Entryways: Xenobia Bailey @ ICA - Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia - Univesity of Pennsylvania - A Site-Specific Installation

Entryways: Xenobia Bailey 

ICA - Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia 

Through August 9, 2026

Entryways: Xenobia Bailey 

Photo courtesy of the artist and Maharam

In July 2025, the Institute for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (ICA), unveiled a striking new public artwork as part of ICA’s annual Entryways commission by visionary artist Xenobia Bailey. Spanning 400 square feet, the site-specific installation transforms ICA’s façade with a “Funktional” design and visionary illusion inspired by domestic crochet, natural cosmologies, masquerading culture, and local Philadelphia legend Sun Ra’s artistic philosophy. Entryways: Xenobia Bailey was developed in partnership with Maharam, North America’s leading creator of textiles for interiors, and is on view through August 9, 2026.

“Entryways: Xenobia Bailey continues our partnership with Maharam to transform ICA’s entrance into a space for experimentation,” said Hallie Ringle, ICA’s Daniel and Brett Sundheim Chief Curator and Interim Director. “ICA champions exploration and public engagement in meaningful ways, and local artist Xenobia Bailey’s site-specific work will do just that, inspiring visitors and redefining the way we remix, and they encounter, our space.”

For the Entryways commission, Xenobia Bailey began by crocheting decorative elements of vibrant yarn, before draping these crochet afghans over a ladder and photographing them. These images were digitally composed into the work’s centerpiece: a figure of Afrofuturist musician Sun Ra, whose Philadelphia-based jazz group Sun Ra Arkestra embodied a holistic Black cosmology and philosophy. Bailey drew inspiration from masquerading traditions—used to channel ancestral spirits—and memories of homemakers such as her mother, who transformed household furniture pieces by draping colorful crochet textiles over them. Astrological symbols orbit the figure and reappear across the building’s surface. Later this year, Xenobia Bailey will also introduce a digital element to her process for the first time. An Augmented Reality (AR) feature extend the installation into an interactive realm and virtually suspend the masquerade designs, underscoring their multidimensionality and further evolving a “Funktional” Black aesthetics into the future. Deploying intuitive, organic improvisation, Xenobia Bailey translates the frequencies of Sun Ra’s music into a symphony of crochet stitches, colors, and forms that come to life through AR. Honoring Sun Ra’s ability to bring the frequency of a Black cosmic aesthetic into material culture and lifestyle and using textiles as animating masks that energize space, Bailey’s Entryways design reimagines ICA’s façade as that of Sun Ra’s spirit welcoming visitors and passersby.

Entryways: Xenobia Bailey 

Photo courtesy of the artist and Maharam

Entryways: Xenobia Bailey 

Photo courtesy of the artist and Maharam

“In this expansive new commission, Xenobia Bailey draws on the legacies of Black utilitarian makers, including her own maternal lineage, from whom she inherited her ‘Funky’ textile aesthetics. She brings her medium of crochet, which she associates with domestic and sharecropping textile craft, into conversation with the architecture of ICA,” remarks Denise Ryner, ICA’s Andrea B. Laporte Curator. “Bailey carries this spatial expansion into the all-encompassing experimental cosmos of Sun Ra’s Arkestra, who surveys Philadelphia from above. Bailey adds to this Funk-tional orbit a towering masquerader.”

Entryways is a continuation of Bailey’s ongoing, multi-part, research project Paradise Under Reconstruction in the Aesthetic of Funk, a series she began in 1999 to build a distinctly African American aesthetic—one she experienced in her childhood, but had not seen represented in her academic industrial design education. Bailey’s body of crochet work, developed since 1984, stands as a testament to evolving textile material culture “funktioning” simultaneously as a source of sanctuary, comfort, historical preservation, and cultural identity. Born in Seattle and raised in rural and urban Washington, Bailey’s early life was shaped by Northwest forestry seasonal rhythms and land and stream-based living, guided by tools like the farmer’s almanac. Informed by this upbringing of being in sync with the natural environment, as well as thorough research on independent historical and contemporary radical elite Black communities, Bailey's work contributes to an ongoing dialogue on the material culture of funk, and emphasizes research, experimentation, development, and sustainable socio-economic models.

Artist Xenobia Bailey

Internationally recognized artist Xenobia Bailey (b. 1955, Seattle, WA) produces artworks and installations inspired by urban material culture and rural African-American homemakers. A student of ethnomusicology and industrial design, Bailey is well known for her crocheted sculptural headwear, wall hangings, and tents that articulate the utilitarian material crafts of the funk counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s. Using fiber and found items as her primary materials, Bailey produces a range of pieces that frequently riff on traditional home furnishings with inventive twists of color and texture.

Entryways: Xenobia Bailey is commissioned by The Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania (ICA) and developed in partnership with Maharam as an initiative of Maharam Digital Projects. The installation is curated by Denise Ryner, ICA’s Andrea B. Laporte Curator.

