Institute of Contemporary Art

In 2013 we interviewed abstract artist Ellsworth Kelly during an exhibition of his relief series in wood at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. A graduate of the Museum School he maintained close times with the city and its museum. He passed away yesterday at his home in Spencertown, New York.

The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women, established at the ICA in 2014, represents three decades of collecting by Lee and brings together painting, sculpture, photography, and videography by iconic modern and contemporary women artists.

This fall, under director Jill Medvedow, for the first time during her administration, the ICA will present a much anticipated historical exhibition surveying the impact of Black Mountain College on the post war American avant-garde. Under her predecessors, Milena Kalinovska and David Ross, there were many such projects. We spoke with Kalinovska about her Boston years as she prepared to depart with a three year contract as director of modern and contemporary art at the National Gallery in her native Prague.

The newly opened exhibit, The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now, celebrates the 50th anniversary of Chicago's experimental jazz collective, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), which continues to expand the boundaries of jazz.

This summer Chris Busa has published the 30th annual issue of Provincetown Arts Magazine. The publication which is organized as a non profit is a widely respected compendium of the arts in the Lower Cape, past and present. The award winning magazine covers the fine arts, literature with and emphasis on poetry, film and theatre.

When the rise of the Third Reich led to closing the Bauhaus in 1933 the architect Walter Gropius and his wife the weaver. artist Anni regrouped in rural North Carolina to establish a small experimental outpost for advanced art and design Black Mountain College. The faculty and students were intended to build their dorms and studios as well as grow their food and raise livestock. Never having a solid endowment the experiment ended in 1957. Gropius went on to Harvard and the rest of the faculty scattered. The impact on post war American arts was indelible. Organized by former curator Helen Molesworth this promises to be one of the most ambitious and informative exhibitions of the fall season. It will be on view in Boston Oct. 10, 2015 to Jan. 24, 2016 and then travel to LA and Columbus, Ohio.

After less than a decade the land locked ICA on the waterfront has run out of space. There is a desperate plan to expand into two floors of a 17 floor adjacent building which is under construction. It has become ever more obvious that the award winning design by Diller, Scofidio + Renfro. is proving to be an utter dysfunctional disaster.

Particularly in the early work starting with Five Day Locker Piece in 1971 when he remained confined to a cramped space as his thesis project Chris Burden tested the limits of his human endurance. His occasionally death defying art entailed getting shot, crucified to a Volkwagen, and laying down in traffic. Given these dark projects, reporting on his death at 69 from melanoma, lacks the intensity and dramatic impact of his work. We recall meeting with him during a 1989 exhibition at Boston's ICA. Speaking with him about outrageous work made perfect sense.

In 2009 Michael Rush, then the director of the Rose Art Museum, took the fall when Brandeis University schemed to close the museum and sell its $350 million collection. In 2010 he became the founding director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University. He died recently at 65.

The Venice Biennale is about to open. The renowned curator and museum director, Jane Farver, was working with the artist Joan Jonas on an installation in the American Pavilion. It was announced that she died suddenly apparently of a heart attack. Jane was a friend and beloved mentor during her tenure as director of the MIT List Visual Arts Center from 1999 to 2011.

From 1989 to 1993 Matthew Teitelbaum was an ICA curator under director Milena Kalinovska. On August 2, after some 22 years at the Art Gallery of Ontario, he will take over as the 11th director of the Museum of Fine Arts. It is anticipated that he will bring a more welcoming management style than the autocratic Malcolm Rogers who cleaned house and instilled fear in the staff under the mantra of One Museum.

As a part of our research and oral history of modern and contemporary art and culture, some time ago, I contacted Kenworth Moffett. At the end of the tenure of Perry T. Rathbone as director of the Museum of Fine Arts, in 1971, a department of contemporary art was created with Moffett as its founding curator. He asked me to send him some questions and this essay is the result of that correspondence. During the years when he was director of the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art we always enjoyed an annual lunch when vacationing in nearby Palm Beach.

The protest artist Dana C. Chandler, Jr. was an activist who charged the Museum of Fine Arts with institutional racism. That initiated the special exhibition African American Artists from New York and Boston and the appointment of its curator, Edmund Gaither, as an adjunct curator of the MFA. Chandler was later instrumental in forming African American Master Artist-In-Residence Program for Northeastern University. This is the first of a two part interview with the artist.

