centre for the Arts, The Theatre Centre, VIVO Media Arts, Embassy of Canada to Argentina and Paraguay. Developed with the funding support from Creative BC and the British Columbia Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts.

Produced in association with the National Arts Centre of Canada’s National Creation Fund.

Experience Maria Somerville’s singularly lush dream pop in a one-night-only performance. Inspired by the landscape of her youth—the wild, mountainous terrain of Galway’s rural west coast—Somerville has developed a spellbinding sound world of gusting ambient electronics, ethereal guitar strums, sparse percussion, and hushed lyrical vignettes. Luster, her 2025 landmark album for the independent label 4AD, was named “Best New Music” by Pitchfork and heralded as an “Irish dream pop masterpiece” by Fader Magazine. Somerville is also known for her beloved Early Bird Show on NTS Radio, where her dawn chorus selections range from blissful ambient and shoegaze to traditional Irish folk songs.

Accessibility

  • Accessible seating is available first-come first-served and may be selected upon theater entry. Please contact our Visitor Services team at visitorservices@icaboston.org or 617-478-3100 for more information.
  • Assistive listening devices are available for all theater programs at the theater entrance.
  • A link to live captioning will be shared by the day of the event and will be available in the theater.
  • ASL interpretation is available by advance request; please contact our Visitors Services team at 617-478-3100 or visitorservices@icaboston.org to make a request.

Are there other access accommodations that would be useful to help you fully participate in this program? Let us know at accessibility@icaboston.org or learn more about Accessibility at the ICA at icaboston.org/accessibility.

Heralded for their “white-hot intensity” (The New York Times) and “stunning precision of harmony, intonation, and . . . spectacular virtuosity” (Gramophone Magazine), the Grammy-nominated Lorelei Ensemble performs LOOK UP, a concert of music inspired by the sea and sky. 

The program features Christopher Cerrone’s Beaufort Scales, a new 36-minute oratorio for eight voices and live electronics commissioned by Lorelei Ensemble, that draws inspiration from various iterations of the Beaufort Wind Force Scale created by Sir Francis Beaufort in 1805, along with texts from Melville, Fitzgerald, and Anne Carson. Composer Christopher Cerrone explains, “The piece tries to posit—through both historical sources and technological intervention—what increasingly tempestuous weather is doing to our lives.”

The concert also features Meredith Monk’s “Other Worlds Revealed” and “Earth Seen from Above,” from Atlas, Molly Herron’s “Stellar Atmospheres,” and Elijah Daniel Smith’s “Suspended in Spin” (Lorelei commission). 

“The idea of LOOK UP is about looking up to the sky and seeing we are one entity in this expansive universe, but also looking up and seeing what is happening on the planet right here,” says Artistic Director Beth Willer.

About Lorelei Ensemble

Since its founding in Boston in 2007, Lorelei Ensemble has been recognized across the globe for creating and championing bold new music that elevates and amplifies women’s voices. Led by founder and artistic director Beth Willer, Lorelei delivers culturally relevant and artistically audacious programs that stretch and challenge the expectations of artists and audiences alike. Lorelei Ensemble is creating a living repertoire for a living audience, partnering with today’s leading composers to commission more than seventy new works that transform the sounds, words, and stories that define vocal ensemble music. Lorelei Ensemble maintains a robust national touring schedule, including collaborations with the Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Cincinnati, National, and Nashville symphonies, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, A Far Cry, and Cantus, and performances at celebrated venues across the country, including Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tanglewood Music Center, and Boston’s Symphony Hall. Committed to education, Lorelei is empowering young artists to be our next creative leaders through its work with rising performers and composers at children’s choirs, high schools, and colleges and universities across the country.

Accessibility

  • Accessible and companion seating can be selected when purchasing tickets online, or at the Box Office at 617-478-3100 or visitorservices@icaboston.org.
  • Assistive listening devices are available for all theater programs at the theater entrance.
  • A link to live captioning will be shared by the day of the event and will be available in the theater.
  • ASL interpretation is available by advance request; please contact the Box Office at 617-478-3100 or visitorservices@icaboston.org to make a request.

Are there other access accommodations that would be useful to help you fully participate in this program? Let us know at accessibility@icaboston.org or learn more about Accessibility at the ICA at icaboston.org/accessibility.

