Upcoming exhibitions

Guadalupe Maravilla: Mariposa Relámpago 
May 24–September 4 2023 
ICA Watershed 
Guadalupe Maravilla grounds his sculpture, painting, performance, and large-scale installation in activism and healing, informed by his personal story of migration, illness, and recovery. This exhibition presents a selection of recent sculptures and paintings by Maravilla. At its center is Mariposa Relámpago (Lightning Butterfly), a newly commissioned work for the ICA Watershed and the artist’s largest sculpture to date. Mariposa Relámpago is part of the artist’s “Disease Thrower” series—sculptures that incorporate natural materials, handmade objects, and items collected by the artist while retracing his migratory route to become shrines and healing instruments. Every sculpture includes metal gongs that are activated by the artist during public sound baths to deploy the powers of vibrational sound as a form of healing. Maravilla’s artworks contain a cosmology of potent symbols and objects that connect the artist’s personal journey with ancient practices of the indigenous Mayan peoples; diverse spiritual and folk beliefs; and contemporary crises of disease, ecology, and war. Organized by Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Senior Curator, with Yutong Shi, Curatorial Assistant. 

Tammy Nguyen 
August 24, 2023–January 28, 2024 
Connecticut-based multidisciplinary artist Tammy Nguyen creates paintings, works on paper, unique artist books, and publications. For the ICA, her first solo museum exhibition in the US, Nguyen is creating a new, interconnected body of paintings, works on paper, and artist books. These works, inspired by East Asian landscape painting, are all related to the relationship between man and nature, landscape and wilderness, as articulated in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s influential book-length essay Nature (1836). Nguyen maps the lasting impact of Emerson’s ideas on still commonly held ideas of nature, especially through a studied consideration of the activities of the United States Agency for International Development in Vietnam after the Fall of Saigon in 1975. Organized by Jeffrey De Blois, Associate Curator and Publications Manager. 

2023 James and Audrey Foster Prize 
August 24, 2023–January 28, 2024 
The 2023 James and Audrey Foster Prize exhibition presents the work of Cicely Carew, Venetia Dale, and Yu-Wen Wu. Encompassing a wide range of media, from sculpture and installation to time-based media and works on paper, the exhibited projects demonstrate how these Boston-area artists each uniquely engage with the theme of states of change, whether through personal experiences, the passage of time, or in the very nature of materials undergoing transformation in the making of an artwork.  

First established in 1999, James and Audrey Foster endowed the prize (formerly the ICA Artist Prize) and exhibition to nurture and recognize exceptional Boston-area artists. Organized by Anni A. Pullagura, Curatorial Assistant 

Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today 
October 5, 2023–February 25, 2024 
Taking the 1990s as its cultural backdrop, Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today is the first major group exhibition in the United States to envision a new approach to contemporary art in the Caribbean diaspora, foregrounding forms that reveal new modes of thinking about identity and place. It uses the concept of weather and its constantly changing forms as a metaphor to analyze artistic practices connected to the Caribbean, understanding the region as a bellwether for our rapidly shifting times. Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today was organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and was curated by Carla Acevedo-Yates, Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator, with Iris Colburn, Curatorial Assistant, Isabel Casso, former Susman Curatorial Fellow, and Nolan Jimbo, Susman Curatorial Fellow. The ICA/Boston presentation is coordinated by Jeffrey De Blois, Associate Curator and Publications Manager.