ICA PHILADELPHIA - UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

118 South 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104

icaphila.org

Entryways: Xenobia Bailey

Institute for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (ICA)

July 12, 2025 –– August 9, 2026

Mavis Pusey: Mobile Images @ ICA Philadelphia - Retrospective Exhibition

Mavis Pusey: Mobile Images

Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia

Through December 7, 2025

Mavis Pusey with her work Within Manhattan 

Image courtesy of Studio Museum in Harlem

For the first time, the life and work of Jamaica-born artist MAVIS PUSEY (1928-2019) is fully explored in a major museum survey. Through December 7, 2025, ICA Philadelphia presents Mavis Pusey: Mobile Images, an extensive retrospective spanning the prolific artist’s 50-year career. Featuring more than 60 works – including paintings, drawings, and prints – as well as archival materials, the exhibition explores the influences that led Pusey to develop her unique visual language through experimentation with geometric abstraction. Tracing her journey from Jamaica to New York, London, Paris, Philadelphia, and Virginia, Mobile Images demonstrates the evolution of Pusey’s work throughout her life, and offers a long-overdue reexamination of her impact on American abstraction and beyond.

Mavis Pusey: Mobile Images was curated by Hallie Ringle, Interim Director and Daniel and Brett Sundheim Chief Curator of the ICA Philadelphia, with Kiki Teshome, Curatorial Assistant at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where it will travel in Spring 2027. The exhibition is supported by extensive research and preservation initiatives conducted in partnership with the Getty Research Institute and Getty Conservation Institute with significant support from the Mellon Foundation. ICA hosted a two-day symposium, bringing together scholars, artists, community leaders, and the public to discuss Pusey’s legacy and the continued relevance of her work today. 

“It has been a monumental and collaborative process to bring this project to fruition. Culminating over a decade of partnership, working initially with the artist herself and collaborating alongside Thelma Golden and the Studio Museum, the exhibition marks the first time that Pusey’s work will be on view publicly in a comprehensive manner,” remarks Hallie Ringle. “Our goal is to enable audiences to appreciate the breadth and evolution of Pusey’s work within a deeply researched framework, and for the public, scholars, and artists alike to be able to draw connections between her work and key art historical narratives and contemporary practices.”

While Pusey’s dedication to geometric abstraction earned her recognition from key curatorial voices during her lifetime, like Howardina Pindell, her work remains largely overlooked. Born and raised in Retreat, Jamaica, she created rich abstract paintings and works on paper inspired by her wide-ranging interests in fashion, print-making, and the urban environment of cities she lived in throughout her life. Mavis Pusey studied at the Art Students League under Will Barnet (1961–1965) and, later, worked at Robert Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop (1969–1972), which was frequented by significant figures such as Emma Amos, Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, and Melvin Edwards, among others. A passionate educator, she taught for some time at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia as she continued to develop her own studio work.

Mavis Pusey resisted pressures to create figurative, overtly socio-political work and remained committed to working in abstraction, retaining a focused thematic vision of her work throughout her career. However, discriminatory hiring practices that barred her from tenured teaching positions, and a late-in-life illness further contributed to the fragmentation and near-loss of her artistic archive. Starting in 2015, Hallie Ringle, who at the time served as Assistant Curator at the Studio Museum, worked closely with the artist; Thelma Golden, Ford Foundation Director and Chief Curator of the Studio Museum; and the team at the Studio Museum to painstakingly reassemble her body of work before her death in 2019, including the acquisition of a large portion of Pusey’s work for the Studio Museum’s collection. With her appointment at ICA, Hallie Ringle continued to advance her research, prompting a close collaboration between ICA and the Studio Museum on comprehensive conservation and research initiatives to preserve the artist’s legacy.

Thelma Golden said, “Mavis Pusey was a truly pioneering artist of the abstract movement who should be rightfully recognized for her formal precision and boundless curiosity. My immense gratitude goes to Hallie Ringle for her unwavering care and research throughout this process and to the entire team at ICA Philadelphia and the Studio Museum, especially Kiki Teshome, for their dedication and attention over the course of this exhibition’s planning.”

Mavis Pusey 

Paris, Mars – Juin, 1968 

Image courtesy of the Estate of Mavis Pusey

Unfolding across ICA’s first and second floors, Mavis Pusey: Mobile Images is organized in thematic sections that explore important motifs in her work, including the body, music, and demolition/construction. The exhibition will debut seven newly discovered paintings, on view for the first time alongside key works moving through each period of Pusey’s creative trajectory. Although some of Pusey’s works are over 50 years old, the themes addressed connect deeply to contemporary life. Her “Broken Construction” series (1960s–1990s) explores ideas of destruction and renewal as a metaphor for societal change. Her compositions, which show bricks and boards falling to the ground, are not dystopian realities but rather hopeful imaginings of the future. Another highlight are Pusey’s works created in reaction to the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and student protests in Paris during the 1960s. After witnessing the student protests in Paris, Pusey created several prints inspired by the movement, including Paris, Mars - Juin (1968) that shows the city in flames. Eric (1968), named after a friend, was inspired by an encounter she had with the French police: the periphery of the print is minimalist in form and grows increasingly chaotic towards the center, representing the emotional turmoil Eric felt under his cool demeanor. These and other works are contextualized by the inclusion of photographs, notes, and ephemera from Pusey’s lifetime, which offer historical and personal insight into the artist’s boundary-pushing body of work.