“A tour-de-force” —The New York Times

“What is life? Is it the thing that happens between birth and when you die?” These questions animate Leslie Cuyjet’s wickedly funny and deeply moving For All Your Life, a performance and social experiment that investigates the value of Black life and death. Encapsulating numerous characters through film and live performance, Cuyjet explores and satirizes the labyrinthine world of the life insurance business, its darker links to the transatlantic slave trade, and how monetary value is affixed to human life. Are you prepared for what comes next? For All Your Life may have the answers.

Based in Brooklyn, NY, Leslie Cuyjet is a performer and choreographer who aims to conjure life-long questions of identity; confuse and disrupt traditional narratives; and demonstrate the angsty, explosive, sensitive, pioneering excellence of the Black woman. Hailed as “a potent choreographic force” by The New York Times, Cuyjet is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow and received New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Awards in 2019 and 2022.

Accessibility

  • Accessible seating is available first-come first-served and may be selected upon theater entry. Please contact our Visitor Services team at visitorservices@icaboston.org or 617-478-3100 for more information.
  • Assistive listening devices are available for all theater programs at the theater entrance.
  • A link to live captioning will be shared by the day of the event and will be available in the theater.
  • ASL interpretation is available by advance request; please contact our Visitors Services team at 617-478-3100 or visitorservices@icaboston.org to make a request.

Are there other access accommodations that would be useful to help you fully participate in this program? Let us know at accessibility@icaboston.org or learn more about Accessibility at the ICA at icaboston.org/accessibility.

Please note: this performance includes strobe lights.

Leslie Cuyjet: For All Your Life is funded in part by the New England States Touring program of the New England Foundation for the arts, made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts Regional Touring Program and the six New England state arts agencies.

NEFA logo

Choreographers Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener return to the ICA with their newest experiment, Open Machine. Exploring the relationship between human and machine intelligence, Mitchell and Riener enact a constantly shifting, multi-sensory performance that blurs the boundaries between public and private perceptions. Featuring a sweeping sound score by vocal artist Charmaine Lee and electronic musician Mas Ysa, and media design by Jesse Stiles, seven extraordinary dancers erupt in a dynamic choreography for the stage that reimagines live gathering, decision-making, and our influence on a technologically mediated and rapidly changing world. 

About Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener

Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener are New York-based dance artists. Their work involves building collaborative worlds through improvisational techniques, digital technologies, and material construction. They met as dancers in the Merce Cunningham Dance company. Since 2010 they have created over 25 multidisciplinary dance works including site-responsive installations in public spaces, dances for film, and performances in venues such as the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Barbican Centre, REDCAT, The Walker Art Center, and MoMA/PS1. Throughout, they have maintained a commitment to queer culture and aesthetics. Their partnership intentionally blurs authorship and maintains a deep commitment to collaboration with a diverse community of dancers, performers, artists, and cultural institutions.

Accessibility

  • Accessible seating is available first-come first-served and may be selected upon theater entry. Please contact our Visitor Services team at visitorservices@icaboston.org or 617-478-3100 for more information.
  • Assistive listening devices are available for all theater programs at the theater entrance.
  • A link to live captioning will be shared by the day of the event and will be available in the theater.
  • ASL interpretation is available by advance request; please contact our Visitors Services team at 617-478-3100 or visitorservices@icaboston.org to make a request.

Are there other access accommodations that would be useful to help you fully participate in this program? Let us know at accessibility@icaboston.org or learn more about Accessibility at the ICA at icaboston.org/accessibility.


In conjunction with An Indigenous Present, experience a museum-wide takeover of provocative sound-based installations, films, and performances by Diné composer, musician, and Pulitzer Prize-winning artist Raven Chacon. Known for his visual score-based practice, Chacon will present more than a dozen works of various scale, performed by area musicians and artists throughout and outside the museum. The pieces integrate found sounds, natural elements, and conceptual experimentation to create a singular experience each time they are executed. Central to Chacon’s practice is a connection of Diné (Navajo) worldviews and relationship models with Western classical, avant-garde, and art-music traditions.

At the ICA, a cellist will perform a solo inspired by a traditional Navajo hunting song. A recording from a found cassette will be sonically reinterpreted by a vocalist. An album composed using audio shards from 140 Beatles songs will score visitors’ ascent and descent in the museum’s glass elevator. A vinyl record will be amplified and manipulated using sharpened wooden kabob skewers. Outside, pairs of brass musicians will enact a vertically oriented piece meant to acknowledge the temporal relationships that align past and future knowledge. Experience these activations, and many more, alongside Chacon’s visual and sound-based work in the galleries as part of An Indigenous Present.

