90 YEARS

For 90 years, the Institute of Contemporary Art has championed the artists and ideas shaping contemporary culture. This special anniversary exhibition revisits nine exhibitions and initiatives from the ICA’s extraordinary history, tracing the museum’s evolution alongside the ever-changing landscape of contemporary art. 

One of the oldest museums dedicated to contemporary art in the United States, the ICA was founded in 1936 as the Boston Museum of Modern Art, a sister institution to New York’s MoMA.  In response to a postwar period marked by “world chaos and social unrest,” the museum recognized a growing need to engage with the art of the present.¹ In 1948, it adopted a new name to signal its commitment to fostering contemporary artistic expression: the Institute of Contemporary Art. Over nine decades and across thirteen different locations, the ICA has remained consistently dedicated to artistic innovation. Collaboratively organized by the ICA’s curatorial team in celebration of the museum’s 90^th anniversary, the exhibition looks back as a means of moving forward, revisiting past projects to imagine the ICA’s vibrant future.  

Highlights of 90 YEARS include the landmark 1941 exhibition Modern Mexican Painters, which introduced many U.S. audiences to Mexico’s dynamic contemporary painting scene and the work of José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, among others. In 1966, the ICA hosted pop art icon Andy Warhol’s survey and premiered his experimental Exploding Plastic Inevitable—a combination of live music, dance, and projected video that featured a performance by the Velvet Underground. Between 1984 and 1991, the ICA partnered with WGBH’s New Television Workshop to commission and co-produce over twenty new works of video art for home broadcast as part of the Contemporary Art Television (CAT) Fund by artists such as Laurie Anderson, Joan Jonas, and Tony Ousler. In 2006, the ICA opened its waterfront museum building by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and started a permanent collection, acquiring significant works like Yayoi Kusama’s LOVE IS CALLING, one of the artist’s largest infinity mirror rooms. In 2022, the ICA commissioned artist Simone Leigh to represent the United States in the 59^th Venice Biennale and brought her magisterial ceramic and bronze sculptures back to Boston for a traveling survey exhibition.  

Together, these defining moments—and many other exhibitions, programs, and publications in between—tell the story of an institution continually shaped by artists, audiences, experimentation, and cultural dialogue. 90 YEARS showcases the ICA as a vital force in Boston and contemporary art and invites audiences to imagine what the museum can become next.  

[1] Nelson W. Aldrich and James S. Plaut, “Modern Art” and the American Public: A Statement by The Institute of Contemporary Art, formerly The Institute of Modern Art (The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston: February 17, 1948), 3.

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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 Coordinator.

This exhibition is funded, in part, with support from Kim Sinatra, the Brizius Family Fund for Artists, 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.

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