Institute of Contemporary Art

Nelida Nassar provides an overview of cultural offerings for the week of August 15 to 21. From Harvard Film Archives to previews of the anticipated Broadway bound production of Porgy and Bess at American Repertory Theatre.

During the dog days of Summer, here are some interesting leads on entrainment and culture for the week of Augst 8 for those of you hanging out in Boston. Summer in the City may simmer, but there are many cool things to do in Boston.

Eva Hesse was arguably one of the 20th Century's great sculptors male or female. Challenging herself with new, nontraditional and experimental materials and techniques, her work both synthesizes and transcends Minimalism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and Conceptual Art. The rarely seen and rather small Studiowork pieces now on view at the ICA are 50 process and test sculptural objects that indicate the thought and direction of the artist as her worked developed. The small size of the exhibit leaves the viewer wanting much more.

Forty years later to the day a group of Boston artists, organized by Boston Phoenix art critic, Greg Cook, recreated a preemptive strike on the uptight and stuffy MFA. In a roto rooter event artists hung their works in the male and female rest rooms of the venerable Fenway dowager. The exhibition and reception was busted, rather politely, after just twenty hilarious minutes. But 21 artists can now put the MFA on their resume. Three of the artists, Robert Guillemin (Sidewalk Sam), David Raymond, and Jo Sandman reprieved their original participation. The big question focused on whether or not the MFA has really changed over the past 40 years?

For the past few decades, cities and prominent institutions have focused on creation of iconic buildings by star architects to underscore their prominence. After three major attempts in the last 25 years, The Whitney Museum of American Art has given up on building expansion of their Marcel Breuer designed iconic structure and are building a new museum downtown in NYC's Meatpacking District. This is a major statement about institutional icons.

Exploring with inflatables since the early 1960s, the multidimensional artist Otto Piene has been dazzling viewers with spectacular kinetic gestures of floating form, structure and line. On May 7, Piene's Sky Art piece was part of the culminating event of the FAST Festival. With the assistance of a group of artists, students and MIT alumni, Piene's environmental art flew as a brightly lit star over Killian Court. However, Otto Piene is a world class artist that has not been properly recognized.

Fed up with its lack of interest in contemporary art on June 15, 1971 a group of Boston artists organized a top secret exhibition Flush with the Walls in the Men's Room of the Museum of Fine Arts. It scared the crap out of then director Perry T. Rathbone. Fearing further guerrilla attacks shortly after the infamous stunt the museum appointed Kenworth Moffett as its first curator of Contemporary Art.

The third conference, presented byTransCultural Exchange in Boston, closed on Sunday, April 10 to great applause for director, Mary Sherman, sponsors, board members, staff and volunteers. It was again a phenomenal effort with participants from around the world. If you were not in the position to attend the conference, but have ambitions to exhibit or work internationally, or attend national or international retreats, residencies or symposia, please also read this article. It includes a number of hyperlinks to organizations and websites for easy research.

Appropriately titled: ‘The Interconnected World’ the conference will be held from April 7 – 10. Mary Sherman, the TransCultural Exchange director, again will bring together global speakers and participants in a chock-full four day long conference. Interactive panel discussions, exhibitions, music events, book and poetry readings, portfolio reviews, workshops demystifying subjects and much more will offer new opportunities in the US and world-wide organizations at an ever greater event.

Since designing Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art in 2006, architects Diller Scofidio+Renfro have become something of the architectural flavor of the decade for art institutions and universities. Their latest project which opened in February at Brown University in Providence is another one of their bold visual statements that says as much about the multi-arts center that it houses as the aesthetics of the designers. It is an edifice visually to embrace.

The AICA-USA awards ceremony, which has been held annually for more than 25 years, will take place at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art on March 14 2011 at 6 PM. Awards will be presented by a group of distinguished artists and curators. Elizabeth C. Baker will be honored with a special Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Field of Criticism. Museum curators, artists and critics from around the country are expected to attend.

The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) presents ambitious performing arts programming for Winter/Spring 2011, including world-premiere dance, revolutionary theater and a vaudevillian spectacular. The New Music Now series returns with three exciting concerts of adventurous music, and the ICA presents its first "live documentary," narrated by filmmaker Sam Green alongside live performances by sound artist David Cerf and band The Quavers (featuring special guest Brendan Canty of Fugazi).

