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

Ohan Breiding: Belly of a Glacier @ MASS MoCA, North Adams

Ohan Breiding: Belly of a Glacier

MASS MoCA, North Adams

Through December 14, 2025

Ohan Breiding

To dress a wound from the light that 

shines from it (Belly of a Glacier)

111 Giclée Prints on Fine Art Luster Paper

128.55 in x 266.93 in / 326.5 cm x 678 cm

Ohan Breiding

To dress a wound from the light that 

shines from it (Belly of a Glacier) [detail]

111 Giclée Prints on Fine Art Luster Paper

128.55 in x 266.93 in / 326.5 cm x 678 cm

Ohan Breiding

To dress a wound from the light that 

shines from it (Belly of a Glacier) [detail]

111 Giclée Prints on Fine Art Luster Paper

128.55 in x 266.93 in / 326.5 cm x 678 cm

MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) in North Adams, in collaboration with The Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA), presents the exhibition Ohan Breiding: Belly of a Glacier, a series of photographs and video that ruminates on the imminent loss of the Rhône glacier, amplifying the current state of climate emergency while expressing the intimate entanglement of human and environmental well-being. 

In 2019, Iceland constructed the first memorial to mark the death of its Okjökull glacier. Since then, funerals have been held around the world to mark the melting of glacier bodies. Consisting of an experimental documentary film and a photographic installation, Breiding’s Belly of a Glacier captures the efforts of the residents of Obergoms, Switzerland, to drape the nearby Rhône Glacier with thermal blankets to insulate it from rising temperatures. Despite these hope-filled actions of ecological care, scientists predict the Rhône will have fully melted by 2050.

“Ohan Breiding’s work is a powerful, intimate portrait of a dying glacier,” said Susan Cross, MASS MoCA Senior Curator. “The stunning photographs and video make the loss feel very personal—as it should, given that we are part of the ecosystem being forever transformed by climate change.”

Ohan Breiding

Belly of a Glacier, 2024

HD video, with sound, 32:55 min.

Courtesy of the artist and OCHI Gallery, Los Angeles

Ohan Breiding

Belly of a Glacier, 2024

HD video, with sound, 32:55 min.

Courtesy of the artist and OCHI Gallery, Los Angeles

Ohan Breiding

Belly of a Glacier, 2024

HD video, with sound, 32:55 min.

Courtesy of the artist and OCHI Gallery, Los Angeles

The film documents the community at the National Science Foundation’s Ice Core Facility in Lakewood, Colorado, who are preserving ancient ice cores for future generations. Ice is like a time capsule, storing atmospheric debris, including volcanic ash and greenhouse gasses, that can tell us about major natural disasters as well as resulting human activity over thousands over years. Breiding’s project connects acts of mourning to ongoing practices of care that strive to protect the ice — a material that contains both remnants of the past and the conditions of a future world.

“WCMA and MASS MoCA joining together to present Ohan Breiding’s deeply moving and thought-provoking installation exemplifies the best of what our Berkshire arts ecosystem can provide to our visitors and local community,” said Pamela Franks, WCMA Class of 1956 Director. “We are thrilled to have the opportunity to collaborate across institutions in this way.”

ARTIST OHAN BREIDING

Ohan Breiding is a Swiss-American artist, raised in a Swiss village and living between Brooklyn, N.Y., and Williamstown, MA. They work with photography, photographic and filmic archives, and video in a collaborative practice that reinterprets historical events, putting the past into a meaningful transformative relation with the present. They employ a trans-feminist lens to the discussion of ecological care to amplify the systemic failures and violence of the Anthropocene.

Ohan Breiding has presented their work at numerous museums, galleries, and film festivals including ICA LA, Photo LA, the Armory Center for the Arts, LAMAG, LAXART, Human Resources, Oakland Museum of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Haus N Athens, Sharjah Art Foundation, IKOB Museum of Contemporary Art, Kunsthaus Zürich, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center (Buffalo, N.Y.), Frac des Pays de la Loire and Oceanside Museum (as part of the Getty’s PST Art — Pacific Standard Time).

Ohan Breiding is a 2024 A.I.R. Fellow, a 2024 FIAR resident, a 2024 Triangle Artist Resident, a 2021 TBA (Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary) Academy Ocean Space Fellow, a 2019 Millay Colony Resident and a 2018 Shandaken: Storm King resident. They are the recipient of the 1945 World Fellowship Award, the Hellman Award, the SIFF (Swiss International Film Festival) Award for The Rebel Body, a short film made with Shoghig Halajian and the participation of Silvia Federici, the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Award, and the DAAD Award. Their practice has been written about in Artforum, Art in America, BOMB, e-flux, Hyperallergic and Whitewall.

