Word: ica
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...large extent, this tiny institution is a reflection of the tastes and skill of the person running it, and the level of taste and skill has varied quite a bit throughout the past years. These days, it's impossible to talk about the ICA without talking about its director of one year, a young and energetic man by the name of David Ross. "I'm here because I like what I do," says Ross, "and I'm committed to contemporary art. It's hard for some people to support contemporary art--it's an unknown, it takes a little courage...
...experimenter," says James Plaut '33, the original director of the ICA, "but he's the right kind of experimenter. He approaches things with great enthusiasm, but also with thorough knowledge and great calm." Linda Stux, owner and director of the Stux Gallery on Newbury St., echoes those sentiments. "The ICA has changed tremendously," she says. "Ross is very accessible and open-minded, and he's using the ICA to focus on the good artists here in Boston. His energy level is so high, it's contagious. There's a real feeling that something is happening in Boston, the art scene...
...ICA seems to be serving, as never before in its history, as a catalyst for change in the Boston arts scene. Only for the past three years has the institution even had an annual exhibition of the work of Boston artists. For years the institution's emphasis seemed to be only on mounting exhibitions of the work of rising stars on the international art scene...
...Northern European modernist painters, leaving the New York branch to deal primarily with the Paris school of modernists. For some years this was a most fruitful setup for the tiny Boston MOMA. Oskar Kokoschka, Edvard Munch, and Georges Rouault were virtually unknown in this country when the ICA first exhibited their work...
After that push the ICA became an innovator. It was one of the first institutions to show the works of Henry Moore, and in the late 60s, it was one of the first to begin community outreach art programs. But the leadership then took a turn for the worse. As Plaut admits, "Over the years the ICA has had waves of success and failure, good leadership and not so good." Some critics have maintained that during the late 60s and early 70s the ICA lost almost all of its reputation, run as it was by the girlfriends of trustees. "That...