The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston Announces 2016-18 Exhibitions, 8/17

The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston announces its upcoming exhibitions:

First Light: A Decade of Collecting at the ICA

Aug. 17, 2016 - Jan. 16, 2017

Celebrating the tenth anniversary of the ICA/Boston's move to its iconic waterfront building, this exhibition celebrates the museum's first decade of collecting. Drawn entirely from the ICA's collection, the exhibition will feature significant new acquisitions. Conceived as a series of interrelated and rotating stand-alone exhibitions, this presentation will highlight major singular works from the collection, including a monumental cut-paper silhouette tableau by Kara Walker, work from the Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women, groupings of work by artists such as Louise Bourgeois and Nan Goldin, and thematic and art-historical groupings featuring the work of artists as diverse as Paul Chan, ShaRon Hayes, Sherrie Levine, and Cornelia Parker. A new multi-media web platform will be created to mark the occasion with interviews with artists and commentary from current and former curators. This exhibition is organized by ICA's curatorial department under the leadership of Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Jessica Hong, Curatorial Assistant.

The Artist's Museum

Nov. 16, 2016 - March 26, 2017

The Artist's Museum departs from the impulse to collect and connect, bringing together photography, film, video, installation, sculpture, and sound works that use artworks, images, and history as material for new works. These multilayered projects reimagine the lives of other artworks, demonstrating how social history, personal connections, and ideology shape our relationships to objects, images, and the cultures they produce. Among the artists featured in The Artist's Museumare: Rosa Barba, Carol Bove, Anna Craycroft, Christian Marclay, Xaviera Simmons, Rosemarie Trockel, and Sara VanDerBeek. Engaging the realms of dance, music, popular culture, natural history, image archives, and design - as well as art history - the twelve artists in this exhibition address a constellation of issues such as gender, sexuality, technology, and digital culture, charting forms and themes across cultures and through time.

Gillian Wearing

Dec. 9, 2016 - Jan. 1, 2018

Best known for her photographic and video works that intimately capture aspects of our familial and personal histories, Gillian Wearing continues to explore the nuances of identity, the intersections of public and private, and the performativity of self. Wearing's monumental photographic installation Rock 'n' Roll 70(2015/2016) is a site-specific commission for the Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall and the first presentation in Boston of the celebrated artist's work. Using a self-portrait, Wearing asked individuals working with age-progressing technology to digitally enhance portraits of the artist to see what she might look like at age 70. Printed as wallpaper, these aged portraits show the diversity of possibilities of the artist's future self. They differ slightly or immensely from each other, revealing the limitations of pioneering technology and how identity can be pictured. On top of the wallpaper hangs a framed triptych of photographic portraits, consisting of the artist at her current age, an enhanced portrait, and a blank space, as Wearing intends to make a self-portrait when she turns 70. In a world oversaturated by images, particularly "selfies," Wearing explores the complexities of identity as mediated through technology. Organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Jessica Hong, Curatorial Assistant.

2017 James and Audrey Foster Prize Exhibition

Feb. 15 - July 9, 2017

The James and Audrey Foster Prize is key to the ICA's efforts to support and recognize Boston-area artists and the artistic community. Sonia Almeida, Jennifer Bornstein, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, and Lucy Kim are the recipients of the 2017 James and Audrey Foster Prize Exhibition. In media including painting, sculpture, printmaking, film, and video, they explore a range of themes and subjects, each engaging the human body with a tactile approach to its cultural, psychological, and historical resonances. Central to the exhibition, this iteration of the James and Audrey Foster Prize features a new program, Foster Talks, enabling audiences to engage more deeply in the work and practice of the Prize winners. Once a month over the course of the exhibition, in a space in the exhibition galleries, each artist will present their work and invite an important writer, artist, performer, researcher, or other cultural producer who has influenced their artwork, or whose own work resonates with the artist's. The exhibition is organized by Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator, with Jeffrey De Blois, Curatorial Assistant, and will be on view at the ICA from Feb. 15 through July 9, 2017. First established in 1999, the James and Audrey Foster Prize (formerly the ICA Artist Prize) expanded its format when the museum opened its new facility in 2006. James and Audrey Foster, passionate collectors and supporters of contemporary art, endowed the prize, ensuring the ICA's ability to sustain and grow the program for years to come. This iteration of the ICA's biennial exhibition of work by Boston-area artists will be organized by Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator, with Jeffrey De Blois, Curatorial Assistant.

Ashes

Feb. 15 - July 9, 2017

Ashes is an immersive video installation by award-winning British artist Steve McQueen. On one side of a freestanding screen is soft, grainy footage originally shot on Super 8 film that shows a young carefree fisherman named Ashes balancing playfully on a fishing boat against a horizon of blue sky and water. The other side shows a second projection, shot in high definition video, which chronicles Ashes' unexpected fate. Never seen together, yet linked by a shared soundtrack, the videos conjure an easy vitality and a vivid description of place against the darker forces of society and fate. This presentation is the U.S. debut of McQueen's most recent video work. Organized by Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator, with Jeffrey De Blois, Curatorial Assistant.

