Image: Opening preview of "Andy Warhol" exhibition, the Institute of Contemporary Art (October 1 – November 6, 1966): left to right, Holly Solomon, Andy Warhol, and International Velvet (Susan Bottomly), September 30, 1966. ICA Archives, Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston
The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston will mark its 90th anniversary with "90 YEARS", an exhibition on view from 15 October 2026 to 7 March 2027 in the Bridgitt and Bruce Evans and Karen and Brian Conway Galleries. Rather than offering a conventional survey, the show returns to nine exhibitions and initiatives from the museum's past to trace how the institution has changed alongside contemporary art itself.
The ICA was founded in 1936 as the Boston Museum of Modern Art, a sister institution to New York's Museum of Modern Art, and is among the oldest museums in the United States devoted to contemporary art. Responding to what it described as the "world chaos and social unrest" of the postwar years, it adopted its present name in 1948 to signal its commitment to the art of its own time. Over nine decades it has occupied thirteen different locations.
Among the episodes revisited is "Modern Mexican Painters" (1941), which the museum says introduced many American viewers to contemporary painting in Mexico, including work by José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. In 1966 the ICA hosted a survey of Andy Warhol and gave the premiere of his Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a multimedia event combining live music, dance and projected film, with a performance by the Velvet Underground.
From 1984 to 1991, working with WGBH's New Television Workshop, the ICA commissioned and co-produced more than twenty video works for television broadcast through its Contemporary Art Television (CAT) Fund, with artists including Laurie Anderson, Joan Jonas and Tony Oursler. The opening of its waterfront building by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in 2006 coincided with the start of a permanent collection, which has since acquired works such as Yayoi Kusama's LOVE IS CALLING, one of the largest of her infinity mirror rooms. In 2022 the ICA commissioned Simone Leigh to represent the United States at the 59th Venice Biennale, and later brought her sculptures back to Boston in a touring survey.
The museum presents these moments, together with the many programmes and publications in between, as the story of an institution shaped by artists, audiences and experimentation, and uses the anniversary to consider what it might become next.
The exhibition has been organised collectively by the ICA's curatorial team, including Ruth Erickson, Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, Jeffrey De Blois, Erika Umali, Tessa Bachi Haas, Meghan Clare Considine and Max Gruber.
