Upcoming exhibitions at ICA/Boston

Huma Bhabha: They Live
March 23, 2019–May 27, 2019
Since the early 1990s, Huma Bhabha has developed a distinct visual vocabulary that draws upon a wide variety of influences, including horror movies, science fiction, ancient artifacts, religious reliquary, and modernist sculpture. The largest survey of the artist’s work to date, Huma Bhabha: They Live encompasses sculpture, drawing, and photography, with a special focus on Bhabha’s engagement with the human figure. Her work transcends a singular time and place, instead creating an exploration of what she describes as the “eternal concerns” found across all cultures: war, colonialism, displacement, and memories of home. Accompanied by scholarly publication, co-published with Yale University Press, this exhibition is organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator.

Less Is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design
June 26, 2019–September 22, 2019
Less Is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design is a multigenerational survey of strategies of pattern and decoration in art and design. Borrowing its attitude from Robert Venturi’s infamous retort to Mies van der Rohe’s modernist edict “less is more,” this exhibition includes art works that privilege decoration, patterning, and maximalism over modernism’s reductive “ornament as crime” philosophy. Less Is a Bore includes works ranging from experiments in patterning by Sanford Biggers, Jasper Johns, and Miriam Schapiro to the transgressive furniture and sculpture of Lucas Samaras and Ettore Sottsass, to the installations of Polly Apfelbaum, Nathalie du Pasquier, and Virgil Marti. Accompanied by a richly illustrated publication, this exhibition is organized by Jenelle Porter, guest curator, with Jeffrey De Blois, Assistant Curator.

Vivian Suter
August 21, 2019–January 5, 2020
Vivian Suter works in close partnership with the natural environment surrounding her home and studio in Panajachel, Guatemala. Suter’s method often involves moving her canvases between the indoors and outdoors and exposing them to the climate in order to allow nature to comingle with her broad swaths of painted, vivid color. The artist’s first Boston exhibition features a single installation, filling the gallery with a canopy of color and shapes evocative of Panajachel’s lush and luminous setting. This exhibition is organized by Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Curator.

2019 James and Audrey Foster Prize
August 21, 2019–January 5, 2020
The 2019 installment of the ICA’s biannual James and Audrey Foster Prize exhibition recognizes the work of Boston-area artists Rashin Fahandej, Josephine Halvorson, Lavaughan Jenkins, and Helga Roht Poznanski. This intergenerational group of artists works across media, including painting, sculpture, film, and video, to explore questions of place, portraiture, and belonging. This exhibition is organized by Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Curator.