This exhibition showcases the deep holdings of portraits in various forms of media within the ICA Collection, exploring how artists create images of themselves and others to communicate the emotions, politics, and beauty of representation. Portraits offer both artists and sitters a means to convey personal and lived experiences and, through this, an opportunity for viewers to reflect on themselves. Unlike more historical portraits, which often celebrated the aristocracy and those in power, contemporary portraiture explores a broader and more inclusive range of people and identities. This selection of almost thirty works reflects the richness of today’s diverse narratives and reminders of our shared humanity.

 

Highlighting the rich interplay between imagery and text and the related practices of looking and reading, Wordplay draws primarily from the ICA’s permanent collection to showcase how contemporary artists have played with words to animate and expand their art practices. Text has been part of visual expression for centuries, but “text art” as a genre began to proliferate with the emergence of conceptual art in the 1960s. Artists in the exhibition use text to probe philosophical questions, express and subvert political messages, challenge notions of identity, and connect their artwork with multiple references, writers, and cultural icons. This exhibition will feature many recently acquired works that have never been on view by artists Kenturah Davis, Taylor Davis, Joe Wardwell, and Rivane Neuenschwander, alongside work by Shepard Fairey, Jenny Holzer, Glenn Ligon, and others who have pioneered the creative engagement with language.   

Looking guide: Space Poem #1, Renée Green

For each installation in the Jim and Kim Pallotta Gallery, works from the ICA collection are brought into conversation with borrowed pieces to explore particular themes and modes of art making. In October 2014, we updated the selection on view to include recently acquired works by Gilbert and George, Leslie Hewitt, and Yasumasa Morimura. These appear alongside collection works by artists including Paul Chan, Rineke Dijkstra, and Boris Mikhailov in an exploration of two focal points: artistic engagement with social and political issues that lend to a contemporary reading of the effects of war and the reimagination of painting through serialization of form, the transformation of genres such as landscape, and the expansion of the medium to encompass drawing, photography, sculpture, and video.

Since the end of the nineteenth century, painting has gone through a repeated cycle of death and rebirth in the face of artistic innovations such as photography, conceptual art, installation, and digital-imaging technologies. At each of these challenges, artists have explored alternative ways of making a “painting” that go beyond the application of paint to a canvas using a brush by diversifying the components of its production and presentation. This exhibition highlights the most recent growth of painting, examining key transformations the practice has undergone since the 1970s. Pushing the boundaries of its definition, the artists with work on view in these galleries have deconstructed and reinvented what a painting is and what it can be. While some have maintained a commitment to traditional materials, others have expanded the genre beyond its limits to take the form of video projections, a pile of advertising posters, altered book covers, and even vintage chairs hung on the wall side-by-side. Through their varied investigations into the history, present, and future of painting, these artists acknowledge and often exaggerate its contradictions to proclaim that painting still is, and will likely remain, very much alive. 

Discover how artists transform commonplace materials into works of art and meaning.

Sculpture today is an expansive medium that includes a range of phenomena, forms, techniques, and materials; the category includes discrete objects, installations, staged video displays, and even performance. This display of collection works brings together pieces by a variety of artists who have used commonplace materials in new ways. Many employ everyday materials such as pins, glass, and wood, transcending their original function to suggest new material associations. Others use found objects and images to investigate socio-political contexts, creating new narratives for those objects.

Yet other artists probe the complex relationship of rendering three-dimensional forms in two-dimensional moving and still image. These thematic threads, among others, reflect the expansive vitality and diversity of object-making today. Included will be works from Mark Bradford, Taylor Davis, Tara Donovan, Kader Attia, Rachel Harrison, Charles LeDray, Roy McMakin, and Josiah McElheny, among others.

 Episode No. 37 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Josiah McElheny and A.Bitterman.

Themes include the use of language as material, the vulnerability of the human body, and the ability of artworks to shape-shift.

#ICAcollection

Though founded in 1936, the ICA formed its permanent collection just ten years ago. After the expansive presentation in First Light: A Decade of Collecting at the ICA, New Acquisitions continues to focus on the incredible growth of the collection in recent years. Taking an approach common in larger museums, the exhibition showcases works in a range of mediums acquired in the past three years. Dating from the 1970s to the present, the works on view focus on the use of language as a material in art, the vulnerability of the human body, and the ability of artworks to shape-shift, taking on the character of architecture, décor, or found objects.  

Among the new acquisitions is Sarah Sze’s Hidden Relief (2001), a major sculptural work by the Boston native that transforms a corner of the gallery into a mesmerizing network of shapes, lines, lights, and rulers. Mika Rottenberg’s 2015 video NoNoseKnows (50 Kilos Variant) brings the New York–based artist’s penchant for the visceral and the absurd to bear on China’s cultured pearl industry. Henry Taylor’s family portrait i’m yours (2015), a powerful and memorable contribution to one of art’s oldest genres, presents a trio of figures characterized by determination and resolve.