Nari Ward: Sun Splashed

April 26 - Sept. 4, 2017

Nari Ward: Sun Splashed is the largest survey of the artist's work to date. Emerging alongside a notable group of black artists in New York City in the 1990s, Nari Ward gained recognition for his use of unconventional exhibition sites and the ambitious scale of his works. He derives inspiration from his immediate environment, incorporating found objects gathered in and around urban neighborhoods and embracing varied cultural references. Working in sculpture, collage, photography, video, installation, and performance, Ward captures the makeshift qualities of everyday life and imbues his production with a visceral relationship to history and the real world. The exhibition includes artworks made from soda pop bottles, shoelaces, shopping carts, and a fire escape, materials that speak to the artist's distinctive experimentation. Nari Ward: Sun Splashed focuses on vital points of reference for Ward, including his native Jamaica, citizenship and migration, and African American history and culture, to explore the dynamics of power and politics in society. Nari Ward: Sun Splashed is organized by Pérez Art Museum Miami Associate Curator Diana Nawi. The Boston presentation is coordinated by Ruth Erickson, Associate Curator, The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, with Jessica Hong, Curatorial Assistant.

Dana Schutz

July 26 - Nov. 26, 2017

New York-based artist Dana Schutz has emerged as one of the most prominent painters of her generation. Known for her distinctive visual style characterized by vibrant color and tactile brushwork, her paintings capture imaginary stories, hypothetical situations, and impossible physical feats, such as an individual swimming while smoking and crying. Equal parts darkly humorous and surreal, Schutz's paintings combine abstraction and figuration with expressive imagination, compressed bodies, banal objects, and quotidian scenes into oddly compelling and intriguing pictures. Dana Schutz will be a concise survey of the artist's recent work. This exhibition is organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Jessica Hong, Curatorial Assistant.

Mark Dion

Oct. 4, 2017 - Jan. 1, 2018

Acting as traveler, historian, scientist, and artist, Mark Dion has pioneered an influential model of artistic practice that involves research, collaboration, and fieldwork. His process-based work in sculpture, installation, drawing, and public art investigates the construction and display of knowledge about the natural world. The first U.S. survey of the internationally recognized artist, Mark Dion spans the past twenty-five years, bringing together many of the artist's most significant works. The exhibition combines a series of single-room installations with large gallery presentations of sculpture, drawing, and photography, as well as models of major public artworks. Informed by a deep knowledge of history and contemporary issues, these diverse projects illuminate the wondrous, absurd, and macabre outcomes that occur when the natural and cultural worlds collide. A scholarly publication dedicated to the artist will accompany the survey. This exhibition is organized by Ruth Erickson, Associate Curator, with Jessica Hong, Curatorial Assistant.

Ron Nagle

Dec. 14, 2017 - April 22, 2018

This exhibition surveys the twenty-five years of work by San Francisco-based artist Ron Nagle. One of the most original artists working today, Nagle has made stunning, entirely unique small sculptures since the 1950s. A student of Peter Voulkous, Nagle participated in an important dialogue with ceramic artists like Ken Price and Jim Melchert. He began his career making funky, rough cups and vessels out of earthenware, and, by the early 1960s, he was using low-fire, slip casting techniques, making smoother surfaces and bringing into play the luminous colors that would become his calling card. He also began gluing elements together, muddying the purity of ceramics and allowing more play and flexibility with form. Nagle mixes allusions to modernism, vernacular culture, and highly specific pop sensibility in vessels no bigger than a few inches that reference bodily and architectural forms. This exhibition will be on view at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive summer of 2018. A catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Ron Nagle is co-organized by Dan Byers, Mannion Famiy Senior Curator, ICA/Boston, and Apsara DiQuinzio, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and Phyllis C. Wattis MATRIX Curator, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

ON VIEW

Liz Deschenes

Through Oct. 16, 2016

This exhibition is the first museum survey of the Boston-born, New York-based artist Liz Deschenes. Deschenes is known for her lushly beautiful and meditative work in photography and sculpture. Since the early 1990s, she has produced a singular and influential body of work that probes the relationship between the mechanics of seeing, image-making processes, and modes of display. In addition to making discrete two-dimensional works, the artist has created carefully calibrated installations that blur the lines between photography and sculpture. On the occasion of her first museum survey, the artist has created a new site-specific work in the John Hancock Founders Gallery. The exhibition is accompanied by a scholarly publication. Organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Jessica Hong, Curatorial Assistant.

Nalini Malani: In Search of Vanished Blood

Through Oct. 16, 2016

Nalini Malani is India's foremost video and installation artist and committed activist for women's rights. This exhibition centers on her signature multi-media work, In Search of Vanished Blood (2012), accompanied by a selection of related works on paper. The work is comprised of six video projections or "shadow plays" streamed around the room through five hand-painted Mylar cylinders. As the cylinders rotate, colorful and layered iconography from Eastern and Western cultures is projected onto the walls, creating an arresting environment reminiscent of lantern slide presentations and other proto-cinema experiments in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Jessica Hong, Curatorial Assistant.

