An Indigenous Present @ ICA Boston - An Exhibition spanning 100 years of Contemporary Indigenous Art - Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston + Frist Art Museum, Nashville + Frye Art Museum, Seattle

An Indigenous Present

ICA Boston

October 9, 2025 - March 8, 2026

The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens An Indigenous Present, a thematic exhibition spanning 100 years of contemporary Indigenous art. The exhibition includes new commissions and significant works by 15 artists who use strategies of abstraction to represent personal and collective narratives, describe specific and imagined places, and build upon cultural and aesthetic traditions. Co-organized by artist Jeffrey Gibson and independent curator Jenelle Porter, the exhibition offers an expansive consideration of Indigenous art practices that highlights a continuum of elders and emerging makers, and premieres newly commissioned site-specific works by Raven Chacon, Caroline Monnet, and Anna Tsouhlarakis. An Indigenous Present emerges from Gibson and Porter’s 2023 landmark publication of the same name, which, through a collaborative process, brought together work by Native North American artists exploring diverse approaches to concept, form, and medium. Their engagement with artists during the making of the book inspired this exhibition—one that demonstrates the endless variability of abstraction and its capacity to hold multiple forms and histories. 

An Indigenous Present debuts at the ICA, before traveling to the Frist Art Museum in Nashville (June 26—September 27, 2026) and the Frye Art Museum in Seattle (November 7, 2026—February 14, 2027). 

“This exhibition is one take on the field of contemporary art and culture by Native and Indigenous makers. Some of these artists have been working for decades, and I follow in their path; others are at an earlier stage in their career, and I see new routes and possibilities in their respective practices. Together, they are amplifying the histories that have come before them and building a new context for present and future artists,” said Jeffrey Gibson.

​​Jenelle Porter added: ​“Since curating Jeffrey’s first solo museum exhibition at the ICA in 2013, he and I have continued to think together about ways to enlarge art histories. This exhibition is a proposal, one that explores the ways that these artists challenge the often arbitrary, historical categorizations of art by Indigenous makers​.”​ 

The exhibition unfolds across 10 galleries, beginning with a focus on the work of George Morrison and Mary Sully, two important forebearers in the development of contemporary Indigenous art during the first half of the 20th century. Throughout the exhibition, works by emerging artists are positioned in dialogue with those by more established makers. Kay WalkingStick and Dakota Mace explore seriality and repetition in bodies of work realized in the 1970s and 2020s, respectively. WalkingStick’s Chief Joseph Series—dedicated to the heroic Niimíipuu / Nez Perce chief—presents a grid of 32 paintings that characterize the artist’s decades-long devotion to serial forms and storytelling. Mace’s So’ II (Stars II) is composed of 40 unique chemigram prints that draw on Diné (Navajo) design histories and heritage. In another artistic dialogue, George Morrison and Teresa Baker evoke the land and light of their own ancestral homelands through an interplay of color and form. George Morrison, who trained alongside Abstract Expressionists painters in New York in the 1950s, is known for vibrant compositions, especially those inspired by the horizon near his Lake Superior, MN, home. Theresa Baker composes with yarn, paint, willow, and hide on irregularly cut artificial turf to create large-scale abstractions that convey her memories of place, such as the Northern Plains of her youth, as well as legacies of color field painting and collage.

At the ICA, An Indigenous Present includes two new commissions that expand the exhibition beyond the galleries. An immersive sound work by Raven Chacon will fill the ICA’s Founders Gallery overlooking Boston Harbor. Monnet’s site-specific installation for the museum’s Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall is composed of commercial building materials—such as Tyvek and roofing underlayment—that are sewn into a fractal-based composition inspired, in part, by Boston’s 600-year history of land reclamation and the ICA’s harbor location. The fractal patterns, or population “blooms,” derive from Anishinaabeg designs that, for the artist, symbolize interconnectedness, knowledge transmission, and kinship. Throughout the run of the exhibition, the ICA will host a series of performances of Raven Chacon’s scores and sound works, a film series curated by artist Sky Hopinka in the ICA’s Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater, and a number of other public programs. 