Conservation: Much of Pusey's work has needed conservation, and experts across the country have been working to restore her paintings and prints. As part of this initiative, ICA Philadelphia and the Studio Museum are working collaboratively with the Getty Research Institute and the Getty Conservation Institute to jointly conduct a thorough study of Pusey’s work. The study includes focused technical analysis of the artist materials and conserving her works on paper. All of Getty’s findings was published so that the technical aspects of Pusey’s practice is made broadly accessible to the public.

Exhibition Publication: The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive publication documenting Pusey’s creative practice. Designed by Miko McGinty, the catalog includes forewords by Thelma Golden and Hallie Ringle, an introduction by Ringle, guest essays, a roundtable on experimental music and its impact on Pusey’s work, and an archive essay by Kiki Teshome. The publication is co-published by the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

ICA PHILADELPHIA - UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

118 South 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104

icaphila.org

Mavis Pusey: Mobile Images 

Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, July 12 - December 7, 2025

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

Artist Tau Lewis @ ICA Boston - "Tau Lewis: Spirit Level" Exhibition + Monograph

Tau Lewis: Spirit Level

ICA, Boston

August 29, 2024 – January 20, 2025 

The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) presents Tau Lewis: Spirit Level, the artist’s first solo museum presentation in the United States. For the ICA, TAU LEWIS (b. 1993, Toronto) is creating a new body of work that is accompanied by her first monograph. The exhibition is organized by Jeffrey De Blois, ICA Mannion Family Curator, with Max Gruber, Curatorial Assistant. 

Tau Lewis transforms found materials into fabric-based figurative sculptures, quilts, masks, and other assemblages through labor-intensive processes such as hand-sewing and carving. She forages for objects and materials that carry meaning and memories—from previously worn clothing and leather to driftwood and seashells. Often, these artifacts are drawn from a meticulously organized material library the artist has amassed since 2000 collected from innumerable places. The evocative objects Tau Lewis gathers and transforms carry their own spirit and energy and connect her work to the social, cultural, and physical landscapes that she moves through, collects from, and inhabits. Tau Lewis describes these different landscapes as “Black geographies.” These geographies—oceanic, terrestrial, extraterrestrial—are the areas where Tau Lewis’s otherworldly beings live.  

“Lewis harnesses the beauty and power carried by found materials in her monumental soft sculptures,” said Jeffrey De Blois. “Her sculptures are alive with the energy of previously worn found fabrics and animated through every meticulous gesture. They are intensely personal, yet open to a world of associations and meanings.” 

Tau Lewis’s upcycling relates to forms of material inventiveness practiced by Afro-diasporic communities. For the artist, working with things close at hand is a reparative act aimed at reclaiming agency. Her works circumnavigate a broad range of references, from the mythic underwater civilization of Drexciya, to forms of material inventiveness practiced by artists such as Thorton Dial, Lonnie Holley, and the quilters from Gee’s Bend Alabama. Throughout, Lewis’s interest is in advancing the diasporic traditions and exploring the transformation and rebirth of materials that occurs when an object is made by hand.  

For the ICA, Tau Lewis is creating a new, interrelated body of sculptures including a large floor-bound quilt and five monumental figurative sculptures. The patchwork quilt is pieced together with a series of repeating panels the artist refers to as sequences radiating out from the center, where a miniature architectural form made from found metal components and a starfish is located. Each repeating sequence is composed of a set of found objects from the artist’s material library that recall kingdom-like organizations of the universe: animals, planets, satellites, weapons, aliens, and more. Intricately detailed in its configuration, and a whole world unto itself, the quilt evokes the idea of a portal or a galactic landscape; a cosmological ecosystem where struggles for power are playing out. The quilt is surrounded by five statuesque, fabric-based sculptures, each approximately 10 feet in height, adorned with hand-sewn, cloak-like garments and holding unique gestural hand poses. Their garments are pieced together with a makeshift aesthetic from found fabrics—ranging from muslin scraps dyed with tea or rust to deconstructed leather jackets and parachutes—while the figures themselves are by turns oceanic and extraterrestrial in appearance. Holding space in the exhibition, the figures congregate together as onlookers towering over the quilt.    

TAU LEWIS - Artist Biography 

Born in 1993 in Toronto, Tau Lewis lives and works in New York. Her work has been exhibited internationally, at venues including the Barbican, London; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; ICA/Boston; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Hepworth Wakefield, London; MoMA PS1, New York; the Art Gallery of York University, Toronto; and New Museum, New York. Her work has been included in major international group exhibitions including The Milk of Dreams, the 59th Biennale di Venezia, and Yesterday we said tomorrow, Prospect.5, New Orleans. Tau Lewis’s work is held in several permanent collections, including Grinnell College Museum of Art, Iowa; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.  

Publication - The exhibition is accompanied by the artist’s first monograph featuring an essay from the exhibition’s curator, Jeffrey De Blois, and a conversation between Tau Lewis and Lonnie Holley, renowned artist, musician, and long-time mentor to Tau Lewis.  

