Tammy Nguyen’s first solo museum exhibition in the U.S featured paintings layered with history and lush landscapes.

A solo exhibition in the ICA Watershed by artist Guadalupe Maravilla was grounded in activism and healing, informed by his story of fleeing El Salvador as an unaccompanied child.

Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, featured artists from or inspired by the Caribbean including María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Teresita Fernández, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Ana Mendieta, Suchitra Mattai, Lorraine O’Grady, and Ebony G. Patterson.

The ICA partnered with Veronica Robles Cultural Center to host a Day of the Dead celebration featuring artist-created altars, performances, and a parade.

A site-specific commission by Igshaan Adams greeted visitors to the museum. The wall-sized work used beads, rope, chain, and pink mohair to depict and soften the “hard edges and coldness” of hypermasculine Cape Town areas of his youth.

The first North American survey dedicated to the richly layered work of Firelei Báez explored the legacy of colonial histories and the African diaspora in the Caribbean and beyond.

The touring exhibition of drawings, large-scale paintings, and installations included the wall-size Man Without a Country (aka anthropophagist wading in the Artibonite River) from the ICA Collection.

The artist appeared for an Artist’s Voice talk with Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs Ruth Erickson and Curator of the Arts of Global Africa and Diaspora at the Art Gallery of Ontario Julie Crooks.

Boston artist Mithsuca Berry, an ICA Teens alum, created Destiny Doorways, a hands-on art-making experience exploring the winding pathways lives might take, for the Bank of America Art Lab.

MacArthur-winning movement artist Shamel Pitts presented the afrofuturist-inspired BLACK HOLE—Trilogy And Triathlon.

Innovative documentarian Sam Green presented an immersive study of sound.

And legendary Sweet Honey in the Rock packed the house with Affirmations for a New World, presented in collaboration with Jazz Urbane Cafe and the Longy School of Music.

The 2023 James and Audrey Foster Prize awarded three artists with the biannual prize celebrating Boston-based artists. Venetia Dale works with found embroidery and cast pewter to visualize intimacy and care in domestic life.

Cicely Carew wields the formal, material, and sculptural aspects of painting to evoke feelings of radical joy, hope, and liberation.

Yu-Wen Wu’s interdisciplinary work examines issues of displacement, arrival, and assimilation, and the shape of identity in a new country.

Wordplay gathered works from the ICA Collection that use language in innovative and evocative ways.

Participants in the Teen Exhibitions Program organize exhibitions for the Teen Gallery in Seaport Studio. Our teen programs responded directly to what we heard from our participants about their financial realities: all intensive program participants are now paid.

We kicked off summer with two Boston Public School high school graduation ceremonies hosted on the grandstand.

Wu Tsang’s immersive installation Of Whales, inspired by Herman Melville’s classic 1851 American novel Moby Dick and powered by extended reality technologies from the Unity gaming platform, mesmerized visitors.

We celebrated Juneteenth with free admission and live performances by Anabel Gil Diaz and Samuel Batista, presented in collaboration with partner Jazz Urbane Cafe.

Former ICA chief curator Helen Molesworth returned for a talk with Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director, about her book Open Questions: Thirty Years of Writing About Art.

Vinyl Nights featuring local DJs drew large audiences for dancing on the Harbor.

We ended the year with the opening of Hew Locke: The Procession at the Watershed.

Commissioned by Tate Britain, this ambitious installation includes 140 life-size sculptures of masked figures in printed fabrics and embroideries informed by Locke’s formative years in Guyana and arranged in a procession engaging with the legacies of colonialism and empire.