The evocative, adorned sculptures of Leilah Babirye (b. 1985 in Kampala, Uganda) feature the artist’s inventive reuse of debris with her deft carving of wood and work with ceramics. She uses the metal gears and chains of bicycles to create elaborate headdresses and jewelry and braids, and the rubber inner tubes of bicycle tires to form long tresses that mingle with the burnt-black angles of her carved sculptures and the colorful glazes of her bulbous ceramic forms. For the ICA, Babirye premieres a new body of sculptures inspired by the idea of the queer wedding. Each sculpture adopts the role of bride, groom, ring bearer, flower girl, bridesmaid, groomsman, or guest in a vivid installation that is both wedding ceremony and celebration. The sculptural figures range in scale—from monumental heads atop tall poles and scaffold-like structures representing lovers, to rows of miniature “royal guards,” representing protectors of the queer community. For Babirye, who fled Uganda after being outed as gay, the exhibition continues her commitment to uplift LGBTQ identities through her singular, striking sculptural practice. The exhibition will be accompanied by the artist’s first book.

The 2025 James and Audrey Foster Prize features the work of Alison Croney Moses, Yorgos Efthymiadis, Damien Hoar de Galvan, and Sneha Shrestha (aka Imagine). Working across a range of media including installation, painting, photography, sculpture, and woodworking, each artist draws on materials that uniquely connect their local and global roots. Their work celebrates the expansive cultures of our region and beyond — recognizing the internationalism of greater Boston. 

 First established in 1999, the prize (formerly the ICA Artist Prize) and exhibition were endowed by James and Audrey Foster to nurture and recognize exceptional Boston-area artists. This exhibition marks the tenth edition of the prize exhibition.

Learn more about the James and Audrey Foster Prize

Alison Croney Moses

Person wearing a black apron stands smiling in a woodworking shop. Various tools are organized on the wall behind them. On the workbench in front are a wooden sculpture and a round wooden object.
Alison Croney Moses (born 1983, Fayetteville, North Carolina; lives and works in Roslindale, MA, and Allston, Boston, MA) creates wooden objects that reach for your senses—the smell of cedar, the glowing color of honey, the round form that signifies safety and warmth, the gentle curve that beckons to be touched. Born and raised in North Carolina by Guyanese parents, Croney Moses remembers making clothing, food, furniture, and art as part of her childhood. She cares deeply about why and how things are made and has carried these values and habits into adulthood and parenting, creating experiences, conversations, and educational programs that cultivate the current and next generation of artists and leaders in art and craft. She holds an MA in Sustainable Business and Communities from Goddard College and a BFA in Furniture Design from Rhode Island School of Design. Croney Moses has been included in group exhibitions at Houston Center for Contemporary Craft (2024–25); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2024); Center for Art in Wood, Philadelphia (2022–23); MassArt Art Museum, Boston (2022); and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2021–22), among others. She is a recipient of the 2024 Black Mountain College International Artist Prize, the 2023 Boston Artadia Award, and the 2022 USA Fellowship in Craft, and a finalist of the 2024 LOEWE FOUNDATION Craft Prize. Croney Moses will debut her first public art installation at the Boston Public Art Triennial in 2025 through their Accelerator program.

Yorgos Efthymiadis

A person with glasses stands in front of a white wall displaying framed photographs. The person is wearing a dark blue jacket over a gray sweater. The photos on the wall include floral and indoor scenes.
Yorgos Efthymiadis (born 1972, Halkidiki, Greece; lives and works in Somerville, MA) is an artist and curator who works in photographic media. Drawing from his experience as an architectural photographer, Efthymiadis has explored portraiture of kin. In recent series. His large-scale, exploded portraits depict his friends and family in Greece, Boston, and beyond, alongside portraits of their surrounding architecture, natural environments, and material culture. In 2015, Efthymiadis created a gallery in his kitchen entitled The Curated Fridge to celebrate fine art photography and connect photographers with established and influential curators, gallerists, publishers, and artists from around the world through free, quarterly curated calls. The Curated Fridge recently celebrated 10 years of exhibitions featuring more than 1,500 artists across 40 shows. Efthymiadis has had solo exhibitions at Gallery Kayafas, Boston (2016, 2019, 2024) and the Griffin Museum of Photography, Winchester, MA (2016); and has been included in several group exhibitions including at Danforth Art Museum, Framingham, MA (2013, 2015, 2016, 2022); Somerville Museum, Somerville, MA (2019); and Photographic Resource Center, Boston (2015), among others. Efthymiadis is an awardee of the Artist’s Resource Trust A.R.T. Grant (2024); a finalist for the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship (2017); and a board member of Somerville Arts Council (2017–present). 