An Indigenous Present - Artist List

Teresa Baker (Mandan/Hidatsa; born 1985 in Watford City, ND)

Raven Chacon (Diné; born 1977 in Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation)

Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation; born 1984 in Bellingham, WA)

Sonya Kelliher-Combs (Iñupiaq/Athabascan; born 1969 in Bethel, AK)

Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill (Cree and Métis; born 1979 in Comox, British Columbia)

George Longfish (Seneca and Tuscarora; born 1942 in Ohsweken, Ontario)

Dakota Mace (Diné; born 1991 in Albuquerque, NM)

Kimowan Metchewais (Cree; born 1963 in Oxbow, Saskatchewan; died 2011, St. Paul, Alberta)

Caroline Monnet (Anishinaabe [Algonquin] and French; born 1985 in Ottawa, Ontario)

George Morrison (Ojibwe; born 1919 in Chippewa City, MN; died 2000, Red Rock, MN)

Audie Murray (Cree and Métis; born 1993 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan)

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation; born 1940 in St. Ignatius Mission, Flathead Reservation, MT; died 2025, Corrales, NM)

Mary Sully (Susan Mabel Deloria) (Yankton Dakota; born 1896 in Standing Rock Reservation, ND; died 1963, Omaha, NE)

Anna Tsouhlarakis (Navajo/Creek/Greek; born 1977 in Lawrence, KS)

Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee and Anglo; born 1935 in Syracuse, NY)

An Indigenous Present is organized by Jeffrey Gibson and Jenelle Porter, guest curators, with Erika Umali, Curator of Collections, and Max Gruber, Curatorial Assistant.  

ICA - INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART / BOSTON

25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston MA 02210

www.icaboston.org

Stanley Whitney @ ICA Boston - "Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon" Retrospective Exhibition

Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon

Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston

April 17 - September 1, 2025

The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) presents Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon. The ICA/Boston is the last stop for this major touring survey, which traces the development of Stanley Whitney’s unique and powerful abstractions over his 50-year career. The exhibition includes over 100 works, featuring extensive installations of the artist’s improvisatory small paintings; drawings and prints; and a selection of his sketchbooks spanning from 1987 to 2021, offering a view into Stanley Whitney’s endless variations on the theme of color, form, and his engagement with the written word. 

“Like the 1940 song, penned by Nancy Hamilton and Morgan Lewis, that inspired the exhibition’s title, Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon conveys feelings of enchantment through the artist’s consistent yet wholly expansive paintings,” said Ruth Erickson, Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the ICA. “Whitney’s abstractions create a space for viewers focus on their wide-ranging responses to color, rather than a specific subject.” 

This exhibition places Stanley Whitney’s color-saturated paintings in the context of his diverse sources of inspiration, which include jazz and soul music, poetry, American quilting traditions, and global histories of art and architecture. Between the early 1970s and the early 1990s, while making works characterized by a bold, experimental palette and unique rhythm, Stanley Whitney wrestled with the spatial legacies of foreground and background, and of object and field. His travels through the American West, Italy, and Egypt in the mid-1980s and the early 1990s transformed his work. Prior this period, Whitney’s paintings of colorful forms were suspended in what Stanley Whitney called “landscape air.” In the decades since, inspired by the natural and built environments he encountered, including Egyptian Pyramids and the Roman Colosseum, he began grounding his paintings with the loose but ever-present framework featuring horizontal rows of alternately askant and ordered squares, resulting in the loosely gridded abstractions that capture the imagination of audiences today. 

Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon surveys Stanley Whitney’s extensive investigation of color at the true height of his career. The survey features the artist’s large-scale explorations of color alongside his improvisatory small paintings. His drawings and prints provide vital, and often overlooked, context to the artist’s practice. These smaller works are exhibited alongside a chronological selection of the artist’s sketchbooks spanning from 1987 to 2021 to provide a view into Stanley Whitney’s engagement with the written word, and contemporary social and political issues.

Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon

Exhibition Catalogue

Buffalo AKG Art Museum, 2024

This career retrospective is accompanied by a catalogue featuring new essays by Cathleen Chaffee and host curators Ruth Erickson, Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the ICA, and Pavel S. Pyś, Curator of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. It also features texts by Kim Conaty, Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Normal Cole, a poet, designer, painter, and translator; and Duro Olowu, a London-based fashion designer and curator. These examinations of and reflections on the arc of Whitney’s career are presented alongside full-color reproductions of the works featured in the exhibition, a robust bibliography, an exhibition history, an illustrated chronology, and an extensive interview with the artist by Grégoire Lubineau and a conversation between Normal Cole and Stanley Whitney.

Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon is organized by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and is curated by Cathleen Chaffee, Charles Balbach Chief Curator at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. The ICA’s presentation is organized by Ruth Erickson, Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, with Tessa Bachi Haas, Assistant Curator. 

ICA - INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART - BOSTON

25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA, 02210

www.icaboston.org

Related Post:

Stanley Whitney: Dance With Me Henri, Baltimore Museum of Art, November 20, 2022 -  April 23, 2023

Sarah Sze: Recipient of the Meraki Artist Award 2025

The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston announced that Sarah Sze is the first recipient of the Meraki Artist Award

The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) announced that Sarah Sze (b. 1969, Boston, MA) is the inaugural recipient of its new Meraki Artist Award. Widely recognized for expanding the boundaries between painting, sculpture, video, and installation, Sarah Sze’s work blends the intimate with the monumental, precision with chaos, and the physical with the digital. Her intimate paintings and large-scale installations and public works challenge perceptions of space, time, and scale, making her one of the most compelling artists of our time.

“It’s a huge honor to be the first recipient of the Meraki Artist Award and I’m inspired by the dedication to love, care, and art that the award stands for,” said Sarah Sze.  

Generously funded by Fotene Demoulas, the $100,000 award celebrates the artistic achievements of women artists and their impact on the field of contemporary visual art. Sarah Sze will accept the Meraki Artist Award at the museum’s annual Women’s Luncheon on May 5, 2025. 

“I am honored to collaborate with the ICA to spotlight the passion and presence that women visual artists bring to their practice through the Meraki Artist Award,” said Fotene Demoulas. “I want to offer heartfelt congratulations to Sarah, whose innovate work inspires us to see the world in new ways.”

“In Greek, the word meraki means to pour your soul into something, and I can think of no better way to describe Fotene’s longstanding support of artists and the ICA,” said Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director of the ICA. “The generosity of this award is echoed in the open spirit and artistic expansiveness of Sarah’s work. We are thrilled to recognize Sarah as the inaugural recipient of the Meraki Artist Award and to celebrate her important contributions to art and culture.”

An exhibition of works promised to the ICA by Fotene and Tom Coté will go on view at the museum in January 2026. Reflecting their longtime support of artists at every stage of their career through exhibitions, publications, and museum acquisitions, the exhibition features work by 20 artists including Charlene von Heyl, Deana Lawson, Deborah Roberts, Diedrick Brackens, Laura Owens, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Mickalene Thomas, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Olga de Amaral, and Sarah Sze. The artworks reflect multiple generations, styles, media, and thematic concerns, exemplifying a sustained interest in formal and material complexity and a steadfast belief in the singular perspectives that artists contribute to the world.

SARAH SZE BIOGRAPHY 

Sarah Sze gleans objects and images from worlds both physical and digital, assembling them into complex multimedia works that shift scale between microscopic observation and macroscopic perspective on the infinite. A peerless bricoleur, Sarah Sze moves with a light touch across proliferating media. Her dynamic, generative body of work spans sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, video, and installation while always addressing the precarious nature of materiality and grappling with matters of entropy and temporality. 