Related Post on Wanafoto: Taux Lewis, Atlanta Contemporary, 2018

ICA - INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART / BOSTON

25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA 02210 

www.icaboston.org

Betye Saar Exhibition @ ICA Miami - Institute of Contemporary Art - Serious Moonlight

Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight 

Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami 

October 29, 2021 – April 17, 2022 

Rarely-seen installation works by pioneering artist Betye Saar (b. 1926) receive their first dedicated exhibition in more than three decades at ICA Miami. Serious Moonlight spans significant installations created from 1980 to 1998, including Oasis (1984), a work that is reconfigured for the first time in more than 30 years. Showcasing this lesser-known aspect of the artist’s practice, the survey provides new insights into Betye Saar’s explorations of ritual, spirituality, and cosmologies, as well as themes of the African diaspora. Serious Moonlight is curated by ICA Miami Curator Stephanie Seidel. 

“Betye Saar’s impact on art history is undeniable, yet important aspects of her innovative body of work have yet to be fully explored,” said ICA Miami Artistic Director Alex Gartenfeld. “Serious Moonlight gives audiences the first opportunity to view many works of large scale sculpture and installation together that have not been seen in a museum context for decades. ICA Miami is committed to exploring under- recognized aspects of significant artists’ practices in order to enable deeper understanding of their work and its impact.”

“Saar’s radical immersive installations are incredibly rich with narrative,” said ICA Miami Curator Stephanie Seidel. “Connecting the political and the spiritual from a feminist point of view is an enduring aspect of Saar’s practice, and her groundbreaking work continues to spur important dialogues about gender and race. Through these rarely-seen installations, made nearly three decades ago, the exhibition illustrates her bold and pioneering approach as an artist, storyteller, and mythmaker, and the ongoing significance and relevance of her work to the most pressing issues in America today.”

Recognized for her visionary artistic practice, Betye Saar has been a pioneer of assemblage art on the West Coast and Black feminist art in the United States since the 1960s. Her dense, complexly referential assemblages, sculptures, and collages reflect changing cultural and political contexts—generating and influencing dialogues and artistic practice related to race and gender. Rich with familiar symbols, a number of the works in the exhibition highlight Saar’s interest in spirituality and cosmology. Serious Moonlight brings together a series of her lesser-known installations to demonstrate the artist’s critical focus on Black identity and Black feminism throughout her practice, as well as her explorations of myth and spirituality in relation to the African diaspora and the African American experience.

Influenced by Betye Saar’s lifelong home of Los Angeles and research trips to Haiti, Mexico, and Nigeria in the 1970s, the installations seen in the exhibition explore concepts of ritual and community through both cultural symbols and autobiographical references. Reconfigured in close collaboration with the artist, each installation is exhibited in a dedicated architectural pavilion, enabling each work to be showcased individually and supporting the artists’ intentions to create immersive, dynamic viewer experiences with each installation.

Among the significant works on view is Oasis (1984), the exhibition’s earliest installation, which will be reconfigured for the first time since 1988. Featuring meticulously blown glass spheres around a children’s rocking chair embedded in sand, Oasis evokes a utopic space where life and death merge and coexist.

Serious Moonlight additionally features House of Fortune (1988), an ominous scene of a card table, tarot cards, and Vodou flags as a meditation on spirituality. Limbo (1994) and Wings of Morning (1992), both address death and mourning, and draw from the history and experience of African American communities to create tangible and powerful monuments consecrating collective memories. Saar’s reflections on the African diaspora are also illustrated through the installations Mojotech (1987), Secrets and Shadows (1989), A Woman’s Boat: Voyages (1998), and Gliding into Midnight (2019)—the latter with fragments of the 1993 installation In Troubled Waters—which touch upon this history of the aftereffects of the transatlantic slave trade. 

Betye Saar - Exhibition Catalogue: Serious Moonlight is accompanied by a richly illustrated scholarly catalogue edited by Stephanie Seidel. The catalogue features contributions by Sampada Aranke, Edwidge Danticat, Leah Ollman, and Stephanie Seidel that consider Betye Saar’s work in the contemporary context. 

BETYE SAAR - BIOGRAPHY

Boldly addressing questions of race and gender in her art and activism, Betye Saar (b. 1926, Los Angeles) has been a pioneer of readymade art on the West Coast and Black feminist art in the United States since the 1960s. Her revolutionary work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and around the world, including, most recently, the exhibition “Betye Saar: The Legends of Black Girl's Window” at Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, dedicated to her prints; the retrospective “Betye Saar: Still Tickin’” at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona, and Het Domein, Sittard, The Netherlands; the group show “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85” at the Brooklyn Museum, New York; and the monumental traveling group show “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power” at the Tate Modern, London; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Brooklyn Museum; The Broad, Los Angeles; and the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Current exhibitions include solo presentations “Betye Saar: Call and Response” at the the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson, MS, previously on view at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and The Morgan Library & Museum, New York) and traveling to Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX (Fall 2021), focused on her sketchbooks and related works. The Academy of Arts and Letters recently inducted Saar May 19, 2021. Saar’s works are held in more than sixty museum collections, including the Detroit Institute of Arts; MoMA; LACMA; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others.

