“Feel No Guilt in Your Desire:” 90 YEARS Short Film Program  

Drop in for a looping series of short films in conjunction with 90 YEARS. Each of the following films were presented at the ICA during the 1980s, a dynamic period for video art in Boston and beyond.  

Isaac Julien’s This Is Not an AIDS Advertisement is an impressionistic and lush riposte to dominant moralizing and fearmongering advertising languages, and was included in the program Video Against AIDS that screened in the ICA’s theater in 1989. 

The international Time Code project commissioned artists to capture the spirit, reality and “pulse” of a specific place without dialogue or commentary. Branda Miller’s contribution Time Squared was supported by the ICA and WGBH’s Contemporary Art Television Fund, and the collected Time Code series was screened at the ICA in 1988.  

Meredith Monk’s Turtle Dreams (Waltz) conjures dissonant urban archetypes seen against the threat of war or nuclear annihilation. With video direction by Ping Chong, the work was a production of WGBH-TV’s New Television Workshop and broadcast in 1983, and later presented in the ICA’s 1987 film series WGBH New Television Workshop: New Television’s 20 Year Challenge.  

Together, these works chart the color palettes, sounds, and political imagination of the 1980s.  

90 YEARS is organized by Meghan Clare Considine, Curatorial Assistant; Jeffrey De Blois, Mannion Family Curator; Ruth Erickson, Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs; Max Gruber, Curatorial Assistant; Tessa Bachi Haas, Assistant Curator; and Erika Umali, Curator of Collections, with Brianne Chapelle, Curatorial Department Manager.

This exhibition is funded, in part, with support from Kim Sinatra, the Brizius Family Fund for Artists, The Kristen and Kent Lucken Fund for Photography, and Leadership in Art Museums, an initiative to create more racial equity in art museum leadership, supported by the Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Pilot House Philanthropy, and Alice L. Walton Foundation.

The 1960s Andy Warhol gallery is supported by Judi Kaufman and Arthur Rubin.

With warmest thanks, we gratefully acknowledge the generosity of the ICA’s Avant Guardian Society in making this exhibition possible.