About Raven Chacon

Raven Chacon is a composer, performer, and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, Chacon has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at LACMA, The Renaissance Society, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Borealis Festival, SITE Santa Fe, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, and Swiss Institute Contemporary Art New York. As a member of Postcommodity from 2009 through 2018, he co-created artworks presented at the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, Carnegie International 57, and the two-mile-long land art installation Repellent Fence.

As a recording artist for over 24 years, Chacon has appeared on more than 80 releases on various national and international labels. In 2022, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his composition Voiceless Mass. His 2020 Manifest Destiny opera, Sweet Land, co-composed with Du Yun, received critical acclaim from The LA Times, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, and was named 2021 Opera of the Year by the Music Critics Association of North America.

Since 2004, Chacon has mentored over 300 high school Native composers in writing new string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project (NACAP). Chacon is the recipient of the United States Artists Fellowship in Music, The Creative Capital Award in Visual Arts, The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship, the American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition, the Bemis Center’s Ree Kaneko Award, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award (2022), the Pew Fellow-in-Residence (2022), and is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow.

Timed programming

10:30 AM Invisible Arc, 2016–17 Poss Family Mediatheque (4 FL)

Score for solo cello, written for and performed by Rhonda Rider.

10:30 AM Film screening Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater (3 FL)

A Song Often Played on the Radio, 2019. 22 min. In a search for the mythological Cities of Cibola, a horseman finds himself in a race against another rogue seeking the valuable metals of the New Mexican desert. Spurred by the justification of moralistic dichos, or Spanish-language proverb, the rival explorers come to learn about what truly brought them to this land, understanding their true identities, and finding that they were only stealing from themselves.

Earth Mother / Father Sky, 2021. 30 min. This film captures a collaboration with Rob Thorne, a Ngāti Tumutumu/Tainui composer and anthropologist. Thorne performed on his wind instruments as the sun rose near his home in Oruaiti, Aotearoa (New Zealand), while Chacon did the same as the sun set in New Mexico.

11 AM Vertical Neighbors, 2024 Outside front entrance

Vertical Neighbors is a composition for two pairs of the same brass horn instrument, first presented on the occasion of Chacon’s solo exhibition, A Worm’s Eye View from a Bird’s Beak, at the Swiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York. The score exists as a set of murals, visible to one or more musicians on the ground and their counterparts in an elevated position. A performance of this composition becomes an acknowledgement of vertical orientations as temporal relationships, aligning past and future knowledge.

Performed by members of the Callithumpian Consort, Neil Godwin, Wesley Hopper, Robert Krahn, and Connor Wood, and directed by Stephen Drury.

11:30 AM Music for Voice, 2003 Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater (3 FL)

Music composition for four performers with each positioned in front of a tam-tam of various size. Each performer rubs on the tam-tam with a superball, while mouthing the heard ‘words’ of the sounds produced by the gestures indicated. The audience or viewer gathers their own version of what is being said.

Performed by members of the Callithumpian Consort, directed by Stephen Drury: John Andress, Lilit Hartunian, Sam Kelder, and Stephen Marotto

11:45 AM Dį́į́’ts’ïadah, 2024 Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater (3 FL)

Score for double bass, written for and performed by Ross Wightman.

12:30 PM Ella Llora, 2002 Poss Family Mediatheque (4 FL)

The origins of this composition are a found cassette on the streets of Albuquerque of a woman giving recorded court testimony or deposition. A large portion of the audio recording contains the woman in a state of sorrowful crying. The crying was transcribed into standard Western music notation for a singer to perform. The original audio cassette has since been destroyed.

Performed by Aliana de la Guardia.

12:30 PM Film screening Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater, (3 FL)

1 PM Round, 2007 State Street Corporation Lobby (1 FL)

Score for several players surrounding a turntable.

Performed by Dani Abugattas, Sam Beebe, Raven Chacon, Jenelle Porter, and Shane Silverstein

1:30 PM Double Weaving, 2014 Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater (3 FL)

Score for string quartet.