Damien Hoar de Galvan

A person with glasses sits at a workbench surrounded by art supplies, including pencils, glue, and clamps. Behind them is a wooden mosaic on the wall. Theyre wearing a green jacket and appear engaged in their creative work.
Damien Hoar de Galvan (born 1979, Northampton, MA; lives and works in Milton, MA) has developed a unique output of painted sculpture made primarily from recycled wood for nearly 20 years. His sculptures range from smaller tabletop objects to larger wall-sized installations. Some of the wood Hoar de Galvan uses is reclaimed from his time as a preparator at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, MA, and from his father’s carpentry projects, which he began in the 1970s as an immigrant to Massachusetts from Argentina. Hoar de Galvan recently completed a sculpture-a-day series over the 2024 calendar year and plans to incorporate recycled wood from ICA installations into new works. Hoar de Galvan holds a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a BA from Green Mountain College in Poultney, VT. He has exhibited in group exhibitions at Concord Center for Visual Art, Concord, MA (2024); Drive-By Projects, Watertown, MA (2023); and has had several solo and group exhibitions at galleries in New York, Seattle, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and across Massachusetts. 

Sneha Shrestha (aka Imagine)

A person with curly hair sits in a chair, wearing a dark green sweater. Behind them are large, vibrant abstract artworks in shades of pink, yellow, and multicolored patterns.
Sneha Shrestha (born 1987, Kathmandu, Nepal; lives and works in Kathmandu, Boston, and Somerville, MA), also known as Imagine, creates paintings, works on paper, sculpture, and larger-than-life murals that harmoniously blend her native Nepali and Sanskrit languages, mantras, sacred sounds used in meditation and prayer, and American graffiti hand styles. There are hundreds of Nepali scripts, and Shrestha’s work actively pushes against the monolithic notion that they “all look the same” – a generalization that often extends to entire ethnic groups and cultures. Shrestha celebrates the beauty and diversity of Nepali language throughout her practice. She received her MA in Education from Harvard University. Shrestha has had a solo exhibition at Cantor Arts Gallery, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA (2024) and participated in group exhibitions at Wrightwood 659, Chicago (2024–25); Nepal Arts Council, Kathmandu (2024); and Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art, New York (2024). Her additional honors include a commissioned 30-foot sculpture at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2024); a grant from the Collective Futures Fund (2024); becoming the first contemporary Nepali artist the be included in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s permanent collection (2023); inclusion in WBUR The ARTery’s 25 Millennials of Color (2019); and recognition as one of the 100 most influential women in Nepal by the Nepal Cultural Council (2018). Shrestha was recently selected for a studio residency at Boston Center for the Arts.

Since arriving in America from England 250 years ago, the Shakers — a Christian sect of pacifists — have occupied a unique place in the American national identity. Also known as the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, the Shakers ascribe to values of communal living, celibacy, shared property, and gender and racial equality, and they are widely recognized for their simple living, architecture, music, and furniture. The Shakers have captured the imagination of countless artists since at least the early twentieth century, when ideas about perfection, elegance, and practicality associated with Shaker life and material culture took hold. These ideas entered more strongly into the American consciousness following a string of influential exhibitions and books, many of them organized and authored by collectors of Shaker furniture.

Believers begins with the fruits of an unorthodox residency instigated by curator France Morin during the summer of 1996. Ten artists were invited to live, work, and worship in the only remaining active Shaker community, in Sabbathday Lake, Maine. The residency yielded a dynamic body of works featured in the exhibition The Quiet in the Land, curated by Morin and brought to the ICA by Jill Medvedow in 1998. Believers reunites a core group of works first presented in The Quiet in the Land by artists Janine Antoni, Kazumi Tanaka, Wolfgang Tillmans, Nari Ward, and Chen Zhen—several of which are being remade or reimagined for this exhibition—alongside more recent works by artists Jonathan Berger, Taylor Davis, Gordon Hall, Pallavi Sen, and Cauleen Smith. Believers considers how contemporary artists negotiate the space between received representations of the Shakers and the utopian community’s vital experience as “ordinary people attempting to live an extraordinary life.”