Ohan Breiding is an assistant professor in the Art Department at Williams College and is represented by OCHI Gallery in Los Angeles.

MASS MoCA

Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art

1040 MASS MoCA Way, North Adams, MA 01247

www.massmoca.org

Ohan Breiding: Belly of a Glacier

MASS MoCA, North Adams, February - December 14, 2025

Nicole Chesney @ Gallery NAGA, Boston - "Exquire" Exhibition

Nicole Chesney: Exquire

Gallery NAGA, Boston

May 2 - May 31, 2025

Gallery NAGA presents its fourth major solo exhibition of paintings by the acclaimed artist NICOLE CHESNEY. 

Exquire showcases a compelling new body of work that explores the transformative qualities of glass as a painting surface. Nicole Chesney masterfully adds, subtracts, and moves oil paint around the glass, creating a dynamic interplay of color and reflection. Unlike traditional canvas, the glass surface allows for unique optical effects, where colors are reflected in unexpected ways. Chesney's innovative approach pushes the boundaries of traditional painting by exploring complex relationships between the inherent luminosity and reflectiveness of glass and the applied paint color, resulting in nuanced and shifting visual experiences. This invites viewers to engage with the artwork from multiple perspectives and in different lighting conditions. In works such as Vivida, this is particularly evident in the subtle yet captivating shifts in color as the viewer's viewpoint changes. The resulting atmospheric quality in her work often evokes the subtle gradations and transient beauty of weather phenomena, from hazy light to the crispness after a storm.

The new paintings in Exquire are confident and exciting, conveying depth and illusion through Chesney's varied and expressive strokes. Notably, and for the very first time, two of the paintings in this exhibition take on a tondo form, a circular format historically significant in art, particularly during the Renaissance. Nicole Chesney was compelled to transform her composition within this classical structure. Furthermore, Chesney's use of multi-panel formats recalls the visual storytelling seen in chapel altarpieces and devotional art. This creates a feeling of interconnectedness and an immersive experience for the viewer.

Nicole Chesney's work has garnered international recognition and is held in numerous prestigious permanent collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, New Britain Museum of American Art, Toledo Museum of Art, Newport Art Museum, RISD Museum, Palm Springs Art Museum, Corning Museum of Glass, and many more.

Gallery NAGA

67 Newbury Street, Boston, MA 02116

gallerynaga.com

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

Edvard Munch: Technically Speaking @ Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge

Edvard Munch: Technically Speaking

Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge

March 7 - July 27, 2025

EDVARD MUNCH

Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones), 1894

Etching and drypoint

Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, 

The Philip and Lynn Straus Collection, 2023.559 

Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College

EDVARD MUNCH

Two Human  Beings (The Lonely Ones), 1899 

Woodcut, printed in four colors of ink

Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, 

The Philip and Lynn Straus Collection, 2023.602

Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College

EDVARD MUNCH

Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones), 1906–8.

Oil on canvas 

Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum, 

The Philip and Lynn Straus Collection, 2023.551

Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College

The Harvard Art Museums present an exhibition of works by Edvard Munch that examines the artist’s innovative techniques and the recurring themes across his paintings, woodcuts, lithographs, etchings, and combination prints. Highlighting the collaborative partnership between curatorial and conservation experts at the museums, the exhibition reveals new and ongoing technical research into Munch’s practice and shares recent discoveries about his materials and highly experimental methods. 

The exhibition showcases 70 works, primarily from the Harvard Art Museums collections. Thanks to a transformative gift from Philip A. and Lynn G. Straus, the museums now house one of the largest and most significant collections of artwork by Munch in the United States—a collection that is also distinctive for its technical variety. Key loans from the Munch Museum in Oslo include two paintings and eight examples of the artist’s materials used for printmaking, seven of which have never before been on display in the United States. 

Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863–1944) is well known for his innovative experiments in painting and printmaking. He often rendered the same subject matter in both mediums—repeatedly over decades—to investigate their distinctive possibilities. His highly expressive work deals with psychological themes of isolation, separation, anxiety, illness, and death, but also attraction and love. Technically Speaking explores Munch’s fascination with materiality, uncovers new avenues for thinking about his work, and delves into his unconventional techniques and the various themes he returned to again and again over many years.

