By Katie Koenig
The Institute of Contemporary Art is a small museum. You can find it in Seaport in an imposing metal and glass building, but the entrance is a small door on the side that opens into a full lobby to buy tickets.
Outside, though, are large, plastic, spinning seats. They look a little like yoyos, essentially an hourglass where the top curves in like a bowl to create a seat and the bottom comes out to a point for the seat to pivot on. Thankfully, I got there right before people came in droves, so I didn’t have to wait to sit on one of these pivoting seats. It was ridiculously fun to rotate around on the ground, feeling the rush with my head tilted towards the ground as I spun.
Inside, the interactive exhibits continued. There’s a massive glass elevator you can use to get up to the fourth floor, where all of the exhibits are. When I went, only four were on display, although Charles Atlas: About Time will also open on October 10th.
Wordplay is an entire exhibit on text art, providing neon light works, paintings, photographs, and multimedia productions that all incorporate words and text to highlight certain themes in the art. In the back is a chalk wall that you can actually draw on.
Just one of the many works on display, this wall, or Zé Carioca e amigos (Um festival embananado), is based on a well known Brazilian comic strip about a dapper, Brazilian parrot. The artist, Rivane Neuenschwander, takes Zé Carioca panels and strips them of their images and text, but leaves blocks of colors in each panel and the blank speech bubbles for museum-goers to fill in as they please.
I also saw Spirit Level, which is artist Tau Lewis’s exhibition that displays the connections between found materials, imbued emotions in handicrafts, and the diasporic cultures she is a part of. The catalog for Spirit Level goes into more detail about the connections Lewis makes and imbues into her work, but I was particularly fascinated by the fact that the five statues, each much taller than a single person, and huge floor quilt are made from upcycled fabrics and other materials like seashells, keys, and photographs that she found around the areas she’s lived.
The last exhibit I saw was the Gun Violence Memorial Project, started in 2019, that displays two mini white brick and glass houses with keepsakes in individual nooks labeled with each person’s name and years they lived that died from gun violence. Their families have donated these mementos for others to remember their children, siblings, and parents. A video plays in the back of the room with interviews of the family members that donated each item as they talk about their lost loved ones.
Finally reaching the back of the floor, the memorial room leads to a back hall with lounges facing a completely glass wall that looks out onto the water. It’s a quiet, peaceful space, useful to sit down for a literal and metaphorical break from standing and experiencing the intriguing exhibits and heavy topics.
When I went, I had to head back through the exhibits to reach the elevators. I noticed that there was a small room off to the side that I had initially missed; a little interactive drawing nook to design and staple together mini dancing costumes with fabric scraps and pencils on a paper stencil of a dancing figure.
The whole museum emphasizes this interactiveness, no matter when you go. Even for exhibits that you don’t physically touch, like Spirit Level, they’re still intended so that visitors walk around and view them from all angles, wandering through rooms of immersive artworks that makes for an engaging afternoon.
Although there aren’t many exhibits, Emerson students can get in for free, as long as you specify that you’re an Emerson student at the ticket desk when asking for admission. Emerson is part of the group of universities that provides free admission to certain art museums across Boston, and the ICA and Gardner Museums are just some of the locations that allow this!