Performed by members of the Callithumpian Consort, directed by Stephen Drury:Lilit Hartunian, Sam Kelder, Stephen Marotto, and Sophia Szokolay

2 PM Vertical Neighbors, 2024 Outside front entrance

2 PM Film screening Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater (3 FL)

2:30 PM Invisible Arc, 2016–17 Poss Family Mediatheque (4 FL)

3 PM Dį́į́’ts’ïadah, 2024 Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater (3 FL)

3:15 PM Music for Voice, 2003 Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater (3 FL)

3:30 PM Film screening Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater (3 FL)

3:30 PM Compass, 2024 Putnam Investments Plaza, outside

For solo overly-amplified guitar. Performed outdoors, the guitarist takes cues from shadows, wind, insects, clouds, and more to determine the course of musical decisions. Compass encourages the reading of pulses and paces of the world around us. We can align with all entities with whom we share our universe, we can be a part of them and respond when they reveal themselves to us.

Performed by Jeff Platz

4 PM Ella Llora, 2002 Poss Family Mediatheque (4 FL)

4:15 PM Couplet, 2024 Poss Family Mediatheque (4 FL)

Score for two cellos, performed by Rhonda Rider and Adam Broce.

Ongoing programming, 10 AM – 5 PM

Radio Coyote, 2001 State Street Corporation Lobby (1 FL)

A programming takeover of Cambridge-based internet radio station Central on Air. Live video and audio broadcast.

Be’eldiildaahsinil (Abduction Song), 2001 Elevator Lobby (1 FL)

An oral account, relayed by Chacon’s grandfather, Frank Dineyazhe, telling a family story in the Diné language. As a teenaged girl, Chacon’s great-great-grandmother was kidnapped by a Mexican man and taken from her home at Dinetah (Navajo homelands) to what is now Albuquerque, New Mexico (Bee’eldiildaahsinil). While filming in restricted areas of Albuquerque International Airport, the camera moves as though it is surveilling the site, creating a disjuncture in time and relaying a generations-old story of abduction while capturing the transit of people in present-day Albuquerque.

While Contemplating Their Fate In The Stars, The Twins Surround The Enemy, 2003 Common Room (1 FL)

A pair of birds interact with a pitch theremin instrument while situated in a cage. The instrument, being the center of the birds’ home, becomes an encroaching presence that the birds realize can be manipulated over time. Over the course of the piece, the birds change the pitch with the placement of their bodies, while harmonizing with the instrument by matching their chirps with its pitch.

“The title is based on the Navajo creation story of the hero twins, who fought the monsters who were terrorizing the Diné people. In the days after 9/11, I was thinking often of how one (or a group of people) force themselves to harmonize with an encroaching presence while in the position of defense. When backed into a corner, what choreography of response is unconscious reaction, and what is self-determined. What can one do so that their defense is not perceived as aggression, and can the presence of the smaller bodies interrupt the invasive force?” –Raven Chacon

Meet the Beatless, 2003 Glass Elevator

An album of ten new songs composed using audio shards from 140 Beatles songs. Samples of the original records were chosen for their chord progression, tempo/time signature, lyrical content, harmonic (non-)compatibility, and retrograde inversion.

“As a person trying to understand the structures of tonal harmony, I immersed myself in the music of The Beatles. When I had exhausted my ears incessantly listening to their twelve albums and learned what I could from them, I recorded each onto a cassette tape, then proceeded to dismantle the cassette shell until I could remove the tape spool and re-assemble the cassette as a retrograde version of the album. This created 12 ‘new’ albums for me to listen to. Ten years later, I returned to these backward versions of these songs and was inspired to seek other ways to alter the content of the most known of rock bands.” –Raven Chacon

Accessibility

  • Raven Chacon at the ICA will include performance and sound-based art in the State Street Corporation Lobby, Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater, galleries, glass elevator, and outside on the Putman Investments Plaza.
  • Some performances may be loud. Earplugs will be available from ICA staff upon request.
  • Accessible seating is available in the theater first-come first-served and may be selected upon theater entry. Please contact our Visitor Services team at visitorservices@icaboston.org or 617-478-3100 for more information.
  • Assistive listening devices are available for all theater programs at the theater entrance.
  • A link to live captioning will be available in the theater.
  • Are there other access accommodations that would be useful to help you fully participate in this program? Let us know at accessibility@icaboston.org or learn more about Accessibility at the ICA at icaboston.org/accessibility.

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, the Leonard and Ruth Horwich Family Foundation, Peggy J. Koenig, 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.