Past
Download complete list of past ICI exhibitions
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Mixed Signals: Artists Consider Masculinity in Sports
Curated by Christopher Bedford
Despite all that has changed since sexual and social identity became a hot-button topic in art production and discourse throughout the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, one American stereotype still remains particularly entrenched: that of the male athlete. Mixed Signals: Artists Consider Masculinity in Sports focuses on artists from the mid-1990s to the present who question the notion of the male athlete as the last bastion of uncomplicated, authentic identity in American culture during the preceding decades.
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Broadcast
Curated by Irene Hofmann
Broadcast explores the ways in which artists since the late 1960s have engaged with, critiqued, and inserted themselves into official channels of broadcast television and radio. By co-opting the sounds, images, and presentation strategies of our culture’s dominant forms of mass media, they reveal the mechanisms and power structures of broadcasting systems, and challenge their authority and influence.
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The New Normal
Curated by Michael Connor
The New Normal brings together thirteen recent artworks that use private information as raw material and subject matter. Although the concept of privacy is widely invoked, it is difficult to define. The private sphere encompasses domestic spaces, bodies, thoughts, communications, and behaviors—contexts that are usually rendered inaccessible to the public eye by legal, social, and physical boundaries.
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Slightly Unbalanced
Curated by Susan Hapgood
All people have their own psychological quirks; we accept this as an essential element of human nature. During the past fifteen years, more and more artists have been probing these peculiarities, exploring neurosis as a primary subject of their art. Slightly Unbalanced features work that deals with a range of psychological tendencies, including anxiety, obsessive behavior, depression and narcissism. The artists question what constitutes normalcy, and what qualifies as neurosis, a slippery and suggestive endeavor.
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Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art
Curated by Stephanie Smith
Balancing environmental, social, economic, and aesthetic concerns, sustainable design has the potential to transform everyday life and is reshaping the fields of architecture and product design. Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art explores the influence of this design philosophy on artists who combine a fresh aesthetic sensibility with a constructively critical approach to the production, dissemination, and display of art.
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Jess: To and From the Printed Page
Curated by Ingrid Schaffner
Jess (1923–2004) was an influential artist who emerged in the 1950s from within the literary context of Beat culture in San Francisco. Focusing on his intimate ties to poetry, books, and printed matter, Jess: To and From the Printed Page features examples of his celebrated impastos together with many of his collages and designs, as well as the books and magazines in which they were reproduced.
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Phantasmagoria: Specters of Absence
Curated by José Roca
Long before large art exhibitions and blockbuster shows, crowds were awed by traveling shows called “phantasmagoria” in which familiar scenes and stories were performed with the use of magic lanterns and rear projections to create dancing shadows and frightening theatrical effects. These lively, interactive events incorporated storytelling, mythology, and theater in a single art form that entertained while providing a space for thinking about the otherworldly—playing with the viewers’ anxieties regarding death and the afterlife. A comparable trend can be seen in works by contemporary artists who create ghostly images to reflect on notions of absence and loss, using spectral effects and immaterial mediums such as shadows, fog, mist, and breath.
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Space Is the Place
Curated by Alex Baker & Toby Kamps
The theme of space exploration—its infinite potential, as well as its historical successes and failures—is the focus of Space Is the Place, featuring installations, paintings, works on paper, and sound and video works made during the past ten years by an international group of contemporary artists.