“This exhibition showcases an exciting selection of Munch’s paintings and prints from a career that spanned more than 60 years,” said Elizabeth M. Rudy. “We are thrilled to present his work through a lens that is perfect for a university museum—one that reinforces our teaching and research mission—by sharing the results of our recent investigations into his techniques and materials.”

The exhibition begins with several iterations of Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones), depicting a man and a woman standing at a shoreline, side by side yet isolated from one another. First painted by Munch in 1892 (a work later destroyed in an accident at sea), the motif is repeated in an etching from 1894 that depicts the original painting and five subsequent woodcuts that Munch produced between 1899 and 1917. The prints reveal the various intriguing woodcut and etching techniques the artist utilized and also show how he manipulated his jigsaw woodblocks to print different parts of a single work in different colors. They are displayed in the exhibition with the original steel-faced copperplate and jigsaw woodblock that were used to produce the prints. Two paintings on display continue the motif: the artist’s 1906–8 version from the Busch-Reisinger Museum’s collection is based on his woodcuts, and a later (final) version from around 1935, on loan from the Munch Museum, reverts to the composition of the couple used by Munch in his 1892 painting.

“Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones) remains one of Munch’s most well-known subjects, and we are extremely fortunate to be able to trace his engagement with it over a period of more than 40 years and through nine works in our collections, supplemented by the generous loan of his last painting of the motif and two related matrices from the Munch Museum,” said Lynette Roth. “Together, they demonstrate the close relationship between painting and printmaking in Munch’s practice, his dedication to certain motifs over time, and his embrace of chance effects.”

Several other groupings highlight additional recurring themes in Munch’s work and how he experimented with their representation. Three woodcuts from the Woman’s Head against the Shore series show how Munch selectively printed his jigsaw woodblocks, omitting one of the pieces (the water) in one of the impressions. Four prints from The Kiss series—an etching and three woodcuts—portray a couple embracing in front of different backgrounds. Prints from Melancholy I and Melancholy III, on display with a rare example of Melancholy II, which Munch printed himself with his small hand-crank press, are shown with five of the artist’s original carved woodblocks. Four variations of Vampire II demonstrate how Munch sometimes combined lithographs with hand coloring and used woodblocks to add color as well. Also on display are three versions of Man’s Head in Woman’s Hair, including one used by Munch as a poster advertising an exhibition of his work at Diorama Hall in Kristiania (now Oslo).

Over the last several months, the works in the exhibition from Harvard’s collections have undergone technical study, including pigment analysis, selective treatments such as cleaning and varnish removal, and most of the prints were rematted and reframed. The painting Two Human Beings (1906–8) was varnished at some point in its history, which is not consistent with Munch’s practice of leaving his canvases without a unified glossy surface; this varnish has been removed. Train Smoke (1910) needed paint stabilization and cleaning to remove atmospheric grime, and Winter in Kragerø (1915) had its varnish removed to reveal a more vibrant snowy scene. This work was carried out by staff from the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, including Ellen Davis, Associate Paintings Conservator; Abby Schleicher, Assistant Paper Conservator; and Kate Smith, Senior Conservator of Paintings and Head of the Paintings Lab, and their findings are presented in the exhibition. Additionally, all six paintings on display from Harvard’s collections were reframed with new, historically accurate frames.

“Munch’s deep experimentations in painting and printmaking meant that he was constantly reworking his canvases and layering many different types of print techniques, which can become complicated to describe,” said Peter Murphy. “As research was underway and our conservators and curatorial team were deciphering how he created many of his works, I set out to break down the technical terms we were using in a friendly, digestible way. We hope that visitors will find the glossary useful, not only in the exhibition, but as something that can be kept and referenced beyond the show.”

The exhibition is curated by Elizabeth M. Rudy, Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints, and Lynette Roth, Daimler Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum; with Peter Murphy, Stefan Engelhorn Curatorial Fellow in the Busch-Reisinger Museum. This is the first major presentation at Harvard to examine Munch’s techniques and materials through the lens of the Strauses’ collection in 30 years, following the 1983 exhibition and publication Edvard Munch: Master Printmaker (organized by Charles W. Haxthausen and written by Elizabeth Prelinger) and Norma S. Steinberg’s 1995 exhibition and catalogue Munch in Color.