The world-premiere adaptation of LYSISTRATA by the renowned puppet artist, writer and director Theodora Skipitares – which mixes Aristophanes’ ancient comic tale about a group of Greek women who withhold sex from their husbands and lovers with video and newsreel footage of actual modern-day international sex strikes – is being presented by La MaMa ETC in association with Skysaver Productions, with an opening set for Sunday, February 6 at the Ellen Stewart Theatre (66 E. 4 St.) in Manhattan.

The MIT List Visual Arts Center and the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston present the first museum survey of the work of media art pioneer Stan VanDerBeek (1927-1984). Surveying the artist's remarkable body of work in collage, experimental film, performance, participatory, and computer-generated art over several decades, Stan VanDerBeek: The Culture Intercom highlights the artist's pivotal contributions to today's media-based artistic practices.

Every two years, the Institute of Contemporary Art chooses an emerging artist to recognize by celebrating their work and awarding them $25,000. This year's winner of the James and Audrey Foster Prize is Anie Siegal. Siegel works in 16mm and 35mm film, video, photography, sound, and writing. She often uses cinematic images as a material means to a conceptual end. For the ICA's 2010 Foster Prize exhibition, Siegel created Black Moon, a 20-minute film accompanied by prints of individual frames from the film.

In certain aspects of its collection, Old Kingdom Egypt and Asiatic Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is a world class museum. With the creation of the Art of the Americas wing the museum hopes to rank second to none among American museums. But, as the Bard would say, "What's in a name?" A closer look reveals formidable depth and glaring gaps in the attempt to cover 3,000 years of art on two continents.

Seemingly unworried by the current economic state, the ICA announced today the addition of two prominent new curators to their staff. Jenelle Porter is an institutionally well-travelled curator bringing a quality background to the ICA. Also added is Pedro Alonzo, one of the truly cutting edge museum professionals in the contemporary art world. These appointments will add depth and breath to the ICA's mission.

When the Boston Expressionist Hyman Bloom (March 29, 1913 to August 26, 2009) passed away none of his works were on view in the major New England museums. Bloom, his partner Jack Levine, and Karl Zerbe were the leaders of what is regarded as the most significant and influential movement of artists in Boston during the 20th century. Their neglect has been a scandal for Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. We are informed that a work by Bloom will be hung in the new wing of the MFA which opens in November. It remains to be seen how the museum will treat Levine and Zerbe. The MFA owns a minor work by the still living Levine which it acquired through the WPA.

Staying only for a few months at various locations around the world, Puma City is a movable piece of temporary utilitarian architecture. Made of metal shipping containers, it is a three tiered architectural retail event now being bolted together near Fenway Park. Red and flashy yet cool and made from recycled materials, it is architecture as brand.

Arnold Trachtman is the best Boston painter you probably have never heard of. Part of that is his own fault for sticking to a life long commitment to depicting social and political issues in art when that is definitely not in fashion. We pay tribute to a great artist and friend on the occasion of his 80th birthday.

The American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.), under the Artistic Direction of Diane Paulus, is pleased to announce further details of its 2010/11 Season, beginning on August 31 with Cabaret, followed by Alice vs. Wonderland, The Blue Flower, R. Buckminster Fuller â€" The History (and mystery) of the Universe, Ajax, Prometheus Bound, and Death and the Powers: The Robots’ Opera.

After 6500 miles and 33 days, we returned home ! We had traveled through more than ten states, visited many museums and other cultural sites. We saw America's natural wonders, spent lovely days with old friends and met many interesting people along the way. Please follow us through our journey via photos and entries in my diary.

This show of recent acquisitions from the last 6 years of collecting by the Museum of Fine Arts is full of small gems, and one big one. Does it hint of more substantial works to come in the East Wing this fall?

Originally constructed in the 1930s to lift dangerous freight trains off Manhattan's streets, the High Line is an abandoned elevated train track. When completed, this piece of dormant infrastructure will be a 1.5 mile public park running through Manhattan's Lower West Side neighborhoods. Created as an integrated landscape, designed by landscape architects James Corner Field Operations, with architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the High Line combines meandering concrete pathways with naturalistic plantings. It is already an urban jewel.

Every three years, the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt has its Triennial. Every three years, it is a mix of truly good sometimes great design along with examples of eccentric sometimes simple-minded objects and systems. The jurying process has always been questionable and less than transparent. Too often it seems friends of friends are chosen. This year the Tricentennial of the Unites States' design museum has gone global with designs from both emerging and industrialized countries. No other country's design museum would feature foreign designers. Instead, they would celebrate their own country's best design and designers. In addition, the exhibit is rather strangely laid out, captioned to confuse and badly focused. Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?