Note: this exhibition contains one work of art with sequences of flashing lights.

Tau Lewis (b. 1993, Toronto) transforms found materials into intricately detailed soft sculptures, quilts, masks, and other assemblages through intensive processes such as hand-sewing, carving, and plaster casting. A self-taught artist, Lewis’s practice is directed at healing personal, collective, and historical traumas through the repetitive forms of creative labor she employs. She forages for materials and artifacts charged with meaning—previously worn clothing, fabrics, leather, and photographs, as well as drift wood, sand dollars, and seashells—that she often collects from her surroundings in Toronto, New York, or outside of her family’s home in Negril, Jamaica. The evocative objects Lewis gathers and transmutes constitute a relationship in her work to the social, cultural, and physical landscapes she moves through, collects from, and inhabits. Lewis’s upcycling relates to forms of material inventiveness practiced by diasporic communities, wherein working with things close at hand is a reparative act aimed at reclaiming agency. Throughout, Lewis’s interest is in honoring and advancing these diasporic traditions, and exploring, as she has said, “the transference of energy and emotion that occurs when an object is made by hand.” For the ICA, her first solo museum exhibition in the U.S., Lewis is creating a new body of work. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, the artist’s first monograph.

Line drawing of a person with a mystical appearance, reminiscent of Tau Lewis's style showcased at ICA Boston. The figure wears a flowing robe adorned with abstract designs, intricate symmetrical patterns on the face and robe, and outstretched arms.

Looking Guide

Explore the Tau Lewis Looking Guide

Artist Playlist

Listen to Tau Lewis’s Spirit Level playlist now

“John Andress, the ICA’s associate director of performing arts, and senior curator Jenelle Porter have reached into a deep well of creativity in Boston with this show…. Kudos to them for getting it out there.”
– Boston Globe

Performance, public art projects, and artist-run galleries are enjoying a resurgence in Boston. To give these movements space, exposure, and support, the ICA is—for the first time—devoting this year’s James and Audrey Foster Prize, a biennial exhibition recognizing artists of exceptional promise from Greater Boston, to performance and collaborative modes of art-making.

To select the exhibition artists, co-organizers Jenelle Porter, Mannion Family Senior Curator, and John Andress, Associate Director of Performing Arts, met with dozens of artists, curators, and other experts, then invited a selection of local artists and collectives to submit proposals. Of those, they chose four winners to realize projects of unprecedented scope and scale with the support of the museum: Ricardo De Lima, kijidome, Vela Phelan, and Sandrine Schaefer.

Profiles of the 2015 Foster Prize Artists

kijidome: An experimental project space and collaborative, kijidome was founded by artists Sean Downey, Carlos Jiménez Cahua, Lucy Kim, and Susan Metrican. Located in Boston’s South End, the gallery presents curatorial projects and events by its founders and invited guests. In their Foster Prize contribution, kijidome will create an exhibition space at the ICA in which to present multiple artists in consecutive group exhibitions, some of whom will take up residency in the South End space.

Ricardo De Lima: A visual artist, technologist, and DJ, De Lima’s practice spans a variety of media and cultural contexts. Collaborations serve as a common thread for exploring how artists, curators, and cultural workers activate thirdspaces, spaces where cross-disciplinary relationships can flourish. Ricardo curates Spectacle Boston, a collaborative performance space for experimental music and visual arts, and co-curates Picó Picante, a monthly transnational music event. At the ICA, De Lima will present a combination of sculptural installations and collaborative projects. ricardodelima.org

Vela Phelan: Working in installation, assemblage, performance, sound and video art, Vela Phelan creates rituals and beautifies mundane objects through ceremony. Born in the Dominican Republic and raised in Mexico and Venezuela, Phelan is deeply influenced by modern saints and gods. He is particularly inspired by the “spiritual magic” of Mexico. Phelan enjoys transforming and altering modern and ancient energies into a new unknown universal existence. His ICA exhibit will be a video altar action centered around a fictional anti-hero named Jesús Malverde. templeofmessages.com

