His treatise on the subject is one of the documents that greets you in the entry gallery of “90 YEARS,” the ICA’s just-opened birthday exhibition. It might seem like an arbitrary anniversary, but really, aren’t they all? Even so, the ICA has good reason to be in a reflective mood. In 2024, it received a grant from the Barr Foundation to help put its extensive archives in proper instititional order. It put the curatorial team in a reflective frame of mind: Longtime director Jill Medvedow, who had stewarded the ICA to its glorious permanent home in the Seaport, had just announced her retirement; new director Nora Burnett Abrams would be named that year. It was time to take stock; why not make it public?
“The question we asked ourselves was, ‘How can we use this opportunity to dig into our history in order to think about what we want to signal for the future?’” said ICA chief curator Ruth Erickson, on a recent walkthrough of the exhibition. In that entry gallery, Plaut’s words are joined by the museum’s founding documents, and records of important, early alliances with both the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, the ICA’s original “sister” institution.
It’s notable that the ICA had broken rank with its heavyweight New York counterpart. But more important, maybe, is the bright collage of photography papering one wall here, showing generations of ICA museum-goers every which way. Plaut’s good intentions seem clearly borne out. An invitation to the public remains an animating force at the ICA: Its education programs, which reach far and wide into the public school system, are its badge of honor; its deep engagement with local community services in the city is money-where-its-mouth-is proof. A rigorous exhibition program of championing contemporary artists has put it indelibly on the map of art museums that matter, and its imprint on the city is deep and significant in ways that its founders could hardly have imagined.
The recent archive project uncovered near-forgotten gems, but it also signaled something in its institutional DNA. In a moment when contemporary, progressive culture is under unprecedented assault from the highest levels of government, a trip through the ICA’s full history offers a critical reminder: This has never been easy. And still, here we are.
Through it all, the ICA has traveled miles, literally and otherwise. The exhibition, helpfully, opens the show by literally drawing you a map. Preliminary research reminded the curatorial team that there was good reason for the record-keeping challenge. In its nine decades, the ICA had been in 13 locations all over Boston. Yes: 13.
“I think that’s the biggest revelation for everybody,” Erickson said. On a recent walkthrough of the exhibition, she gestured to the giant map in the entry gallery, pinpointing each and every iteration of the ICA. The map stretches west to Soldiers Field Road in Brighton, where a glass-and-steel box on stilts was the ICA’s seventh home, twice, from 1960 to 1962, and again briefly, in 1968-69; south to the Fenway, where the School of the Museum of Fine Arts gave it space from 1956 to 1959; north to Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum, its first, brief home in 1936; and finally east, to the Seaport, where the ICA came to rest in its sleek purpose-built building in 2006 for good.
All that in mind, “90 YEARS” — all caps — reads either as a declaration, loud and proud, or an expression of shock. The show doesn’t try to pack everything in, but it does craft an arc with some consistent threads running through. It offers nine mini-exhibitions, strung chronologically, that signpost an outsider institution’s dogged evolution across time and civic space.
Some beguile with faithful recreation: The first in line is a do-over of “Modern Mexican Painters,” from 1941, which helped introduce Mexican contemporary artists like Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueros. Archival photos of the 1941 show provide a delightful cognitive dissonance moment: The very same paintings on the wall, here and now, photographed in black and white on the walls of the ICA’s Beacon Hill home, 85 years ago.
Other chapters here serve as potent reminders that, whatever the city’s stodgy cultural priorities, the ICA was a place where tame consensus had little place. One small room contains, though barely, Andy Warhol’s “Silver Clouds,” a cluster of helium-filled chromium pillow-shaped balloons that drift lazily around (and sometimes out of) the space, propelled by ceiling-mounted fans. Warhol had a big survey at the ICA in the fall of 1966 (at 100 Newbury St., now an H+M); his Factory house band, the Velvet Underground, performed for the occasion.
In hindsight, it’s a moment of whimsy; at the time, the show would have been a revolutionary rebuke of the city’s cultural order. In the end, that’s what the ICA has always been: A place where the new was welcomed, not scorned. Slowly, so slowly, it brought the city along with it. The MFA and Gardner Museum, both staunch guardians of history, have robust contemporary programs. The Harvard Art Museums, with their deep historical collections, are invested in contemporary art now, too. Further afield, institutions like the Tufts University Art Gallery and the de Cordova Museum and Sculpture Garden have run robust contemporary programs. The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis, Harvard’s Carpenter Center, the MassArt Art Museum, and MIT’s List Center help complete the contemporary picture. And just last year, The Boston Public Art Triennial launched with dozens of contemporary public pieces in a citywide endeavor that brought almost all of the city’s major museums into the fold as partners.
That would have been hard to imagine less than half a generation ago. Whether or not that’s the ICA’s doing is surely debatable; what’s not is the consistent, determined mandate that it’s held, the presence it offers, and the standard it sets. “90 YEARS” reveals that the ICA has lived many lives, but significantly, in increasingly level flight. The exhibition inflects its historical displays with works from right now, tying things together across generations. But maybe most striking is an indirect callback across a 50-year expanse of priorities maintained, and then strengthened.
In one space is a reprise of an exhibition from 1974, when the ICA’s situation was at its most dire. The museum, in the midst of yet another move, had been mothballed for a year when it moved into its home at 955 Boylston St., where it would remain until its triumphant final move to the Seaport in 2006. In the basement during renovations, “Seven Sculptors: New Involvement with Materials” presented work by an array of women — Barbara Zucker, Jackie Ferrara — whose work would become part of the foundation of the feminist art movement.
Skip forward a few rooms — and decades — to Ellen Gallagher, whose “Watery Ecstatic” exhibition in 2001 was the now-renowned artist’s first-ever solo museum show. It’s a short hop, figuratively but also literally, to the next room and Simone Leigh, another ICA first-timer whom the museum took to the Venice Biennale as the official American representative in 2022.
It feels like an exclamation point, which I suppose it is. But don’t mistake it for a conclusion. With 90 years behind it, there are countless chapters to come.
90 YEARS
At Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, 25 Harbor Shore Drive. Through March 7. 617-478-3100, icaboston.org
Murray Whyte can be reached at murray.whyte@globe.com.