HARVARD ART MUSEUMS

32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

harvardartmuseums.org

Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore @ MFA Boston - A Major Exhibition

Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

October 13, 2024 - January 20, 2025

Georgia O'Keeffe 

Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. 3, 1930 

Oil on canvas 

National Gallery of Art, Washington, 

Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 

Bequest of Georgia O'Keeffe, 1987.58.2. 

© Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington

Henry Moore 

Reclining Figure, 1959–64 

Elmwood 

©  The Henry Moore Foundation: 

Gift of Irina Moore 

Photo: Jonty Wilde

American painter Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) and British sculptor Henry Moore (1898–1986) are among the most distinctive artists of the 20th century. They have long been admired for their extraordinary distillations of natural forms into abstraction—O’Keeffe’s iconic paintings of flowers and Moore’s monumental public sculpture. The major exhibition Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore is the first to bring these two artists together, using compelling visual juxtapositions to explore their common ways of seeing. Each artist experimented with unusual perspectives, shifts in scale, and layered compositions to produce works that were informed by their surroundings—Georgia O’Keeffe in New Mexico and Henry Moore in Hertfordshire, England.

Featuring over 150 works—including about 60 works by Georgia O’Keeffe and 90 by Henry Moore—the exhibition includes paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, as well as faithful recreations of each of the artists’ studios containing their tools and found objects. Organized by the San Diego Museum of Art, Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore is an unprecedented collaboration with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and the Henry Moore Foundation.

“Looking at O’Keeffe and Moore together, we can see how both artists were inspired by and also made use of natural forms. O’Keeffe hoped that her paintings would make people pay attention to things they usually overlooked—the soft gradations of a flower petal, the patterns within a landscape, or the shapes between two objects. As O’Keeffe said herself, ‘to see takes time.’ The chance to see her work in person is not to be missed,” said Erica Hirshler, Croll Senior Curator of American Paintings.

“While many of our visitors here in Boston will know O’Keeffe’s work and reputation well, they might be less familiar with Moore, one of the most important British artists of the 20th century. The generous loans from the Henry Moore Foundation allow us to recreate the artist’s studio and will really help bring Moore alive and show how found objects played a role in the creation of his large-scale public sculpture,” said Courtney Harris, Assistant Curator of European Decorative Arts and Sculpture.

Through careful observation of their surroundings and the objects they collected, O’Keeffe and Moore reimagined natural forms—bones, stones, shells, flowers, and the land itself—into dynamic abstractions. Each played with scale, exploring the effects of making small things large. They twisted and turned pieces in space, searching for balance, looking within their complex interiors, and exploring how objects transform the spaces around them. The exhibition presents their works both individually and in dialogue, presenting unique juxtapositions such as:

O’Keeffe’s Red Tree, Yellow Sky (1952, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and Moore’s Working Model for Standing Figure: Knife Edge (1961, The Henry Moore Foundation): Georgia O’Keeffe often envisioned how miniature forms might become monumental. In this painting she juxtaposed a small piece of wood against a distant landscape, conflating near and far, large and small. Henry Moore similarly made a small thing enormous, inspired by the breastbone of a bird to create a figurative sculpture that twists in space and encourages viewers to walk around it.

Henry Moore’s Helmet (1939–1940, The Henry Moore Foundation) and Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. 3 (1930, National Gallery of Art, Washington): This work by Moore was the first in a series of small sculptures with hollow shells that encased unique interior forms. O’Keeffe similarly used a technique of enclosure in her painting of a deep purple flower with its complex interior and billowing leaves.

O’Keeffe’s Pelvis IV (1944, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum) and Moore’s Reclining Figure Bone (1975, The Henry Moore Foundation): O’Keeffe plays with scale, depth, and perspective by showing an entire vista through the aperture of a sun-bleached pelvic bone. Her interest in simplification and negative space is mirrored in Moore’s reduction of the human figure to a simple curve. His choice of travertine, with its porous texture and off-white color, maintains its connection to his inspiration in a weathered animal bone.

There were many other artists active in the U.S. and Europe in the mid-20th century who also looked to nature. The MFA’s presentation of Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore draws upon the Museum’s modernist collection to provide a broader context. O’Keeffe and Moore’s works are put into dialogue with photographs, prints, sculpture, and paintings by artists including Edward Weston (1886–1958), Alexander Calder (1898–1976), Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975), Arthur Dove (1880–1946), Jean Arp (1886–1966), Imogen Cunningham (1883–1976), and Maria Montoya Martinez (Poveka or Water Pond Lily), (Powhogeh Owingeh [San Ildefonso Pueblo]) (1887–1980).