New Acquisitions also features works by Sadie Benning, Sophie Calle, Jimmy DeSana, Shannon Ebner, Jenny Holzer, Ree Morton, William Pope.L, Keith Sonnier, and Haegue Yang, among others.

 

A Venice Biennale standout by Academy Award–winning artist Steve McQueen makes its U.S. debut.

#Ashes

The ICA/Boston is pleased to present the U.S. debut of Ashes (2002–2015), a video installation by the artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen (b. London, UK, 1969). A standout from the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, Ashes presents footage on two sides of a freestanding screen. One side, originally shot on soft, grainy Super 8 film, shows a young, carefree fisherman named Ashes balancing playfully on a pitching boat against a horizon of blue sky and water. The other side shows a second projection, shot in 16mm film, that chronicles Ashes’s unexpected fate. Never seen together, yet linked by a shared soundtrack, the videos conjure an easy vitality and a vivid description of place against the darker forces of society and fate.

With moving-image works that create exquisite, visceral relationships between bodies and the spaces that surround or confine them, McQueen’s practice has developed from iconic silent videos to poignantly sound-driven works over the past twenty years. McQueen is the recipient of the 1999 Turner Prize and an Academy Award for his 2013 feature film 12 Years a Slave, among many other honors. The ICA introduced McQueen to Boston audiences with a film presentation in 1995.

Each year, since its debut in 2006, the ICA Collection is reinstalled to present new works and new themes. This fourth exhibition, In the Making, marks the Collection’s ongoing growth with a focus on artists’ process and materials in the making of their signature works. For the first time, separate galleries will be devoted to photography, sculpture, and painting. Each gallery invites an in-depth look at how artistic approaches to medium transform familiar subjects into resonant images and experiences.

Photographers such as Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Roe Ethridge, Noriko Furunishi, and Nan Goldin present a range of approaches, from raw and candid to highly conceptual and constructed, to expand notions of the medium.

Sculptures in the exhibition assemble unexpected fragments of our daily lives—pins, Scotch tape, sugar cubes, oil, and charred wood—into forms both familiar and surprising.

A focused look at South African-born, Amsterdam-based artist Marlene Dumas presents five of her powerful, emotionally raw paintings and drawings. The female figure, one of Dumas’ major subjects, is portrayed in a variety of scales, arrangements, and media as the artist updates this classic theme in the history of art.

Eliciting the wondrous from the mundane.

The thirteenth installment of the ICA’s annual collection exhibition presents major works that showcase artists’ engagement and entanglement with the everyday. Interest in common materials and quotidian subjects has been a defining theme of artistic practice in the 20th century, inspiring Cubist collage, found sculpture, and the widespread embrace of photography. By observing and being in the world, artists elevate and make significant ordinary textures and experiences.

Rooms dedicated to materials and process celebrate artists’ capacity to elicit the wondrous from the mundane. Works from Tara Donovan’s tape installation Nebulous to Damián Ortega’s explosion of a 35mm camera highlight the transformative use of common and found materials. Others incorporate everyday actions such as knotting, wrapping, or tying into their artistic practice, as in Lynda Benglis’s knot sculpture Sierra and Sheila Hicks’s stacked bundles of thread in Banisteriopsis II. Finally, portraiture—a noted strength in the ICA’s collection—forms a third means of exploring the everyday within the exhibition, in recently acquired works by Anthony Hernandez, Sanya Kantarovsky, Robert Pruitt, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. All of these artists have creatively engaged with their daily worlds, inviting others to partake in the beauty, dignity, and reality of the everyday.

Organized by Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Curator, with Jessica Hong, Assistant Curator.

With every call for social change arrives the possibility to make the world anew. The Worlds We Make: Selections from the ICA Collection explores how artists have visualized beyond present reality to imagine, dream, and realize the world-otherwise. Drawn from the ICA’s permanent collection and Boston-area collections, these works consider world-making in relation to broader themes such as climate and the natural environment, historical narratives and speculative fictions, the supernatural and the planetary. Expansive in subject and medium, the exhibition includes works by artists such as Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Jeffrey Gibson, Lorraine O’Grady, Matthew Ritchie, and Yinka Shonibare CBE (RA), among others.

Also included in The Worlds We Make is Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Room LOVE IS CALLING.

Together, the works in this exhibition celebrate the emancipatory potential of artistic imagination and invite other ways to see, create, and belong in the worlds we make.

Credits

The Worlds We Make: Selections from the ICA Collection is organized by Anni Pullagura, Curatorial Assistant.