90 YEARS — Beyond the Galleries
90 YEARS — Beyond the Galleries expands the ICA’s 90th-anniversary programming beyond the main fourth-floor exhibition. Additional works are installed throughout the building, inviting visitors to encounter pieces from the museum’s history and collection on multiple floors, including video, photography, text-based installations, and neon works.
The presentation includes Joan Logue’s portraits of North Shore fishermen, Jenny Holzer’s stairwell installation of provocative text, eleven photographs from Rineke Dijkstra’s long-running Almerisa series, and Glenn Ligon’s two text-based neon works overlooking Boston Harbor. Together, the works explore community, migration, identity, race, American history, and the ICA’s own exhibition legacy.
When: October 1, 2026–March 7, 2027
Venue: Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston
Showtimes: No specific showtimes are listed. The works are presented throughout the museum and are available to visitors during the ICA’s regular operating hours.
Tickets: Price not available
First Floor: Joan Logue’s *Video Portraits: New England Fishermen* presents concise video portraits made in nearby Gloucester, Massachusetts. Logue, who has worked with communities since the 1970s, created the portraits with North Shore fishermen as part of her broader practice responding to television-shaped attention spans. The project was supported by the Contemporary Art Television Fund, a collaboration between the ICA and WGBH-TV that helped produce and distribute video art.
Stairwell: Jenny Holzer’s site-specific *Inflammatory Wall* (1979–82) consists of selections from her *Inflammatory Essays*, which use capitalized text on brightly colored paper. Holzer’s work draws on and rearranges language from varied sources, placing direct and challenging statements into public spaces. The installation connects to Holzer’s 1983 participation in the ICA’s CURRENTS program, explored in greater depth in the main *90 YEARS* exhibition.
Third-Floor Lobby: The presentation of Rineke Dijkstra’s works from *Almerisa* (1994–ongoing) includes eleven photographs from the ICA Collection. The series began after Dijkstra photographed children of asylum seekers in Dutch refugee centers, including five-year-old Almerisa Šehrić, who had recently arrived from Bosnia. Almerisa became the subject of Dijkstra’s longest-running photographic project. Some of these photographs were first shown at the ICA in 2001 and have returned in later exhibitions as the collection has developed.
John Hancock Founders Gallery, Fourth Floor: Glenn Ligon’s installation includes *Rückenfigur* (2009) and *Another Country (After James Baldwin)* (2016), two text-based neon works situated above Boston Harbor. Ligon uses language to consider race, identity, and American history, while the works together examine how those subjects remain bound up with ideas of America, including the country’s 250th anniversary.
Artworks: The presentation includes Joan Logue’s *Video Portraits: New England Fishermen*; Jenny Holzer’s *Inflammatory Wall*; Rineke Dijkstra’s works from *Almerisa*; and Glenn Ligon’s *Rückenfigur* and *Another Country (After James Baldwin)*.
Run time: No overall event duration is given. Logue’s video portraits are described as approximately 30 seconds each; the source also identifies a 14-minute, 55-second single-channel video format for *Video Portraits: New England Fishermen*.
Ages: No age restriction is listed.
Accessibility: No specific accessibility information is provided.
Organization: The exhibition is organized by Meghan Clare Considine, Jeffrey De Blois, Ruth Erickson, Max Gruber, Tessa Bachi Haas, and Erika Umali, with Brianne Chapelle serving as Curatorial Department Manager.
Note: The presentation is shown in conjunction with the special *90 YEARS* anniversary exhibition on the fourth floor. No separate schedule, performance lineup, or event-specific accessibility details are listed.