Born in Boston, Sarah Sze earned a BA from Yale University in 1991 and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 1997. While still in graduate school, she challenged the very nature of sculpture, at MoMA PS1 in New York, by burrowing into the walls of the building, creating sculptural portals and crafting ecosystems that radically transformed the host architecture. A year later, for her first solo institutional exhibition, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, she presented Many a Slip (1999), an immersive installation sprawling through several rooms in which flickering projections were scattered among complex assemblages of everyday objects. This marked Sze’s first foray into video, which has since become a central medium of her installations. Citing the Russian Constructivist notion of the “kiosk” as a key inspiration, she conceived subsequent installations as portable stations for the interchange of images and the exchange of information. Sarah Sze represented the United States in the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, and her work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including recently at Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2024); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2023); and Fondation Cartier, Paris (2020), and featured in the Carnegie International (1999); Whitney Biennial (2000); and the Bienal de São Paulo (2002). She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003. 

THE MERAKI ARTIST AWARD  

The Meraki Artist Award is an annual artist award that is a key part of the ICA’s efforts to exhibit, present and collect the work of women artists. The award takes its inspiration from the Greek word “meraki” (may-rah-kee), which means to do something with soul, love, or creativity. The Meraki Artist Award is funded by Fotene Demoulas and will continue to be supported for the next ten years. The artist will be recognized at the ICA’s annual Women’s Luncheon. 

ICA - INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART - BOSTON

25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA, 02210

www.icaboston.org

2025 Foster Prize Recipients and Exhibition @ ICA Boston - Alison Croney Moses, Yorgos Efthymiadis, Damien Hoar de Galvan, and Sneha Shrestha (aka Imagine)

James and Audrey Foster Prize Exhibition 

Alison Croney Moses, Yorgos Efthymiadis, Damien Hoar de Galvan, and Sneha Shrestha (aka Imagine) 

Institute of Contemporary Art / ICA Boston

August 25, 2025 - January 19, 2026

Alison Croney Moses, Yorgos Efthymiadis, Damien Hoar de Galvan, and Sneha Shrestha (aka Imagine) have been named the recipients of the 2025 James and Audrey Foster Prize, announced the ICA Boston. Their work will be presented in the 2025 James and Audrey Foster Prize Exhibition. Organized by Tessa Bachi Haas, Assistant Curator, the exhibition recognizes the global and local roots of each artist, and how this is reflected in their practice.

“The biannual James and Audrey Foster Prize Exhibition consistently introduces audiences to the vitality of Boston’s artistic community and supports artists through exhibition, collaboration and a deepened sense of community. It is always a highly anticipated moment within our exhibition program,” said Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director. “We are grateful to Jim and Audrey Foster, whose ongoing generosity over two decades has made it possible for us to share the work of immensely talented area artists with many thousands of people in person and online.”   

“We are thrilled to congratulate the 2025 Foster Prize artists, whose work demonstrates the strength and creativity of Boston’s arts scene. We can’t wait to see their work on view in the ICA galleries,” James and Audrey Foster added.  

Following recent visits to over 50 Boston-area artist studios, Haas wishes to express her immense gratitude to each artist with whom she has met during this time and over her years in Boston. “It is a unique and necessary privilege to spend extended time with artists in their studios,” said Tessa Bachi Haas. “I am immensely proud to organize an exhibition of four outstanding artists who are pillars of supporting the arts, equity, and education in our region.” 

“Each of this year’s Foster Prize recipients draws on materials that connect their local and global roots,” said Tessa Bachi Haas. “Whether through woodworking, installation, sculpture, painting, and photography, the expansive art practices of Croney Moses, Efthymiadis, Galvan, and Shrestha underpin the strength of our greater Boston arts community.”  

The James and Audrey Foster Prize is key to the ICA’s effort to recognize, present, and acquire works by exceptional Boston-area artists. First established in 1999, the Foster Prize (formerly the ICA Artist Prize) expanded its format when the museum opened its Seaport building in 2006. James and Audrey Foster, passionate collectors and lifelong supporters of contemporary art, endowed the prize, ensuring the ICA’s ability to sustain and grow the program for years to come. 

The program has proven to be a springboard for many artists to have major museum exhibitions. The selection of artists for the James and Audrey Foster Prize Exhibition spans generations and results from sustained conversations with Boston’s community of working artists. More than 46 artists have participated in the Foster Prize exhibition program, including: Ambreen Butt (1999), Taylor Davis (2001), Kelly Sherman (2006), Rania Matar (2008), Evelyn Rydz (2010), Luther Price (2013), Lucy Kim (2017), Lavaughn Jenkins (2019), Marlon Forrester (2021), Yu-Wen Wu (2023), and many more. Works by many Foster Prize recipients have entered the ICA’s permanent collection.  