Sandrine Schaefer creates ephemeral artwork that explores cycles of the invisible becoming visible. She is inspired by site, the relationship between accumulative action and endurance, and challenging the parameters of real time. Her work addresses the shared human experience of fitting in, both corporally and conceptually. Schaefer is a co-founder of The Present Tense, an art initiative that produces and archives performance art events and exchanges in transient spaces, and a member of Mobius Artist Group. At the ICA, Schaefer will perform a series of ephemeral actions in and viewable from the ICA’s John Hancock Founders Gallery that engage the view and concept of an infinite horizon. sandrineschaefer.com

About the James and Audrey Foster Prize
The James and Audrey Foster Prize is key to the ICA’s efforts to nurture and recognize Boston-area artists of exceptional promise. First established in 1999, the James and Audrey Foster Prize (formerly the ICA Artist Prize) expanded its format when the museum opened its new facility in 2006. James and Audrey Foster, passionate collectors and supporters of contemporary art, endowed the prize with a $1 million gift, ensuring the ICA’s ability to sustain and grow the program for years to come.

The exhibition and prize are generously endowed by James and Audrey Foster.

Supported by

LOGO_LV.jpg

Hotel Partner

W Boston logo

“Superb” —Boston Globe

Diane Simpson’s “dazzling” work will “knock you off balance.” — Art in America

#DianeSimpson

Chicago-based artist Diane Simpson’s (b. 1935, Joliet, Illinois) elegantly constructed sculptures evolve from a diverse range of materials, clothing, and architectural sources. While elements of her creations appear to effortlessly hang and fold, they are in fact the result of a rigorous approach to construction techniques, reveling in passages of pattern, joinery, and skewed angles that are by turns humorous and psychologically-charged. This concise survey of over 30 years of work will include a suite of preparatory drawings and sculptural work made from the early 1980s to the present in materials ranging from corrugated cardboard and medium-density fiberboard to aluminum, wool, polyester, poplar, faux fur, fleece, mahogany, brass, copper, and steel.  This will be the artist’s first solo museum exhibition on the East Coast.

“Shirreff knows that the interstices between sculpture and photography are strange, mystical places.”
— New York Times

Working across media, with a focus on material and the analogue, Brooklyn artist Erin Shirreff (b. 1975, Kelowna, British Columbia) explores the intertwined relationship between sculpture and photography. Covering several years of the emerging artist’s work, Erin Shirreff includes both sculptures and photographs of sculptures that investigate the complexities of representing sculptural objects in two dimensions. In series such as “Monograph,” Shirreff photographs sculptures she creates by hand expressly for that purpose. Alongside these photographs will be several large sculptures, among them a series called “Drops.” For these, Shirreff creates shapes by hand-cutting scraps of paper, enlarging them, and cutting them into sheets of steel. The exhibition also presents videos including Medardo Rosso Madame X, 1896 (2013), a 24-minute silent film Shirreff created by manipulating copies of an image of a sculpture by proto-modernist Medardo Rosso, then assembling them digitally.

Densely packed sculptures and immersive acoustic experiences

One of the most exciting artists to emerge in recent years, New York–based Kevin Beasley (b. 1985, Lynchburg, VA) uniquely combines sound and clothing—his core artistic materials—in stunning, densely packed sculptures and immersive acoustic experiences. This exhibition, his first in Boston, will present a selection of the artist’s sculptures made over the past five years.

Beasley’s early works harnessed the physical qualities of sound, deploying vibrations and echoes that penetrate the bodies of both performers and audience. He has embedded microphones and other electronic musical equipment in sculptures made of sneakers and foam, manipulating their sonic possibilities in his live performances. Found objects and clothing, often the artist’s own, are central in Beasley’s diverse sculptural work, ranging from compositions of shredded t-shirts and hoodies to fitted hats, do-rags, and basketball jerseys. More recent works are constructed from colorfully patterned housedresses stiffened with resin that stand on the floor and protrude from the walls, at times hardened over sound-baffling foam panels or concave forms that Beasley refers to as “acoustic mirrors.” Appearing like satellite dishes or clusters of ghostly figures, these works become conduits for absent bodies and histories that the artist evokes through color, pattern, and texture. Rather than contrasting the materiality of objects to the immateriality of music and performance, as is so often the case, Beasley forges strong affinities between the physical and the aural in his multidisciplinary practice.

