As a non-collecting contemporary art museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) is uniquely positioned to shine light on original artists who work outside of the mainstream in a variety of diverse media.
Such is the case in three new installations comprising the ICA’s spring/summer 2019 exhibition season, which opened Friday, April 26, as friends and supporters of the ICA flocked to campus for a special members’ preview and opening reception. Amy Sadao, Daniel W. Dietrich, II Director of the ICA, offered remarks to welcome guests and introduce the artists and curators behind the new exhibitions.
“An Unlikely Birth” is the first U.S. solo museum exhibition of the work of Jamaican artist Deborah Anzinger—using sculpture, video, painting, and installation (with both synthetic and organic materials) to consider geographical, ecological, and spatial paradigms. Curated by Daniella Rose King, the Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow at the ICA, this site-specific exhibition uses both new and past works to reveal how the artist disrupts existing relationships and hierarchies as they pertain to the politics of land, the body, and space.
The members’ preview featured a discussion on stage between King and Anzinger, touching on the exhibition’s namesake work and the inspiration behind it. “This work is the first of all the works exhibited upstairs in which I actually depict the male body,” Anzinger said. “For me, this is a first step of bridging the male body with nature in a way that has historically been projected onto the female body, in how that understanding of the male body as part of nature can shift our understanding of masculinity.”
“Quotidian Pasts” represents the second chapter of a three-part exhibition series titled “Colored People Time”—an experimental presentation that re-envisions the traditional exhibition format to build new narratives and public discourse around the everyday experience of Black Americans. Presented in collaboration with the Penn Museum, “Quotidian Pasts” works to facilitate a critical dialogue about how museums currently value, communicate, and exhibit the objects in their collections.
ICA Assistant Curator Meg Onli spoke on stage with anthropologist Monique Scott, who co-curated the exhibition, and artist Matthew Angelo Harrison, whose technologically facilitated artistic contributions to “Quotidian Pasts” included 3D-printed ceramic sculptures based on art in the the Penn Museum’s African Collection. “The material I choose is clay, ceramic, because it’s a traditional art material,” Harrison said. “It has this flexibility to it that I really like, and I think it’s a good material to translate the abstraction of technology.”
Finally, Onli introduced the ICA’s “Open Video Call 2019,” an annual exhibition featuring a selection of five new video works created by Philadelphia-area artists and filmmakers—offering a unique platform to showcase the efforts of talented local creators. Featured works include Memories from the Future by M. Asli Dukan and Critique of Inheritance by Fred Schmidt-Arenales.
The ICA is free for all, thanks to the generosity of Amanda, C’95, and Glenn Fuhrman, W’87, WG’88. The Power of Penn Campaign is working to ensure the stability of the ICA’s unique curatorial vision, directly introducing more Penn students to contemporary art and extending the impact of exhibitions and scholarship by engaging the broader public.
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