When Thomas Messer served as director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston there was a plan to merge it as a department of the Museum of Fine Arts. This was confirmed when I asked him about it during an unrelated press conference. Belinda Rathbone also found related documents in the MFA archives when researching her book The Boston Raphael. Related to his time at the ICA these are excerpts from an extensive interview with Messer in the public domain at the Archives of American Art.

The publisher Valiz Amsterdam has published a book about the life and work of the performance artist Ulay. The book ‘Whispers: Ulay on Ulay’, 536 pages with many illustrations, includes participations of Marina Abramović, Laurie Anderson, Timea Andrea Lelik, Tevž Logar, Thomas McEvilley, Charlemagne Palestine and others.

Recently we were among the 1.3 million annual visitors to the Getty Center in California. The Richard Meier designed complex opened in 1997 at a cost of some $1.3 billion. While spectacular in scale and cliff top site the museum is oddly generic displaying a thin permanent collection with a handful of very expensive acquisitions through some curatorial hanky panky.

Judith Bookbinder's 2005 publication Boston Modern: Figurative Expressionism as Alternative Modernism is the definitive study of this important but neglected movement. Her study is meticulously researched and documented. This is the catalogue for the exhibition that the Museum of Fine Arts has failed to deliver. Significantly most of the Boston Expressionists were Jews struggling with Biblical constraints against the graven image.

Decades ago the sculptor Kahlin Gibran and his wife Jean purchased a shell in Boston's ethnically mixed South End. A meticulous craftsman the home evolved as a museum of his work and collection. Together they wrote a definitive 1974 biography "Kahlil Gibran, His Life and World." Now Jean has published "Love Made Visible: Scenes from a Mostly Happy Marriage" about a complex relationship with her late husband.

When Dr. Paul Buttenwieser, the newly-appointed President of the BSO's Board, stepped down from the board of the Institute of Contemporary Art, he performed on the piano at a sold-out fundraiser. He had studied piano as a young man in New York. He is a descendant of the Lehman banking family, which of course adds materially to his board credentials. But that he is a competent enough pianist to perform with Yo-Yo Ma in a sold out fundraiser is also an important credential.

Several months ago we spoke in depth with Joe Thompson about a bill pending on Beacon Hill to grant $25 million toward the final phase of developing the North Adams campus of Mass MoCA. This week, early August, 2014 the bill has been signed by outgoing Governor Deval Patrick a Berkshire neighbor of the museum. Thompson, as he discusses here, must raise an additional $30 million for the project which will take several years.

During a dialogue with the artist Izhar Patkin about his Mass MoCA exhibition David Ross hit a dead end when he asked whether there is a Jewish art? At this point in post modernism, with more than a century since Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Chaim Soutine or Amedeo Modigliani, it is not a question that one would ask a Jewish American artist. But is it relevant for an Israeli Sabra?

Yet again controversy surrounds who's in and who's out with the release of the list of artists selected for the 2014 Whitney Biennial. To stir the pot this time three outside curators will be given one floor each of the museum. With no compromises that will ensure the individual taste of the designated curators. The museum's curators will advise on the installations.

For his first ICA exhibition in 2005 former curator Nicholas Baume presented the German artist Kai Althoff in the exhibition Kai KeinRespekt (Kai No Respect). entering into this Gesamtkunstwerk (Total Work of Art) there was a sensation of being engulfed, overwhelmed and disoriented by a chaotic installation of drawings, paintings, photographs, clips from vintage magazines, listening stations to hear the artist’s recordings, monitors of videos, and piles of as well as a room of stuff. This review was first posted to Maverick Arts Magazine.

Before packing off to New York Cynthia Von Buhler led the avant-garde in Boston. Allston actually where opening out of her Castle she organized exhibitions and events while not pursuing a successful career as an artist/ illustrator. This 2001 article for Maverick Arts reports on Von Buhler fronting a rock band and opening for performance artist Karen Finley.

In 2003 the Museum of Fine Arts unveiled a major acquisition of European and American figurative/ realism paintings ans sculptures A Singular Vision: The Melvin Blake and Frank Purnell Legacy. This report is reposted from Maverick Arts Magazine.