In the spirit of artists Noah Purifoy and David Hammons, Beasley improvises upon the legacy of their work to highlight the importance of personal memory and to explore how lived experience intersects with broader examinations of power and race in America. In a recent installation at The Renaissance Society in Chicago, Your Face Is/Is Not Enough, 2016, the artist transformed police-issue riot gear into a carnivalesque installation that was activated by the breath of performers. His 2017 exhibition at Los Angeles’s Hammer Museum featured a single, large-scale installation, Chair of the Ministers of Defense, 2016, that merged imagery from a Baroque altar and an iconic photograph of Black Panther Party cofounder Huey P. Newton to consider—and reformulate—expressions of power for today. Through such multifaceted and visually commanding works, Beasley has proved himself to be among the most significant young artists working today.

Enduring photography that captures the passage of time.

Based in Boston since the 1970s, Nicholas Nixon has captured the intimate details of family, relationships, and life as it unfolds in front of his camera. Using a large-format 8 x 10–inch camera and black-and-white film, he has photographed Boston’s changing landscape, porch life in the rural South, sick or dying people, and his own family. This exhibition surveys the artist’s prolific career and is organized around Nixon’s remarkable ongoing project The Brown Sisters, a series of group portraits of his wife Bebe and her three sisters, Heather, Mimi, and Laurie taken annually since 1975. The Brown Sisters will be presented in its entirety, and each portrait will be paired with other photographs made by Nixon in the same year, drawn from various bodies of work, including schools in and around Boston, people with AIDS, couples, and landscapes. Together these pictures underscore photography’s singular ability to capture the passage of time in incremental moments and are a testament to Nixon’s extraordinary persistence of vision.

Nicholas Nixon was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1947. He lives and works in Brookline.

The 2019 installment of the ICA’s biennial James and Audrey Foster Prize exhibition highlighting the work of Boston-area artists will feature four individuals: Rashin Fahandej (b. 1978, Shiraz, Iran), Josephine Halvorson (b. 1981, Brewster, MA), Lavaughan Jenkins (b. 1976, Boston, MA), and Helga Roht Poznanski (b. 1927, Tartu, Estonia). This intergenerational group of artists works across media including painting, sculpture, film, and video to explore questions of place, portraiture, and belonging. Their unique and exceptional work demonstrates the breadth and ecology of contemporary art practices in Boston.

First established in 1999, the James and Audrey Foster Prize is central to the ICA/Boston’s efforts to nurture and recognize local artists, showcase exceptional artwork, and support a thriving local arts scene. In the course of selecting these artists, Curator Ruth Erickson had the pleasure of conducting fifty studio visits with the following artists, and she would like to thank each of them for sharing their time and their work:
 
Sonia Almeida, Hartmut Austen, Clint Baclawski, Gerry Bergstein, Stephanie Cardon, Cyrille Conan, Furen Dai, Taylor Davis, Cathy Della Lucia, Sean Downey, Tory Fair, Andrew Fish, Aristotle Forrester, Ariel Freiberg, Lina Maria Giraldo, Sean Glover, Garrett Gould, Jesse Aron Green, Dell Hamilton, Elisa Hamilton, Ekua Holmes, Rebecca Hutchinson, Masako Kamiya, Woomin Kim, Timothy McCool, Susan Metrican, Maria Molteni, Elizabeth Mooney, Yuko Oda; Anthony Palocci, Jr., Roberta Paul, Jeff Perrott, Rachel Perry, Rosamond Purcell, Anabel Vázquez Rodríguez, Zoe Pettijohn Schade, Jeannie Simms, Alexandria Smith, Gabriel Sosa, Jessica Tam, Chanel Thervil, Jamal Thorne, Clarissa Tossin, Joe Wardwell, Keith Washington, and Yu-Wen Wu.
 

Credits

This exhibition is organized by Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Curator.

The exhibition and prize are generously endowed by James and Audrey Foster.