fall exhibitions
ICA IS NOW FREE FOR EVERYONE!*
DOUGLAS BLAU
Walkthrough with artist Douglas Blau and ICA Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner
To open the season, ICA is pleased to present new work by New York artist Douglas Blau. This will be Blau's first exhibition of new work in nearly a decade. The exhibition also features an earlier piece The Conversation Piece (1993/1995), which depicts political dialogue in all its variety, from tête-à-têtes to the legislative body, throughout the ages. Douglas Blau creates picture epics and episodes from uniformly framed collages of printed matter. Postcards, film stills, images of paintings and photographs, pictures of all kinds are cut and pasted into individual collage elements. These are composed into sequences, strips and grids, based on formal and narrative associations that flow from frame-to-frame. The big picture is depiction itself.
R. CRUMB'S UNDERGROUND
Walkthrough with collector Eric Sack and ICA Associate Curator Jenelle Porter
This career-spanning survey is organized around specific themes and ideologies critical to Robert Crumb's work. These include social satire, sex, blues and jazz music, mind-altering substances, autobiography, and biography. The show spotlights collaborations from Crumb's early San Francisco days in the 1960s and 1970s, to recent work with his wife, cartoonist Aline Kominsky-Crumb. Extending far beyond comics, this exhibit of over 100 works—including early comics, greeting cards, collaborations, and sketchbooks, as well as drawings and sculptures—is the most substantial portrait of Crumb to date in the United States.
KATE GILMORE
Walkthrough with artist Kate Gilmore and ICA Whitney Lauder Curatorial Fellow Stamatina Gregory
Kate Gilmore loves a challenge. For her performance-based video works, she sets up a difficult physical task—a precarious tower of strung-together furniture to climb, for instance—dons lipstick and a fancy dress, and documents herself making the attempt. She has jumped rope on a perforated wooden platform while wearing stilettos (Double Dutch, 2004), ascended a slippery ramp in rollerskates (Cake Walk, 2005), and forced her satin-clad body through a tiny tunnel (Main Squeeze, 2006). For the Project Space, Gilmore has constructed a new challenge and stars in a corresponding video, to be shown alongside several earlier video works.
ODILI DONALD ODITA
Walkthrough with artist Odili Donald Odita and ICA Whitney Lauder Curatorial Fellow Stamatina Gregory
Odili Donald Odita's large-scale, abstract wall paintings operate at the intersection of Western modernism and African culture. Borrowing strategies of destabilized perception from Op art—a tradition condemned by formalist criticism—and adding narrative and multicultural inflection, Odita both embraces and critiques the modernist tradition. His vast, animated expanses of fractured, rhythmic planes, equally informed by television test band patterns, African textiles, post-colonial discourse, sensory overload, and digital technology, speak to a contemporary experience of dislocation and decenteredness. This is the 16th commission in ICA's Ramp Project Series. For the Ramp, Odita has designed and executed a dynamic work that responds to the unique architecture of the space.
* Free admission to the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania for the public is sponsored by the Glenn R. Fuhrman (W87/WG88) Fund.
Institute of Contemporary Art
University of Pennsylvania
118 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104-3289 · 215.898.5911