At the core of the exhibition are recreations of the artists’ studios, built with original contents from Georgia O’Keeffe’s Ghost Ranch studio in the hills of New Mexico and Henry Moore’s Bourne Maquette Studio in Perry Green, a small hamlet surrounded by sheep fields in Hertfordshire, England. Though both O’Keeffe and Moore remained within reach of city life, the two artists worked in rural settings, both amassing large personal collections of animal bones, stones, seashells, and other natural materials that served as key sources of inspiration. These found objects can be seen in these spaces alongside tools, unfinished works, and plaster maquettes. The studio installations illuminate the heart of O’Keeffe and Moore’s artistic practices—something rarely made visible in museum spaces—and create richer portraits of the artists by encouraging visitors to imagine how they worked and lived.

Georgia O’Keeffe Biography

Georgia O’Keeffe was born in 1887 and grew up in rural Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. She first studied art in Chicago and then, in New York, with the American Impressionist painter William Merritt Chase. But she pursued a more modern approach, inspired by Arthur Wesley Dow, whose compositional theories were rooted in Japanese art. In the 1910s, O’Keeffe, then an art teacher in West Texas, began to make nature-based abstractions, learning to love the landscapes of the southwest.

Georgia O’Keeffe came to New York in 1916. Without her knowledge, a friend had sent her drawings to the New York art dealer, photographer, and champion of modernism Alfred Stieglitz, who gave O’Keeffe her first show at his gallery 291. With Stieglitz’s support, she came back to New York in 1918. They began a romantic relationship, marrying in 1924. O’Keeffe painted flowers, skyscrapers, and, following trips to New Mexico, bones, which she shipped back in barrels to New York. But the stark beauty of the southwest always beckoned. O’Keeffe visited for long periods and began to acquire property, first at Ghost Ranch and then in Abiquiú. She moved to New Mexico permanently after Alfred Stieglitz’s death in 1946.

Georgia O’Keeffe carefully nurtured her art, her career, and her persona, earning a place in the center of the New York art world. Her work was featured in a solo exhibition at MoMA in 1946—the museum’s first show devoted to a woman artist. She gained public recognition after a 1968 cover story in Life magazine. In 1997, The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico opened to the public.

Henry Moore Biography

Henry Moore was born in 1898 in Castleford, a mining town in the northern English county of Yorkshire. He served in World War I and upon his return, enrolled at the Leeds School of Art as the first student of a new sculpture department. Through the 1920s and ’30s he exhibited at shows in London and worked in a studio in Hampstead in northern London. During the World War II, he served as an Official War Artist, making drawings of Londoners sheltering in the Underground during the Blitz.

In 1940, after his London home was damaged by German bombs, Henry Moore settled permanently at Hoglands, a cottage in Perry Green in Hertfordshire, about 35 miles north of London. He spent the next four decades creating some of the most recognizable works of public sculpture of the 20th century. He was enormously successful and well known. He was honored with a solo exhibition at MoMA in 1946, the same year as O’Keeffe’s. He was appointed to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1948, and participated in the Festival of Britain in 1951.

Today, Moore’s legacy lives on through the Henry Moore Foundation at Perry Green and in Leeds. His work is also celebrated in an important suite of galleries at Tate Britain in London and in the Henry Moore Sculpture Centre at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. His sculpture can be found in public spaces across the world.

Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore was organized by the San Diego Museum of Art in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore is on view at the MFA in the Ann and Graham Gund Gallery.

MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON - MFA

465 Huntington Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02115

www.mfa.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

Future Minded: New Works in the Collection @ Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA

Future Minded: New Works in the Collection

Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA

March 1 – July 21, 2024 

Noriko Saitō, Japanese 

Sunbeam, 2002 

Ink and color on paper; drypoint with aquatint.

Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, 

Purchase through the generosity of 

the David L. Klein, Jr. Foundation 

in memory of Sylvan Barnet and William Burto, 2018.200 

© Noriko Saitō 

Future Minded highlights a selection of works acquired in recent years that exemplify the Harvard Art Museums’ collecting vision and strategies. Nearly all are on display for the first time.

