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

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

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