ICA

A slow start to the day.  Ellie slept late, leaving me the opportunity to catch up with the blog and get it posted.  Once showered and ready, we walked up the block to Starbucks for a cup of tea and a muffin for Ellie, and for me a cup of coffee and an egg and sausage English muffin.  A not-bad easy breakfast.  Then back down to Copley Square for a subway ride to the Institute of Contemporary Art, out alongside the Harbor.  On the advice of fellow-travelers, we got off at South Station, which left us with more of a walk than we anticipated, passing first through the financial district...

An interesting artwork here, between the buildings--artist unknown

... then out along the HarborWalk to the impressive new building that houses ICA.  The galleries that show the permanent collection were close for reinstallation, but up on the fourth floor we found a superb retrospective exhibition devoted to the work of Arlene Shechet, "All at Once."  It included some work we had admired sometime ago, highly idiosyncratic, roughly stylized, seated Buddha figures...

This, and all the following iPhone pictures are my own, taken with museum permission

... and Buddha heads fashioned out of plaster and daubed with paint--with a nod to both the artistic heritage of the Far East and to the spiritual tradition of that part of the world.  Here, they are arrayed in a small mountain...

 

... interspersed with blue-splashed vessels formed in layered, hardened paper set mirror-like atop the solid white molds used to shape them...

On the walls around, the blue is echoed in drawings of the floor plans of Asian stupas, reinforcing the context of Buddhist culture and religion.

The next gallery is devoted to the display of a long row of variously sized and shaped porcelain vessels, a kind of cityscape of vertical forms...

(the color here is way off the bone white of the actual objects)

... in shades ranging from black through ashen gray to white.  These pieces date from 2002, and a wall tag informs us that Shechet had the destruction of the World Trade Center in mind as she created the work included in this installation, now titled, simply, "Building."  With this melancholy association in mind, the vessels double as funerary urns, their muted colors a profoundly moving reminder of the thick coat of ash that rained down on the southern end of Manhattan on that fateful day.

The rest of Shechet's exhibition is devoted to her colorful, sometimes monumental, always offbeat explorations in clay...

This medium, she writes in a statement included in the show, "provides an opportunity for building slowly, poking around and figuring things out while finding what I want to make, rather than thinking it out and then making it."  Throughout, even in a series of wall reliefs that resemble "paintings," she chooses mediums that are initially malleable, hardening into shape only after she has allowed them to find their form.  It's a kind of organic growth that characterizes not only the way she works, but the appearance of the final object.  

From the Shechet show we walked out onto the museum's long, glass-enclosed balcony with its panoramic view of the Boston Bay, thence into the deeply-tiered "Mediathèque," a theater-like space with, at its lower end, a window slanted out over a more intimate stretch of water...

Next, we walked through the exhibit of mural-sized panel paintings in "Meleko Mokgosi: Democratic Intuition," a superbly painted series exploring the theme of global education in near life-sized images and split narrative form.  (For images, please follow the link). The title is taken from a conference presentation by Gayatri Spivak, who was a teacher of mine many years ago when I was a doctoral candidate at the University of Iowa; she sees education as the sine qua non for democracy in developing countries.  I myself have long thought that the lack of a good education system is undermining the last tatters of democracy here in this “developed” country…  Unable to take in much more art--particularly of the complex kind offered in ICA's "2015 James and Audrey Foster Prize" exhibit for young Boston-area artists—we paused here only long enough to determine that there appears to be a lively scene here in the Northeast, and that artists here, as elsewhere, are exploring every avenue opened up by the new media, rejecting traditional art forms in favor of an unrestricted interplay of multiple approaches, media, and materials.

After an enjoyable lunch on the spacious exterior deck at the museum café, in occasional sunshine—and persistent wind!

... we paused on our way out of the museum to admire the magnificent, large-scale black and white marker drawing by Ethan Murrow, a huge circular view, as though through a porthole, of the ocean; with, at its center, an aircraft carrier bearing the detailed image of St. Paul's cathedral...

"Lost at sea..."--or headed out into uncharted waters, are both the traditional power structures of our Western culture, the church and the military.  In impressive job, given the detail of the depiction, the sheer scale of the drawing, and its thought-provoking theme.

Venturing underground again, we took the Silver Line to South Station and the Red Line north to Park Street, where we re-emerged into bright sunlight for a stroll through the Common.  Quite a scene there, on a summer's day, with bands playing, drummers drumming, dancers dancing...

... and children everywhere at play.  

We loved the openness of it all, democracy at work, at least in this one little corner of the city.  The swan, by the way, allowed us a view of her eggs today--seven of them, by my count.  

Would love to have been here when they hatch.

Back at the hotel for some respite from the day's activities, I spent some time on the blog, and some more time with the Tour de France on television.  Then out for dinner into a brief rainstorm, with an umbrella borrowed at the front desk, meeting our old friend Alistair, who was for eight years married to our daughter, Sarah.  

Apologies for the not-very-flattering picture!

It was a pleasure to see him again, and catch up a little with his family news.