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, MIAMI

61 NE 41st Street, Miami, Florida 33137

www.icamiami.org

Dalton Gata Exhibition @ ICA Miami - The Way We'll Be

Dalton Gata: The Way We'll Be 

Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami 

May 7 – November 21, 2021 

In Cuban-born, Puerto Rico-based artist Dalton Gata’s first U.S. solo museum exhibition, ICA Miami presents his surrealistic installations across media, which explore his personal experiences, queer and popular culture, and psychological and mythical symbols. The artist’s recent focus on metaphysical still-lifes is reflected through newly commissioned paintings and sculpture that depict symbolic elements in human scale, such as monsters, masks, and a pearl that doubles as an 8-ball.

Trained as a fashion designer, Dalton Gata reimagines craft to consider its relationship to identity and sexuality, creating innovative works across mediums. Dalton Gata’s work draws from an expansive and deeply personal archive of images assembled by the artist over the past five years, including a trove of digital sources. His practice is also profoundly impacted by his experience of immigration, and explores the diasporic conditions of Cuba in the Caribbean through symbolic landscapes and the incorporation of cross-cultural references.

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, MIAMI

61 NE 41st Street, Miami, Florida 33137

www.icamiami.org

Robert Grosvenor @ ICA Miami - Institute of Contemporary Art

Robert Grosvenor 

Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami

May 7 – November 21, 2021

ICA Miami presents a major work by the American artist and recipient of the 2020 Ezratti Family Prize for Sculpture, Robert Grosvenor. Untitled (1968/2019) represents the artist’s use of commonplace materials and exploration of monumental scale and poetic form. Recently acquired by the museum, the large-scale sculpture also showcases a historical dialogue with Minimalism, while challenging the movement’s limitations, and engages the site to provoke profound viewer experiences.  

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, MIAMI

61 NE 41st Street, Miami, Florida 33137

www.icamiami.org

Chakaia Booker Exhibition @ ICA Miami - The Observance

Chakaia Booker: The Observance 

Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami

April 22 – October 31, 2021

As the first comprehensive museum survey of American artist Chakaia Booker, this exhibition explores the artist’s signature form—monumental works made of rubber—while showcasing her innovations across mediums. Featuring an expansive range of Chakaia Booker’s sculptures, including totemic and anthropomorphic assemblages fabricated from cast-off tires, the exhibition highlights Chakaia Booker’s ongoing expression of ecological and technological concerns, examinations of racial and economic disparities, and her interest in the symbolism of the automobile in American culture.

The Observance includes some of Chakaia Booker’s most topical works, including Chu Ching (2012), which depicts a cross on a wheelbarrow resembling Jesus being dismounted from the cross, as well as two rarely seen series of paintings that explore landscape and language. The artist’s photographic series, Foundling Warrior Quest (2010) and Graveyard Series (1995), are also featured to explore the importance of performance and mythology in her practice. Anchoring the presentation is The Observance (1995), an immersive installation made of deconstructed rubber tires and tubes––Booker’s first work in this signature material, chosen by the artist for its associations with riots. 

Chakaia Booker: The Observance is curated by ICA Miami Artistic Director Alex Gartenfeld and Curator Stephanie Seidel.

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, MIAMI

61 NE 41st Street, Miami, Florida 33137

www.icamiami.org

Janiva Ellis Exhibition @ ICA Miami - Rats

Janiva Ellis: Rats

Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami

February 25 – September 12, 2021

Featuring a suite of new paintings created over the past year, Rats is the first solo museum exhibition for the American artist Janiva Ellis, whose paintings use formal themes of speed and transformation to explore fractured states of personal and cultural perception. Her works express a tense intimacy that has been mischaracterized as descriptions of internal crisis. In actuality, the tension in her work comments on the pervasiveness of white delusion and its denial as a brutal and violent social and societal force. Her paintings make expert use of contemporary and historical styles—abstraction, figuration, landscape, and cartoon—to turn a lens to the insidious nature of whiteness. The exhibition traces recent and significant experimentation in the artist’s practice, marking an expansion of her critical approach to representation. 

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, MIAMI

61 NE 41st Street, Miami, Florida 33137

www.icamiami.org

Claudia Andujar Exhibition @ ICA Miami - Institute of Contemporary Art

Claudia Andujar 

Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami

January 20 – May 2, 2021

On view is a concise selection of artist and activist Claudia Andujar’s most experimental and expressive photographs from her earliest series of the Yanomami people, dating from 1972-1976. Andujar became fully immersed in the complex culture of the Yanomami—who reside in the Amazonian rainforest of Northern Brazil—through photographing, working with, and fighting beside the Yanomami. With a lifelong commitment to advocating for the interests of the Yanomami, Andujar has continued to visit the community since her first visit in 1971, and created a unique record and political campaign that has helped to designate their homeland as a protected Indigenous reserve. The exhibition features images that see the artist creating her own documentary style defined by distorted light and soft colors through the use of infrared film, color filters, and the application of petroleum jelly to the camera lens. The resulting images are dramatic views of landscapes and intimate portraits. 

