Institute of Contemporary Art and Watershed Excursion

Join us on Wednesday, August 13 for a very special trip to see two exhibits at the Institute of Contemporary Art. We will begin at 10:50 am with a guided tour of the work of Stanley Whitney, a contemporary African-American artist. Following lunch, we travel by boat to the ICA Watershed to experience the art of Chiharu Shiota. More information on both of these artists continues below.

Admission to the ICA is $14 for non-members, including the Watershed and the boat trip to and from.  The private guided tour is an addiional $10.   We will be ordering lunch from SweetGreen in the Seaport District and eat together on the outside terrace.  The boat for the Watershed departs at 1:15 pm.

Please contact Diane Winkelman at dianewinkelman@gmail.com to register no later than August 1  Parking in the area can be difficult and expensive so please indicate whether you are interested in car pooling.  

More about Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon

From early breakthroughs to mature formal experiments, How High the Moon is the first retrospective to trace the evolution of Stanley Whitney’s wholly unique and powerful abstractions over the course of his 50-year career. The exhibition’s title is inspired by the 1940 song penned by Nancy Hamilton and Morgan Lewis, which became a jazz standard that has conveyed enchantment, longing, and, in some interpretations, has reached for the sublime. 

Since he began making them in 2002, Whitney’s square-format, loosely gridded abstract canvases have increasingly captured the imagination of viewers. Each contains four horizontal rows of alternately askant and ordered squares painted in varying degrees of opacity. While Whitney’s format has remained consistent over the past twenty years, no painting is the same as another. As he builds these immersive abstractions, Whitney holds space for his viewers to focus not on each painting’s subject, but rather on our own response to color. 

How High the Moon features extensive installations of the artist’s improvisatory small paintings; his drawings and prints, which constitute their own important practice for Whitney; and a chronological selection of the artist’s sketchbooks spanning from 1987 to 2021, which offer a view into Whitney’s engagement with the written word as well as politics. Throughout, his work is put in the context of his diverse sources of inspiration, which include music, poetry, American quilts, and the history of art and architecture, among many others. 

Whitney’s powerful, color-saturated abstractions give viewers the space to feel what it means to be human, to mentally wander, and to gather the strength to survive. This touring retrospective, the first survey of Whitney’s work ever assembled, demonstrates the true height of his achievement. 

More about the Watershed and the Chiharu Shiota exhibit

In 2018, the ICA opened its new ICA Watershed to the public, expanding artistic and educational programming on both sides of Boston Harbor—the Seaport and East Boston. Located in the Boston Harbor Shipyard and Marina, the ICA Watershed transformed a 15,000-square-foot, formerly condemned space into a cultural asset to experience large-scale, immersive exhibitions every summer. During the pandemic, the Watershed was used as a food distribution site to address a direct need within the East Boston community. The cross-harbor connection to the Watershed was designed to deepen the vibrant intersection of contemporary art and civic life in Boston and is central to the ICA’s vision of art, civic life, and urban vitality. 

In her awe-inspiring installations, Chiharu Shiota (born 1972 in Osaka, Japan; lives and works in Berlin) tells stories of migration, home, connection, memory, and consciousness. Using line in the form of string, Shiota creates immersive installations that underscore human connection and experience. For the ICA Watershed, Shiota presents two signature, large-scale installations that consider the ways humans collect memories and form connections as they move and travel: Accumulation – Searching for the Destination (2014/2025) and a newly commissioned installation, Home Less Home (2025).

In Accumulation – Searching for the Destination, dozens of vintage suitcases hang from red rope, occasionally shaking with the turbulence of anticipation. For Shiota, who brought only one suitcase with her when she moved from Japan to Berlin in 1996, the suitcase symbolizes the starting point of a new journey. Home Less Home features an enormous field of red and black ropes forming the shape of a house. Within this symbolic form, Shiota suspends paper documents—passports, letters, immigration papers, messages—and embeds beds, desks, chairs, and tables to underscore how people create their homes through communication, stories, and objects. Together, these transporting works consider the journey towards one home and away from another.