In conjunction with the special 90 YEARS anniversary exhibition on the fourth floor, a selection of additional artworks is installed on every floor of the building, offering visitors an expanded encounter with art across the museum.
First floor – Joan Logue, Video Portraits: New England Fishermen, c. 1985
Responding to the shortened attention spans of audiences conditioned by television, Logue (b. 1942, Pennsylvania) has collaborated since the 1970s with a host of communities—from experimental choreographers, to activists, to North Shore fishermen—to make now hundreds of succinct, thirty-second “video portraits” ripe with pathos and humor. For this work, filmed in nearby Gloucester, MA, Logue was supported by the Contemporary Art Television (CAT) Fund, an ambitious partnership between the ICA and WGBH-TV, Boston’s public television, that supported the production and distribution of new works of video art. A broader selection of CAT Fund works are on view in 90 YEARS.
Stairwell – Jenny Holzer, Inflammatory Wall, 1979-82
Words are the medium of artist Jenny Holzer (b. 1950, Ohio), and she uses a variety of vehicles—from stickers, posters, and T-shirts to benches, bronze plaques, electronic displays, and the internet—to disseminate her piercingly incisive phrases, and the ideas they convey, in public spaces. Inflammatory Wall, 1979-82, is a site-specific installation in the ICA’s stairwell made up of selections of Holzer’s Inflammatory Essays, a series of mass-produced texts printed in capital letters on colorful paper and originally displayed anonymously in the streets of New York City. For her Inflammatory Essays, Holzer borrows liberally from a range of sources, decontextualizing quotations from their sources to maximize their impact and power to speak directly to the present. Holzer was the third artist presented at the ICA as part of the CURRENTS program in 1983, which is explored in depth in the exhibition 90 YEARS.
Third floor lobby – Rineke Dijkstra, Works from the series Almerisa, 1994–ongoing
In 1994, Dijkstra (b. 1959, Netherlands) was commissioned to photograph children of asylum seekers in refugee centers in the Netherlands as part of a larger effort to draw attention to their difficult circumstances. Among them was five-year-old Almerisa Šehrić, who had recently arrived from Bosnia and would become the subject of Dijkstra’s longest-running photographic series. This installation brings together eleven photographs from the series in the ICA Collection, some of which were first presented here in 2001 in the exhibition Rineke Dijkstra: Portraits. Over the years and as the collection has grown, these images have returned in several exhibitions, marking an important part of ICA history.
John Hancock Founders Gallery, fourth floor – Glenn Ligon, Rückenfigur, 2009, and Another Country (After James Baldwin), 2016
Ligon’s (b. 1960, New York) site-specific installation includes two text-based neon works overlooking Boston Harbor. He uses language to examine race, identity, and American history. Together, the two works ask how these concepts remain inseparable from the idea of America itself, engaging with the dualities of American society on the occasion of the country’s 250th anniversary.
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.