The exhibition is curated by ICA Miami Curator Stephanie Seidel.

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, MIAMI

61 NE 41st Street, Miami, Florida 33137

www.icamiami.org

Allan McCollum Exhibition @ ICA Miami - Works Since 1969

Allan McCollum: Works Since 1969

Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami

September 2, 2020 – January 17, 2021

The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA Miami) presents the first U.S. museum retrospective for legendary American artist ALLAN McCOLLUM (b. 1944). Allan McCollum: Works Since 1969 traces the artist’s iconoclastic philosophy on the originality, value, and context of art. While McCollum’s contributions have been the focus of six major museum exhibitions in Europe and his work is included in more than 90 museum collections worldwide, this is the first museum exhibition in the U.S. to survey his 50-year career across a range of media, including painting, sculpture, photography, rarely seen early works and large-scale installations. Works Since 1969 is curated by ICA Miami Artistic Director Alex Gartenfeld and Curator Stephanie Seidel. 

“For decades, Allan McCollum has explored how identity and community are created through collections of objects. In our fractious and digital age, his explorations of regional American culture have never been more timely,” said Alex Gartenfeld, ICA Miami’s Artistic Director. “McCollum’s work is profoundly influential on artists working on the role of the museum in society—yet has been underexplored to date. Our survey builds on ICA Miami’s history of providing the first major U.S. museum platform for artists whose work merits renewed attention and reveals insights about contemporary society and culture.” 

Organized chronologically, Works Since 1969 brings together more than more than 20 series that blur the boundaries between mass-produced object and unique, exalted artifact. Some of the artist’s earliest major series, “Bleach Paintings” and “Constructed Paintings”—both begun in 1969—reflect Allan McCollum’s interrogations of art history’s longstanding preoccupation with medium specificity. Not painted in a traditional sense, but instead made from materials widely available in supermarkets and hardware stores, Allan McCollum considers the cultural conventions surrounding painting, fabricated through its context and social significance.

Critiques of originality and value carry through Allan McCollum’s five decades of practice, demonstrated through a range of major series on view in the exhibition. These include his iconic “Surrogate Paintings” (1978– ) and “Plaster Surrogates” (1982– ), wooden wall-mounted reliefs and plaster casts shaped like framed pictures in monochromatic colors, which emphasize the conventions of framed images as a universal sign for anything meaningful and valuable. 

Demonstrating the role of scale and repetition in his work, the exhibition additionally presents two of McCollum’s iconic sculptural series, “Perfect Vehicles” (1985– ) and “Over Ten Thousand Individual Works” (1987– ), which consider methods of collecting and the ways artworks accrue visibility, meaning, and value. McCollum also explores the notion of originality through photographic work, reflected in the “Perpetual Photos” (1982- ) series. For McCollum’s ongoing series, “The Shapes Project” (2005– ), he devised a simple numerical system to designate a unique shape for each person on the planet in the year 2050 (a total of 30 billion different shapes) using a simple home computer and Adobe Illustrator. Through this series, McCollum undermines the notion that art, if it is to be of any value, must be rare.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is Allan McCollum’s rarely exhibited “regional projects,” works from the last three decades that explore how artifacts become charged with cultural meaning and how collections of objects and artifacts become agents for self-assurance and self-representation in regional communities. Works on view include The Dog from Pompei (1991), a cast of the famous form preserved as a natural mold in the volcanic ashes of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79; Lost Objects (1991– ), casts of fossilized dinosaur bones; and Natural Copies from the Coal Mines of Central Utah (1994), dinosaur tracks preserved in stone that are, themselves, copies; and THE EVENT: Petrified Lightning from Central Florida (1997) developed together with the International Lightning Research Center in Camp Blanding, Florida. 

“By rethinking modes of artistic production and distribution as parts of larger economies of value, McCollum is one of the most influential American artists working today,” said Curator Stephanie Seidel. “Over more than five decades his work has remained timely and effective at challenging aesthetic and material concerns, while critically reflecting on the museum context.” 

Exhibition Catalogue: A richly illustrated exhibition catalog accompanies Allan McCollum: Works Since 1969, and features essays by the exhibition curators, and scholars Alex Kitnick and Jennifer Jane Marshall.

ALLAN McCOLLUM (b. 1944, Los Angeles) has been making art for more than five decades. Survey exhibitions of his works have been held at, among others, the Musée d’art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva (2006); Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany (1995–96); Serpentine Gallery, London (1990); Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art, Malmö, Sweden (1990); Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (1989); and Portikus, Frankfurt, Germany (1988). He has produced public art projects in both the United States and Europe, and his works are held in over 90 art museum collections around the world. Allan McCollum’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including “This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2012–13); “The Pictures Generation: 1974–1984,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2009); “The 1991 Carnegie International,” Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (1991); Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1975 and 1989); “A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1989); and “Aperto,” Venice Biennale (1988).