ALISON CRONEY MOSES BIOGRAPHY

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 carries 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. Croney Moses holds an MA in Sustainable Business & Communities from Goddard College, and a BFA in Furniture Design from Rhode Island School of Design. She has been included in group exhibitions at Houston Center for Contemporary Craft (2024-25); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2024); Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Discovery Center (2023); Center for Art in Wood, Philadelphia (2022-23); MassArt Art Museum, Boston (2022); the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2021-22); and Center for Architecture + Design, Philadelphia (2021), among others. Croney Moses’s work is in the collections of Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, MA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Detroit Institute of Arts Museum; and Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. She is recipient of the 2024 Black Mountain College International Artist Prize, the 2023 Boston Artadia Award, the 2022 USA Fellowship in Craft, and a finalist of the 2024 LOEWE FOUNDATION Craft Prize. She will debut her first public art installation at the Boston Public Art Triennial in 2025 through their Accelerator program. This is Croney Moses’s first institutional solo exhibition. 

DAMIEN HOAR DE GALVAN BIOGRAPHY

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. 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 grew up between Western Massachusetts, Argentina, and spent most of his adolescence in Beverly, MA. He 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. Hoar de Galvan 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. He is represented by Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown, MA. This is Hoar de Galvan’s first institutional solo exhibition. 

SNEHA SHRESTHA (aka Imagine) BIOGRAPHY

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. Education has always been at the forefront of Shrestha’s work to celebrate and inspire an appreciation for the beauty and diversity of Nepali language. Shrestha received her MA in Education from Harvard University. She 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). In 2025, she will complete a public art project in partnership with Rubin Museum and New York City Department of Transportation’s Temporary Art Program. One of her iconic public murals is at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Main Street in Central Square, Cambridge, MA, and her work can also be found in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Fidelity Art Collection, among others. Shrestha’s additional honors include a commissioned thirty-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); recognition as one of the 100 most influential women in Nepal by the Nepal Cultural Council (2018); a Boston Artist-in-Residence Award (2018); the HUBWeek Change Maker Award (2018); South Asia and the Arts Fund Grant, Harvard University (2017); and Project Zero Artist-in-Residence Award, Harvard University (2017). She was recently selected for a studio residency at Boston Center for the Arts. 

YORGOS EFTHYMIADIS BIOGRAPHY

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, recent series by Efthymiadis explore portraiture of kin through their material cultures and surrounding natural environments in Greece, Boston, and beyond. Efthymiadis has had solo exhibitions at Gallery Kayafas, Boston (2024, 2019, and 2016) and the Griffin Museum of Photography, Winchester, MA (2016); and has been included in several group exhibitions including at the Griffin Museum of Photography, Winchester, MA (2025, 2024, 2023, and 2020); Boston City Hall (2024 and 2017); Filter Photo Gallery, Chicago (2023, 2022, 2017, and 2014); Vermont Center for Photography, Brattleboro, VT (2022 and 2017); Danforth Art Museum, Framingham, MA (2022, 2016, 2015, and 2013); Distillery Gallery, Boston (2021); Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts, Providence (2020); Somerville Museum, Somerville, MA (2019); and Photographic Resource Center, Boston (2015). 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 recipient of the St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award (2017). A board member of Somerville Arts Council and chair of the Visual Arts Fellowship Grants since 2017, Efthymiadis has also been a reviewer for the Lenscratch Student Prize Awards since 2023 and finds it deeply fulfilling to work with fellow photographers and give back to the photographic community. In 2015, Efthymiadis created a gallery in his own kitchen titled 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 1500 artists in 40 shows juried by 45 guest curators.  

