The Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art & Design (ICA at MECA&D) is pleased to announce the opening of two new exhibitions, CONJURING: 25 Years at the ICA and A Fresh Greeting is Heard. An opening reception will be held July 15, from 5-8pm.
This year, the Institute of Contemporary Art celebrates a quarter of a century in Maine College of Art & Design’s Porteous building in downtown Portland. For 25 years, the Institute of Contemporary Art has cultivated engagement and dialogue regarding contemporary visual art practices, fostering discourse on the critical conversations of our time and enhancing understanding of visual culture. CONJURING: 25 Years at the ICA is an archival exhibition, reflecting on our past and looking forward, celebrating the artists and curators who have come through the Institute of Contemporary Art since its inception in 1997.
“At its heart, the exhibition is a community project, honoring a quarter century of work and recognizing the amazing people who have exhibited, curated, and activated the ICA,” notes Director of Exhibitions, Julie Poitras Santos.
Building on past work at the Baxter Gallery, the ICA operates as a learning laboratory for MECA&D students and a center for public programming regarding contemporary art that engages with the local, national, and global art community. CONJURING: 25 Years at the ICA includes an archive of past exhibitions, interviews, ICA publications, posters, news coverage, and other ephemera from a quarter century of supporting the work of living artists; catalogs of past exhibitions will be on sale.
In the Evans Hunt and Lunder Galleries, a second exhibition presents works in painting, ceramics, and video. The natural world has long influenced artists in Maine, and the proximity to these wild spaces is one of the reasons we are drawn here. A Fresh Greeting is Heard highlights the work of four artists, two working in Maine, who complicate our understandings of nature, navigating realms between abstraction and figuration to tease out the disquiet and enchantment of wild spaces, magic in transformation, meaningful imagery in ambiguous forms, and the agency of natural places in our collective imagination.
These two exhibitions together extend the ICA’s extraordinary history of presenting contemporary art that engages with the local, national, and global art community.
For more information about the exhibition, please visit the ICA website.
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