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, MIAMI

61 NE 41st Street, Miami, Florida 33137

www.icamiami.org

Judy Chicago @ Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami - Judy Chicago: A Reckoning

Judy Chicago: A Reckoning 

Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami 

December 4, 2018 – April 21, 2019

The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami presents “Judy Chicago: A Reckoning,” a major survey of works by the pioneering feminist artist. This exhibition highlights Judy Chicago’s iconographic transition from abstraction to figuration, and explores the ways in which the artist’s strong feminist voice transforms our understanding of modernism and its traditions.

Representing the female voice in a male-dominated world, Judy Chicago explores important narratives of history, form and labor. The artist deploys both iconography and working methods in order to problematize gender roles, artistic mastery and skills traditionally regarded as “female” such as needlework and embroidery, as well as stereotypical “male” skills, such as auto body painting and pyrotechnics.

JUDY CHICAGO (b. 1939, Chicago) is an artist, author, feminist, educator, and intellectual whose career spans over five decades. Her influence both within and beyond the art community is attested to by her inclusion in hundreds of publications throughout the world. Her art has been frequently exhibited in the US as well as in Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. In addition, a number of the books she has authored have been published in foreign editions, bringing her art and philosophy to readers worldwide.

“Judy Chicago: A Reckoning” is organized by Alex Gartenfeld, Artistic Director, and Stephanie Seidel, Associate Curator.

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, MIAMI

61 NE 41st Street, Miami, Florida 33137

www.icamiami.org

Joshua Mosley, dread – Exhibition at ICA, Philadelphia

Joshua Mosley, dread

Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia

January 16 - March 29, 2009

JOSHUA MOSLEY, dread, 2007

Mixed media animation and five bronze sculptures, 6 minutes. 

Courtesy of the artist and Donald Young Gallery, Chicago

Joshua Mosley titled his most recent installation dread after photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s motion study sequences of a dog named Dread. Made over a two-year period, Mosley’s dread is composed of five bronze sculptures, and a six-minute, black-and-white, animated video that combines computer and stop-motion animation, as well as the artist’s own music and dialogue. dread is on view in ICA’s second floor gallery.

dread is installed in two adjacent rooms. The first houses five, small bronze figures on pedestals spaced about the room. Enter the second room to see the film, projected large so as to evoke the scale of the environment the characters inhabit: a real world place created using sequenced still photographs. But unlike the real world, music notes replace ambient sounds. Composed by the artist, each character has its own “soundtrack.” dread follows philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Blaise Pascal on something of a nature walk. They encounter flora and fauna, and engage in conversation about existence, God, and nature; in the end, they encounter Dread.

This exhibition is organized by Associate Curator Jenelle Porter, and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

The exhibition catalogue has been supported by the generous sponsorship of Barbara B. & Theodore R. Aronson. Additional funds for the catalogue have been provided by The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage through the Pew Fellowships in the Arts. ICA is also grateful for exhibition support from the Harpo Foundation and Goldberg Foundation. Additional funds for the exhibition have been provided by David & Gerrie Pincus; The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation; the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; The Dietrich Foundation; Inc.; the Overseers Board for the Institute of Contemporary Art; friends and members of ICA; and the University of Pennsylvania. On behalf of the artist, the ICA would also like to thank the following for support of the project: The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage through the Pew Fellowships in the Arts, the Donald Young Gallery, Chicago, and the Dean’s Office and the Overseers Special Projects Fund of the School of Design, University of Pennsylvania.

Click here for a short biography of Joshua Mosley and about Joshua Mosley: American International, exhibition at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, March 12 - August 29, 2010

Ant Farm: 1968 - 1978, ICA, Philadelphia

Ant Farm: 1968 - 1978
Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadephia
September 8 - December 12, 2004

ICA presents the first exhibition to survey the work of the legendary architecture and art collective, Ant Farm. A group of radical architects who were also video, performance and installation artists-but above all, visionaries and cultural commentators-Ant Farm was founded by Chip Lord and Doug Michaels in 1968 amidst the hot-house San Francisco counter-culture. Influenced by "alternative" architects like Buckminster Fuller, Archigram, and Superstudio, Ant Farm's early inflatable structures were suited to a nomadic, communal lifestyle, divergent from the mainstream Brutalist architecture of the 1960s. The group was also known for spectacular performance events like "Media Burn" (1975), for which Lord and Michaels dressed up like astronauts and sped a customized Cadillac El Dorado through a pyramid of burning televisions.

Ant Farm officially disbanded in 1978 after a fire in their San Francisco studio destroyed a great deal of their work. Much of their photographic documentation and videotapes survived, however, and this, along with a wide range of Ant Farm materials organized into a visual "timeline," will form the core of the exhibition. A comprehensive catalogue, published by UC Press, will accompany the exhibition. It includes essays by Caroline Maniaque, Michael Sorkin, Steve Seid, a conversation among Constance Lewallen, Chip Lord, Doug Michels, and Curtis Schreier, an Ant Farm-designed timeline, and a reprint of Lord's essay on American car culture, Automerica.