ICA - INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART - BOSTON

25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA, 02210

www.icaboston.org

Chen Zhen: Inner Body Landscapes, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

Chen Zhen: Inner Body Landscapes

Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

September 18 - December 31, 2002

The Chinese-born, Paris-based artist CHEN ZHEN (1955-2000) poetically employs both his study of traditional Chinese culture and his knowledge of Western avant-garde art to create artwork that engages with contemporary social issues. In the first U.S. survey of this internationally recognized artist's work since his death, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, will present a carefully chosen group of Chen Zhen's ambitious installations and sculptural pieces created during the last five years of his life. "Chen Zhen: Inner Body Landscapes" is organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art.

"The art of Chen Zhen draws you into an experience that is both familiar and foreign, crossing boundaries of geography, aesthetics, and disciplines," says Jill Medvedow, James Sachs Plaut Director of the ICA. "We are privileged to have organized this major exhibition of Zhen's work with the cooperation of his widow, Xu Min, who worked closely with the artist in realizing most of his installations."

"Chen Zhen's work is often profoundly personal," says Gilbert Vicario, Assistant Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, "reflecting seemingly opposite Eastern and Western approaches to medicine as a metaphor for art-making, global politics, and philosophy. Zhen's aim of establishing a dialogue between the everyday materials of consumer society, human beings, and nature results in giving these materials new meaning."

Chen Zhen's enormous, viewer-interactive piece Jue Chang (50 Strokes to Each) (1998), which will fill the ICA's entire first floor gallery, deals metaphorically with the notion of conflict and misunderstanding among people in a general, global context. The flat surfaces of more than a hundred chairs and beds collected from different parts of the world have been stretched with animal skins to create makeshift drums that are hung from a large, rustic-looking wooden frame. Visitors are encouraged to play this artwork turned percussion instrument. A series of five interconnected sculptures made from hundreds of multi-colored candles, which are traditionally thought of as a symbol of an individual's life, make up the installation Inner Body Landscape (2000). This installation takes inspiration from the traditional Chinese belief that one must treat the entire body rather than just the disease.

The exhibition also features Chen Zhen's last work, Zen Garden (2000), a model for a public garden exploring the fusion of two views of medicine--Chinese and Western--in relation to the human body. Representations of major body organs made of alabaster, pierced by such metal medical instruments as forceps, tweezers, and scissors, hover illuminated over raked sand. In Black Broom (2000), whose theme is similar to Zen Garden's, an ordinary broom becomes menacing with a brush that is made of black transfusion tubing with hypodermic needles at the ends. Crystal Ball (1999), a spherical flask filled with saline solution surrounded by an organic cage made of abacus and prayer beads, and Crystal Landscape of Inner Body (2000), exquisite pieces of blown glass representing different internal organs, complete the exhibition.

Born in Shanghai, China, Chen Zhen, who came of age during the tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution, attended the Shanghai Fine Arts and Crafts school and the Shanghai Drama Institute. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, after the Cultural Revolution ended, he became interested in combining traditional Chinese philosophy (which was forbidden under Maoist rule) and Western avant-garde art forms as an alternative to the official cultural ideology espoused by the government. During his early career, Chen Zhen pursued painting, which he abandoned in favor of installation after immigrating to Paris in 1986 to attend the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts and the Institut des Hautes Etudes en Arts Plastiques. Chen Zhen had a rare medical condition called autoimmune hemolytic anemia that eventually took his life in December 2000.

The Institute of Contemporary Art's relationship with Chen Zhen extends back to 1998, when he participated in the group exhibition "The Quiet in the Land: Everyday Life, Contemporary Art, and the Shakers," at the ICA. His piece Opening of Closed Center (1996) dealt metaphorically with the collision between his own culture and that of the Shakers through a visual manifestation of the complex relationship between space, time, and spirituality.

During the last decade, Chen Zhen's work has been presented at venues throughout Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America, including large group exhibitions such as "First Shanghai Biennale" at the Shanghai Art Museum, and "Unmapping the Earth and Trade Routes: History and Geography" at the second Johannesburg Biennale. Solo exhibitions of his work have been presented at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Centre International d'Art contemporaine de Montréal; Deitch Projects, New York; National Maritime Museum Stockholm; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; and ADDC-Espace Culturel François Mitterand, Périgueux.

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART - ICA BOSTON

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