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Select galleries are closed for installation. See what’s on view

Tickets will be available September 10 for ICA members and September 12 for nonmembers.

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.

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College students are taking over the ICA! Head to the Seaport for a night of creative art-making, unbeatable music, and stunning harbor views. Explore cutting-edge exhibitions—including the brand-new An Indigenous Present and the 2025 James and Audrey Foster Prize, celebrating Boston artists—and make the museum yours for the night.

Music lineup:

Your Biggest Hater
An ever-evolving experimental jazz project by trumpeter Lemuel Marc, Your Biggest Hater features Eazy Freeman-Fanfan on percussion, Jillian Upshaw on drum set, and Aidan Devine on bass.

Teatea 
Boston area performer and producer Teatea fuses R&B, hip-hop, synthpop, and other eclectic styles into her music.

Pleasure Coffin 
Multimedia performance artist/producer Pleasure Coffin’s sculptures of sound accompany her noise-pop music. 

Lilith
Eclectic electronic musician Lilith performs with an array of gadgets ranging from the SP404, Monome, and DJ Decks, to create footwork-R&B melodies.

Command+E
Command+E blends improvised sound and visual performance using sculpture, saxophone, broken electronics, sampling, and effects.

University Members: Reserve your free ticket below!

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Berklee College of Music

Brown University 

Boston College: Art Department 

Boston University 

Brandeis: School of Creative Arts 

Bunker Hill Community College 

Emerson College 

Framingham State University: Arts & Ideas 

Harvard University 

Lesley University 

Massachusetts College of Art and Design  

Massachusetts Institute of Technology  

Montserrat College of Art  

Northeastern University & NU College of Arts, Media and Design  

Olin College of Engineering  

Roxbury Community College  

School of the Museum of Fine Arts  

Suffolk University Art & Design and First Year Seminar 

UMass Boston: Art Department  

UMass Dartmouth: College of Visual and Performing Arts & Honors College 

UMass Lowell: Art and Design Department  

Urban College of Boston  

[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

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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.

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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

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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 electronic musician Mas Ysa, the duo is joined by five other dancers who 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

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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

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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.

“Jazz Urbane is a musical tapestry … informed by tradition, probing the present, provoking thought and possibilities for the (music-making) future.“ —Patrice Rushen  

Jazz Urbane Cafe returns to the ICA for an evening of collaboration, connection, inspiration, and artistic exchange. The Imagine Orchestra directed by Dr. Bill Banfield shares the stage with an incredible array of dynamic artists and projects from across the Greater Boston area, including pianist Dr. John Paul McGee, movement and storyboard artist Wyatt Jackson, filmmaker Karina Choudhury, the voices of Boston Children’s Chorus and Boston City Singers, students from the Longy School, and Boston Ujima Project.  Featuring music, dance, and film, this one-of-a-kind concert experience is a meaningful ode to artistic inspiration and the liberating pleasure and joy of working within a collaborative and supportive community of artists. 

Art Forward is a one-movement interdisciplinary celebration of connection and collaboration. It is our gift, our blessing, and our passion to bring this collective experience to you. 

Jazz Urbane Cafe Art Forward is presented in collaboration with Boston Ujima Project, the Longy School of Music, and the Boston Children’s Chorus and Boston City Singers. 

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This event is sold out for both members and nonmembers!

Boston-born and internationally recognized, DJ Kon takes over the ICA’s waterfront Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater for a special night of music and dancing. The last of an increasingly rare breed of dedicated record crate diggers, Kon brings his deep knowledge of obscure goodies to clubs and festivals worldwide. Dance the night away and celebrate a Boston artist and innovator who places his love of music above everything else. Plan on arriving with comfortable shoes and open ears!

About the Artist

Presented in partnership with Keep On. Keep On is a party held twice a month at Middlesex in Cambridge whose aim is to build community through dance music.

Sip a drink from the ICA Wine + Coffee Bar and enjoy live music from Gregory Groover, one of Boston’s best and brightest jazz musicians.

About Gregory Groover, Jr.