About the ICA/Boston
An influential forum for multi-disciplinary arts, The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston has been at the leading edge of art in Boston for 75 years. Like its iconic building on Boston's waterfront, the ICA offers new ways of engaging with the world around us. Its exhibitions and programs provide access to contemporary art, artists, and the creative process, inviting audiences of all ages and backgrounds to participate in the excitement of new art and ideas. The ICA, located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, is open Tuesday and Wednesday, 10 am - 5 pm; Thursday and Friday, 10 am - 9 pm; and Saturday and Sunday, 10 am - 5 pm. Admission is $15 adults, $13 seniors and $10 students, and free for members and children 17 and under. Free admission for families at ICA Play Dates (2 adults + children 12 and under) on last Saturday of the month. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our Web site at www.icaboston.org. Follow the ICA at Facebook/ICA.Boston,Twitter.com/ICAinBoston, and instagram.com/icaboston.

Acknowledgements
First Light: A Decade of Collecting at the ICA is sponsored by

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Additional support is generously provided by Fiduciary Trust Company, Chuck and Kate Brizius, Katie and Paul Buttenwieser, Karen and Brian Conway, the Robert E. Davoli and Eileen L. McDonagh Charitable Foundation, Jean-François and Nathalie Ducrest, Cynthia and John Reed, and Charles and Fran Rodgers.

Major support for The Artist's Museum is provided by Barbara Horwich Lloyd, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Additional support is generously provided by Steve Corkin and Dan Maddalena, Tristin and Martin Mannion, Ellen Poss, Charlotte and Herbert S. Wagner III, and Anonymous.

Support for Gillian Wearing is provided, in part, by Jean-François and Nathalie Ducrest.

The 2017 James and Audrey Foster Prize exhibition and prize are generously endowed by James and Audrey Foster.

Steve McQueen: Ashes is made possible by a gift from Tristin and Martin Mannion.

Organization of Nari Ward: Sun Splashed and its presentation at the Pérez Art Museum Miami has been made possible by Citi and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, with additional support from the Funding Arts Network and Gander & White.

Major support for Mark Dion is provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Support for Liz Deschenes is generously provided by Edward Berman and Kathleen McDonough, Robert and Jane Burke, Fotene Demoulas and Tom Coté, Bridgitt and Bruce Evans, James and Audrey Foster, Ted Pappendick and Erica Gervais Pappendick, David and Leslie Puth, Mark and Marie Schwartz, and the Residence Inn.

Support for Nalini Malani: In Search of Vanished Blood is generously provided by Vivien and Alan Hassenfeld, Jodi and Hal Hess, and Barbara Lee. Produced by dOCUMENTA (13) in collaboration with the Burger Collection.

Images (from top to bottom): Kara Walker, The Nigger Huck Finn Pursues Happiness Beyond the Narrow Constraints of your Overdetermined Thesis on Freedom - Drawn and Quartered by Mister Kara Walkerberry, with Condolences to The Authors, 2010. Cut paper and paint on wall and gouache and ink on paper, Approximately 48 feet, 16 cut paper elements, dimensions variable; 7 framed works on paper, each 11 1/2 x 15 inches (29.2 x 38.1 cm). The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women. Courtesy the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. © 2016 Kara Walker; Rosa Barba, The Hidden Conference: About the Shelf and Mantel (still), 2015. 35mm film (color, sound; 14:00minutes). Courtesy the artist. © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn; Gillian Wearing, Rock 'n' Roll 70, 2015. Chromogenic color prints, 51 3/8 x 75 3/8 inches (130.5 x 191.5 cm). Courtesy the artist, Maureen Paley, London, and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York. © 2016 Gillian Wearing; Steve McQueen, Ashes, (2002-15). Installation view, Steve McQueen, Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris, 2016. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris. Gift of Tristin and Martin Mannion. Photo: Rebecca Fanuele © 2016 Steve McQueen; Nari Ward, Scandal Bag; History Feeds Mistrust (detail), 2015. Chromogenic color print, 20 x 20 inches (50.8 x 50.8 cm). Courtesy the artist; Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Beijing, Les Moulins, and Havana; and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong. Photo: by Steven Rose. © 2016 Nari Ward; Dana Schutz, Fight in an Elevator, 2015. Oil on canvas, 96 x 90 inches (243.8 x 228.6 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York. © 2016 Dana Schutz; Mark Dion,Cabinet of Marine Debris, 2014. Wood, glass, metal, paint, assorted marine debris, plastic, and rope, 113 x 84 x 32 inches (287 x 213.4 x 81.3 cm). Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York © 2016 Mark Dion; Liz Deschenes. Tilt/Swing (360° field of vision, version 1), 2009. Black-and-white photograms mounted on metal, 136 x 192 x 58inches (345.4 x 487.7 x 147.3 cm). Installation view, Tilt / Swing, Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York, 2009. Courtesy the artist and Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York, and Campoli Presti, London and Paris. © 2016 Liz Deschenes; Nalini Malani, In Search of Vanished Blood, 2012. Six-channel video/shadow play (sound, 11:00 minutes) and five rotating, reverse-painted Mylar cylinders. Installation view, Nalini Malani: In Search of Vanished Blood, Galerie Lelong, New York, 2013. Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris. © 2016 Nalini Malani