The museums are committed to acquiring art that expands the range of artists and cultures represented in the collections; that moves museum practice toward more nuanced understanding of both histories and contemporary issues; and that pushes boundaries and embraces experimentation. Many of the works on view are by living artists, an area of focused growth for the museums.

Staged across two adjacent galleries, the exhibition presents a range of drawings, photographs, prints, paintings, and sculptures spanning centuries and continents. The works are by roughly 30 artists, including Jean (Hans) Arp, Edward Mitchell Bannister, Willie Cole, Pietro Damini, Svenja Deininger, Jeffrey Gibson, Baldwin Lee, Ana Mendieta, Lucia Moholy, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Noriko Saitō, Melissa Shook, Jane Yang-D’Haene, and many others.

Organized by Soyoung Lee, Landon and Lavinia Clay Chief Curator; with Jackson Davidow, John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Curatorial Fellow in Photography, and through close consultation with and contributions from curators and fellows across divisions and conservators in the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies. 

HARVARD ART MUSEUMS 

Special Exhibitions Gallery (Level 3)

32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

www.harvardartmuseums.org

Women and Abstraction: 1741–Now @ Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover

Women and Abstraction: 1741–Now

Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover

January 28 – July 30, 2023

Alma Thomas 

Ruth Kainen's Amaryllis, 1976 

Acrylic on canvas, 40 1/4 x 35 inches 

Addison Gallery of American Art, 

Phillips Academy, Andover, MA, 

bequest of Ruth Kainen, 2010.109

Phoebe Denison Billings 

Bed Rug, 1741 

Wool worked on wool ground, 95 x 93 1/2 inches 

Addison Gallery of American Art, 

Phillips Academy, Andover, MA, 

bequest of Henry Perkins Moseley, 1940.25

Women and Abstraction: 1741–Now offers a nuanced and expansive history of the development of abstraction in America, going beyond the traditional art historical narrative of this movement. The exhibition looks at how women from the 18th century to the present day have deployed the visual language and universal formal concerns of abstraction—color, line, shape, contrast, pattern, and texture—working across a wide variety of media, including painting, textiles, sculpture, photography, drawing, and ceramics.

Drawn almost exclusively from the Addison’s permanent collection, the exhibition features pieces ranging from colonial bed rugs and contemporary textile works by Sheila Hicks, to 19th-century Ojibwe beaded bandolier bags and a 2014 sculpture by Lynda Benglis, combining recognizable masterworks by leading abstractionists with work by historically overlooked women artists and makers, as well as objects that have historically been denied the status of fine art. Featured are pieces by Bernice Abbott, Candida Alvarez, Ruth Asawa, Margaret Bourke-White, Petah Coyne, Helen Frankenthaler, Ellen Gallagher, Libbie Mark, Agnes Martin, Joan Mitchell, Louise Nevelson, Georgia O’Keeffe, Betty Parsons, Rosamond Purcell, Deborah Remington, Anne Ryan, Hedda Sterne, Toshiko Takaezu, Alma Thomas, Dominique Toya, Penelope Umbrico, and others. 

Allison Kemmerer, the Mary Stripp and R. Crosby Kemper Director of the Addison Gallery of American Art said, “Women and Abstraction is a quintessential expression of the Addison’s mission: to offer new insights on American art while expanding the art historical canon. Eschewing traditional chronology, hierarchies of medium, and the restrictive definitions of art movements, it encourages us to rethink our preconceived ideas and opens new ways of seeing the art of this country.”

Gordon Wilkins, the Addison’s Robert M. Walker Curator of American Art and curator of Women and Abstraction noted, “The important work done over the past decades to illuminate the contributions of historically marginalized women has largely concentrated on white painters associated with the postwar, 20th-century New York school’s abstract expressionism. While Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, and others among their contemporaries have rightfully been ensconced in the pantheon of great American abstract artists, the works of many more women—from all periods—remain unexamined by scholars and museums alike. This exhibition proposes a different way of looking at abstraction in American art, inviting visitors to draw aesthetic connections across seemingly disparate objects and complicating ingrained notions of what abstraction is and is not.”

ADDISON GALLERY OF AMERICAN ART

Phillips Academy, 3 Chapel Avenue, Andover, MA 01810

www.addisongallery.org

Imprinted: Illustrating Race @ Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, MA - Exhibition + Catalogue

Imprinted: Illustrating Race

Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, MA

June 11 — October 30, 2022

Loveis Wise (b. 1995)

Taking Care, detail, 2019

Print, Cover illustration for The New Yorker, April 22, 2019.

