THE MAGAZINE OF THEnew INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART/BOSTON WINTER 2015–16 “Extraordinary.” IN THIS ISSUE —New York Times 5 6 2 Meet Ruth eRickson The ICA Assistant Curator talks the BiRthday “Genius abounds.” BRinging Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Dion, PaRty —Boston Globe Black Mountain and guilty pleasures. Artists Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni college to life Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss bring their madcap way of life and Director, on opening avenues. art to the ICA. Plus: 7 ways we’re “learning by doing” “The biggest show the ICA has during Leap Before You Look. ever mounted… You should visit.” —New Yorker “A midcentury cultural Camelot.” —Wall Street Journal diane siMPson now on the new The Chicago-based artist creates icaBoston.oRg highly stylized sculptures inspired MeMBeR sPotlight + • Life at Black Mountain by items of clothing from Amish annual donoRs College slideshow bonnets to samurai armor to George Fifield reflects on 25 years of ICA • Tour of Black Mountain everyday apparel. + COMING membership. Mentioned: Krzysztof Wodiczko, College–related attractions SOON: Walid Raad. Bill Viola, Chris Burden, Tara Donovan, and near Boston the days when the Back Bay was cheap. 8 • Exhibitions through 2017 10 • Holiday gift inspiration! PERFORMANCE + PROGRAMS WINTER 2015–16 can we PRogRaM guide Be fRiends? Concerts, dance, film, talks, family programs, Like us on Facebook: facebook.com/ICA.Boston member events, and more this winter. Follow us on Twitter: @ICAinBoston Follow us on Instagram: @ICABoston Cover: Silas Riener in Merce Cunningham’s Changeling at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. Major support is provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Henry Luce Foundation. Photo by Liza Voll. Additional support is generously provided by Chuck and Kate Brizius, Robert and Jane Burke, Katie and Opposite: Buckminster Fuller at Black Mountain College. Courtesy of Western Regional Archives, State Paul Buttenwieser, the Robert E. Davoli and Eileen L. McDonagh Charitable Foundation, Bridgitt and Archives of North Carolina, Asheville, NC. Bruce Evans, James and Audrey Foster, Erica Gervais and Ted Pappendick, Vivien and Alan Hassenfeld and the Hassenfeld Family Foundation, Curtis R. Kemeny, Kathleen McDonough and Edward Berman, Ellen Poss, David and Leslie Puth, Cynthia and John Reed, Charles and Francene Rodgers, and Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain Steinway & Sons + M. Steinert & Sons. College 1933–1957 has been made This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this exhibition do not necessarily represent those of the National Celebrating 50 Years of Excellence Endowment for the Humanities. Bringing Black Mountain college to life 7 ways we’re learning by doing this season By Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director The ICA’s exhibition schedule inspires These aims—to open avenues, to facilitate critical thinking, and one of the most exciting aspects to foster a “personal sense of looking,” as Robert Rauschenberg of Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957 everything from family programs to said—are central to our mission at the ICA. Black Mountain (on view through January 24, 2016) is its focus on pedagogy— College’s pedagogy resonates loudly with our ICA community— social events to what’s available in the teaching and learning—and the importance of the arts in a liberal artists, students, curators, educators, and audiences—as we education. Drawing on the progressive ideals of the school’s store. Here, get an overview of how strive to encourage visitors of all ages to look closely, learn founder, John Rice, and the educational reformer John Dewey, deeply, make informed choices about art-making and apprecia- the ideas, ideals, and artworks of Black at Black Mountain College students and faculty designed and tion, and carry those skills back to their own lives. As Louis constructed the school’s buildings, shared governance, and Mountain College are permeating all Menand writes in The New Yorker, “The goal was not to produce collaborated in and out of the classroom. Students were tasked painters, poets, and architects. It was to produce citizens.” to find and justify their own ideas and solutions, to think critically, of our education programs this season, and to “learn to see,” as Josef Albers famously said. As we celebrate the Black Mountain community, we continue from Teen Nights to performances to to strengthen and deepen our own, and I am thrilled to welcome A typical day at Black Mountain might find a student weaving two new members to the Board of Trustees. Geoff Cottrill, a community outreach. with Anni Albers in the morning, pouring cement in the afternoon, street-art and music lover who’s thrilled ICA Teens by facilitating and participating in a dance or poetry reading in the evening. the ICA’s long-standing partnership with Converse, where he Full-time