Ant Farm: 1968 - 1978 is co-curated by Constance Lewallen, Senior Curator for Exhibitions at Berkeley Art Museum, and Steve Seid, Assistant Curator for Video at the Pacific Film Archive. Ant Farm: 1968 - 1978 was previously presented at Berkeley Art Museum, University of California (January 21 through April 26, 2004) and at Santa Monica Museum of Art (July 2 through August 14, 2004). After its presentation at ICA, the exhibition will travel to University of Houston, Blaffer Art Gallery (January 15 through March 13, 2005); ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie), Karlsruhe, Germany (April 30 through July 24, 2005); and Yale University School of Architecture Gallery (August 29 through November 4, 2005).

Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania
118 S. 36th St. Philadelphia, PA 19104-3289
www.icaphila.org

David Lamelas: Exhibiting Mediality

David Lamelas: Exhibiting Mediality
ICA - Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA
September 8 - December 12, 2004

This exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Philadelphia draws attention to the late-1960s film and media installations of Argentinean artist DAVID LAMELAS (Buenos Aires, 1946) at a moment when they can speak with renewed urgency. "Exhibiting Mediality" reconstructs and recontextualizes a seminal work from this period to address the conditions under which images are produced and decoded; to consider what it means to exhibit not the image, but mediation. The concept of exhibiting pure mediality/mediation is further explored through collaborations with the University Archive and Records Center, and the Department of English and Film Studies, University of Pennsylvania, and International House, Philadelphia. This exhibition is organized by ICA's 2003-2004 Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow Tanya Leighton.

Image: David Lamelas, Límite de una proyección I (Limit of a Projection I),

1967 Installation View, Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires
Courtesy of the artist and Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam

DAVID LAMELAS is a pioneer of the radical repositioning of sculpture in the sixties and seventies that abandoned traditional definitions of sculpture, displacing its materials and modes of production. In doing so a redefinition of the status of art and its "sites of display" took place. Situated within an emerging aesthetic of institutional critique (that addressed conditions of spectator behavior as forms of social experience within the public institution of art), and opposed to the false neutrality of minimalist sculpture, Lamelas' sought to analyze art as a means of communication, relating it to how information was conveyed by the film and television industry, and to the discourses around public space and media technology. In light of current discussions on the relationship between cinema, art, the media, and politics, his work re-presented thirty years later has lost none of its relevance. 

David Lamelas's work proposes an extreme focus on self-awareness, an aesthetic of pure information—unfettered and laconic. The transformation of the space of the exhibition is one of the most overlooked and critical dimensions of his work, and the often alienating effects that Lamelas realizes through his use of media, challenge us to distance ourselves and to question the role of film, television and the media. In Límite de una Proyección aka Light Projection in a Dark Room, David Lamelas divides the exhibition space into two distinct zones of light and dark by reducing the art object to a single beam of light: the projection of a spotlight in an otherwise completely dark space. The work is almost non-existent, David Lamelas offers only its illusion: "a (dark) space occupied by another (illuminated) space." He poetically and succinctly creates a work that exists for itself, in "undisguised violence," only within its own consciousness and self-awareness. The object upon which light is shed is deliberately erased, paradoxically highlighting the act of "shedding light" itself. The political implication of which is that the work always has the possibility of change, existing as it does as nothing other than the product of the spectator; it exceeds the prefigured meanings imposed by the artist as producer and challenges the restrictions of the aesthetic structure itself. 

In the context of this exhibition, David Lamelas' simple gesture of "shedding light" is understood "in the light" of cinema. Tracing the origins and pre-history of cinema we find that the act of "spotlighting" (the "fonction éclairagiste du cinéma" as French critic Serge Daney wrote) is the very genesis of cinema. The spotlit, illuminated 19th Century vitrine is widely understood as an essential component of cinema's birth. From a diametrically opposed perspective we could say that cinema's birth coincides with a notion of "blocked vision," a blocking-out, that is, a context in which the observer sees one thing, and then another successively in darkness; his/her vision directed only to what is being spotlit and to nothing else.

EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE: Animal Locomotion plates, 1884

Parallel to David Lamelas's work, and as a means to elucidate the constitutive elements of cinema, "Exhibiting Mediality" draws attention to Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion plates, created in 1884 in Philadelphia, and preserved at the University Archives and Records Center, University of Pennsylvania. Eadweard Muybridge's photogravures offer another reflection on the essential elements of cinema and in a sense complete the sentence that Lamelas' spotlight opens. Cinema is one image after another, each image disappearing for the apparition of a third invisible image in the mind of the spectator. This invisible image is again what David Lamelas's work is spotlighting.

Exhibiting Mediality is a collaboration with the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and International House, Philadelphia. For details of talks and film/video screenings visit http://www.icaphila.org

The curator, Tanya Leighton, is the ICA 2003-2004 Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow. David Lamelas: Exhibiting Mediality is the culmination of a year-long fellowship offered by the Lauder Foundation, in collaboration with the Whitney Independent Study Program (ISP) in New York.

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART - ICA
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
September 8 - December 12, 2004
Exhibition Walkthrough: Friday, September 10, 5-6pm, ICA Members Only, join on-site
Opening Reception: Friday, September 10, 6 - 8pm, free and open to the public.

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.

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