© 2019 Loveis Wise. All rights reserved.

Norman Rockwell Museum presents Imprinted: Illustrating Race. This special exhibition examines the role of published images in shaping attitudes toward race and culture. More than 150 works of art and artifacts of widely circulated illustrated imagery are on view, produced from 1590 to today. The exhibition explores harmful stereotypical racial representations that have been imprinted upon us through the mass publication of images and the resulting noxious impact on public perception about race. It culminates with the creative accomplishments of contemporary artists and publishers who have shifted the cultural narrative through the creation of positive, inclusive imagery emphasizing full agency and equity for all. 

“Published images hold powerful sway on shaping our cultural attitudes. Images can uplift, as Norman Rockwell’s work did, and they also can be deployed to establish negative and demeaning attitudes, as often happened with intention during formative centuries of published images in the United States. As our nation redresses a renewed era of racial reckoning, it is important to examine how systems of publishing were used to form commonly held beliefs and attitudes. Published illustration had a role in framing the United States racial attitudes – it is also a powerful tool for reframing stereotypes and celebrating this country’s strength in many cultural identities. We are grateful for the support of many partners, who are making this exhibition possible, from outstanding scholar contributors to our sponsors,” noted director/CEO Laurie Norton Moffatt.

Illustration has been at the forefront of significant, defining events in the United States from the Civil War and Reconstruction Era to the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights Movements of the 1960s and today. The exhibition focuses on artwork commissioned by publishers and advertisers and created by illustrators, engravers, and printers, as well as the work of contemporary creators that will spark dialogue and raise awareness about the role of published art in reflecting and shaping beliefs and attitudes about race.

Imprinted: Illustrating Race is co-curated by guest Curator Robyn Phillips-Pendleton and the Museum’s Deputy Director/Chief Curator, Stephanie Haboush Plunkett. Phillips-Pendleton is the Interim Director of the MFA in Illustration Practice program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), and University of Delaware Professor of Visual Communications; she has written and spoken widely on the theme of this exhibition. They are joined by a distinguished panel of national advisors including 10 academic scholars, curators, and artists with expertise related to the focus of the exhibition’s thesis.

Imprinted: Illustrating Race

Exhibition catalogue

Artwork © 2022 Emory Douglas

Accompanying the exhibition is an extensive exhibition catalogue featuring essays by noted scholars and curators and designed by Hollis King. Robyn Phillips-Pendleton and Stephanie Haboush Plunkett present an exhibition overview and selections from the exhibition, preceded by a foreword by Museum Director/CEO Laurie Norton Moffatt. Additional chapters and authors include:

Michele Bogart, Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus, Department of Art History, SUNY Stonybrook

Artwork and the Cream of Wheat Campaign

Heather Campbell Coyle, Ph.D.

Chief Curator and Curator of American Art, Delaware Art Museum

Historical Fictions: African Americans within Historical Narratives, 1880s to 1920s

Karen Fang, Ph.D.

Professor, Department of English, University of Houston

Asian Americans in Published Imagery: The Nineteenth Century Chinese Exclusion and World War II

William Foster, III

Professor Emeritus, Department of English, Naugatuck Valley Community College

Independent Black Comic Book Artists and Publishers

Colette Gaiter

Professor, Departments of Africana Studies and Art & Design, University of Delaware 

Imagery and the Black Panther Party

Theresa Leininger-Miller, Ph.D.

Professor of Art History, University of Cincinnati

Are They Equal in the Eyes of the Law?: African American Soldiers in World War I Illustrated Sheet Music

Andrea Davis Pinkney

New York Times bestselling author of Martin Rising: Requiem for a King, and Regina Medalist recipient

Embossed, Erased, Embraced: How Racial Representation Impacts the Minds and Hearts of Children

Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, Ph.D.

Professor and Chair of English, Pomona College

Illustration, Publishing, and the Female Artists of the Harlem Renaissance Jazz Age

Michelle Joan Wilkinson, Ph.D.

Curator, Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African American History and Culture

African American Artists in Contemporary Illustration

Published interviews with contemporary illustrators such as Hollis King, Jerry Pinkney, James Ransome, and others who discuss their art and experiences are also included.

NORMAN ROCKWELL MUSEUM

9 Route 183, Stockbridge, MA 01262

www.nrm.org