faculty, summer institute artists, and students worked is VP/General Manager of Brand and Segments and Chief and played together in the safe space of the rural North Carolina Marketing Officer, comes aboard. Jim Pallotta, head of private ENCOUNTERING CUNNINGHAM: “We Do the Work” campus. Assistant Curator Ruth Erickson insightfully connects investment company Raptor Group Holdings; co-owner and the non-hierarchy among the arts at the institution to the Former Merce Cunningham Dance Company member Silas Executive Board Member of the Boston Celtics; Board Member “flourishing of interdisciplinary work” there. Riener has been not only performing work by the legendary for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Berklee College of Music, choreographer as part of Leap Before You Look but also Arriving at Black Mountain College fresh from the closure of Children’s Hospital Trust, and a member of the MIT Media Labs teaching Cunningham’s renowned technique. “When you walk the Bauhaus under Nazi pressure, German émigré Josef Albers Advisory Council; and a trustee from 2005 to 2012, returns to into a room of people who have either never heard of Merce (limited English notwithstanding) revolutionized how art was the fold. We also welcome two avid participants in ICA events, Cunningham or never been exposed to his work before,” Riener taught in the United States. Hazel Larsen Archer, whose trips, and programs to the Board of Overseers: Ed Berman, says, “the best way—and Merce would probably say the only beautiful photographs are one of the great discoveries for me Chairman and CEO of Atlantic Vision, and Robin Hauck, who way—is to do it. So we do the work. We start with class.” in the exhibition and who was deeply influenced by Albers, said as the Director of Group Sales & Marketing and Go Ahead See the PROGRAM GUIDE for upcoming performances. he “had this tremendous capacity to teach. And I don’t mean to Tours at Education First has been active in establishing a instruct or to pass on. But to sort of open avenues.” high-level relationship with the global organization. On staff, Curator Dan Byers has a new role at the ICA: Mannion Family Senior Curator, endowed by longtime supporters Tristin A show not only every art-school and Martin Mannion and family. Family Programs and Art Lab student in this region but every Coordinator Kathleen Lomatoski was honored with the 2015 RETHINKING COLOR: The Bank of America Art Lab Community Art Educator award from the Massachusetts Art Like his legendary Bauhaus Vorkurs (Preliminary Course), artist, every student, every Education Association, nominated by a former volunteer and Josef Albers’s teaching at BMC followed a three-part model: teacher, and every former student parent impressed with her work at monthly Play Dates. And an color, design, and matière or material studies. Albers “felt that anonymous group of donors has generously endowed a position color was ‘the most relative medium in art,’” curator Helen will profit from seeing. I imagine that at the ICA, the Bill T. Jones Director of Performing and Media Molesworth writes in the exhibition catalogue, “and his accounts for everyone.” Arts. The position is named in honor of American artistic director, systematic explorations of color, which involved testing one choreographer, and dancer Bill T. Jones, whose work has been color against another and subtly shifting a color’s context, —Sebastian Smee, The Boston Globe performed at the ICA four times, most recently in 2014 with the elucidate how perception is radically contingent.” Red looks Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company in Story/Time. “His different when next to orange than when next to green–both passion for dance, his commitment to the role art must play in a effect and meaning change dramatically through context. GOING IN-DEPTH: ICA Forums civil society, and his compassion for others have and will forever serve as guideposts for performing and media arts programming The ICA is looking at Albers’s color theory, and adding another ICA Forums are a new series of discussions on social, at the ICA,” says David Henry, who currently holds the new title. layer of shifting implications as well. In partnership with the cultural, and political topics raised by work on view at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, our Bank of ICA. Drawing on the educational and scholarly communities From students performing Merce Cunningham dances in our America Art Lab features an activity that allows participants of the Boston area, these talks engage local art historians, galleries to audiences attempting to emulate Josef Albers’s to interact with Josef Albers’s foundational ideas about color professors, curators, artists, and other specialists to share influential color theory exercises, to the Teen Arts Council theory as well as the social, political, and historical implications their expertise while facilitating in-depth conversations working with artist Sandrine Schaefer to create their own of color.