No Longer ‘Banned in Boston,’ Modern Art Gets New Home

Boston has never quite managed to escape its Puritan founders.

Stringent censorship policies against “objectionable” content stunted the Boston arts scene for much of the last two centuries. The phrase “Banned in Boston” became a joke among the cultural elite, who observed that censorship in Boston meant almost guaranteed success in the rest of the country.

Today there is some effort to make up for lost time, but Boston still largely remains entrenched in its history and ambivalent towards change.

Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), however, has a different definition of history. Founded in 1936 as the first museum in the United States dedicated solely to contemporary art, the ICA has a long tradition of supporting the present.

This cutting-edge museum was responsible for introducing Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol to Boston audiences and launching the careers of artists like Cindy Sherman and Kara Walker.

The ICA has nevertheless long been an underdog, skipping between rented locations and finally settling in an old police station.

But this September, the ICA will finally come into its own as it opens the doors of its new $62 million building on the Boston waterfront.

‘A MUSEUM THAT MAKES HISTORY’

The glass building will feature upper galleries that extend over the water, and a theatre space glazed in clear glass that allows the harbor view to become the stage’s backdrop.

Gallery space totaling 17,000 square feet will allow the ICA to build a permanent collection for the first time, something which was impossible in the past due to its lack of sufficient exhibition space.

The ICA has a formidable past record of exhibiting artists like Edvard Munch, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roy Lichtenstein early in their careers. Though it was not able to collect in the past, the museum will now be able to purchase works from the next generation of rising artists featured in future exhibitions.

If the museum had always been able to buy work, it would now have “one of the greatest collections in the country, if not the world,” said Barbara Lee, a Boston philanthropist whose foundation has donated $6.5 million to the new building.

The opening of the new ICA coincides with a time of incredible development across Boston’s art world, following about a century of inactivity.

A $425 million expansion of the Museum of Fine Arts will open in 2010, and the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum is planning a new building, according to their respective websites.

Harvard is scheduled to renovate the Fogg and Busch-Reisinger Museums in 2008 and is currently negotiating a center for modern art in Allston, The Crimson reported this February.

So what will set the ICA apart from the wave of new construction? As Lee puts it, “Most museums focus on history rather than making history. The ICA is a museum that makes history.”

Under director Jill Medvedow, the ICA is involved in creating art as well as exhibiting it; among its many projects, the museum funds outdoor conceptual art installations across the city, like this year’s computer-animated illustrations of pedestrians by Julian Opie displayed on LED screens on Northern Avenue Bridge.

However, many Boston institutions see a different view of the relationship between contemporary art and history.

William Stover, assistant curator for contemporary art at the MFA, writes in an e-mail that the MFA presents contemporary art in a “historical context due to the nature of its encyclopedic collection.”

Harry Cooper, associate curator of modern art at the Fogg, takes a similar position, saying of the Harvard Art Museums’ modern collection that “we’re historically minded.

We’re interested in seeing the whole chronology of art.” Cooper says he worries that museums devoted exclusively to 20th-century art might create a disconnect between modern artists and their past.

When the Fogg is closed for renovations, Cooper stresses that the Sackler will display modern and contemporary art alongside other selections from Harvard’s permanent collection.

“We don’t want to create a ghetto where all the modern and contemporary art is in one place, apart from the rest of the collection.”

A LACK OF RECENT ART

While Boston’s museums have succeeded to some extent in acquiring modern art that is already renowned, they have met the work of emerging artists with more reluctance.

Museums often group modern art (late 19th-century to 1970) and contemporary art together, shifting the focus from new artists to a general understanding of art created in the 20th century.

The Department of Contemporary Art at the MFA, for example, deals with all art made after 1955. While the museum does acquire recent work, the department’s strength is its collection of early 1960s color-field painters.

The situation is similar at the Fogg. The modern collection is strong, including a Jackson Pollack and works by sculptor David Smith, but there are far fewer pieces by artists currently producing work.

“I think Harvard resists the unpredictability of living art,” says Linda Norden, associate curator of contemporary art at the Fogg. “I think it embraces the arts as a subject for analysis and appreciation.”

Harvard’s contemporary collection is very small, due to the fact that the department was started with virtually no endowed funds. Norden, who is leaving at the end of June, says that she found it “exciting but often frustrating” to do contemporary art in the context of a historical museum such as the Fogg.

The new ICA will bring contemporary expression in visual art, dance, music, and spoken word to the public, with a busy fall season of performances, lectures, outdoor events, and exhibitions.

Norden says she thinks that the ICA will serve as a “great catalyst” for the Boston arts scene in general. Its role will be very different from Harvard’s proposed center of modern art, she says, but “the competition between the two will only be good for Boston.”

Others across the city are eagerly looking to the ICA to usher in a new era in Boston’s relationship with contemporary art. Says Lee, “If something exciting is happening at one museum, other museums become more courageous.”