Founded in 1963, the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania is a leader in the presentation of contemporary art. ICA enriches the public's understanding by presenting the work of established and emerging artists through exhibitions, commissions, educational programs and publications.

ICA is open to the public, except during installation, from 12:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. on Wednesday through Friday and from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. Admission is $3 for adults; $2 for students over 12, artists, and senior citizens; and free to ICA members, children 12 and under, PENN card holders, and on Sundays from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. For more information, call 215-898-7108, or visit www.icaphila.org

All exhibition information is subject to change. Please call the museum to verify exhibitions, dates, and hours of admission.

Fall Schedule: September 4-December 15, 2002

ICA will kick off its 2002-2003 exhibition schedule with "Pictures, Patents, Monkeys, and More... On Collecting." In the realm of collecting, everything is fair game: comic books, rare porcelains, bottle caps, Old Master drawings, butterflies, antique dolls, modern art -- anything that becomes the object of an individual's enthusiasm for acquiring and saving. This exhibition offers a representative selection of objects from four different kinds of collections. From the Robert J. Shiffler Foundation, a collection of contemporary art in Ohio, comes a gathering of works by artists including Janine Antoni, Karen Finley, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Joel Otterson, Kay Rosen, Michael Snow, Tony Tasset, and others. From a private collection in New York come 100 examples of sock monkeys, a hand-crafted toy, the golden age of which was the 1950s. Representative of collecting as a form of public record are a group of models from the United States Patent Office, to which every optimistic inventor submitted miniature versions of his or her "big idea." The fourth collection included in "Pictures, Patents..." is a local one: Egyptian artifacts from the Dillwyn Parrish Collection of the University of Pennsylvania Museum. This will mark the first time ICA has collaborated with its neighbor institution and will allow a little known collection of antiquities (bequeathed in the 1920s) to be considered in a broader context of collecting as a phenomenon that is both cultural and highly idiosyncratic.

This exhibition's collecting of collections raises provocative questions that are pertinent to institutions and individuals alike: Why do so many of us accumulate objects? What distinguishes an object as art? And how does the creation and collecting of contemporary art differ in value, interest, and purpose from that of other fields?

"Pictures, Patents, Monkeys, and More...On Collecting" is a traveling exhibition organized and circulated by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York, a non-profit traveling exhibition service specializing in contemporary art. Guest curator for the exhibition is Ingrid Schaffner. The exhibition will be accompanied by a 70 page hard-backed exhibition catalogue.

ICA is pleased to present the first solo museum exhibition in the United States of Mexican artist Damian Ortega (b. 1967, lives and works in Mexico City). Ortega's sculptures, photographs, and videos often hinge on the political and cultural currency found in everyday objects and images -- pick-axes, children's toys, tortillas, advertising, weeds -- especially as these relate to his native Mexico. Working in a history of strategic mis-signification that stretches though DaDa, Situationism, and Conceptual art, Ortega is adept at transforming banality into serious commentary on difficult issues like world pollution, uneven development, and globalization. "Cosmic Thing," Ortega's installation for ICA, is comprised of photography and a site-specific, sculptural "decomposition" of an actual VW Beetle suspended in mid-air. Like Ford's Model-T before it, the Bug is mass-produced and user-friendly at once. Ubiquitous in Mexico, the car serves Ortega as an ambiguous metaphor for his country's participation on the global stage. Even at its most conceptual, however, Ortega's work can be deeply humorous and concise in its materials and message. This is no-doubt influenced by the artist's previous career as a political cartoonist, for which he regularly contributed to Mexico's rich culture of newspapers and magazines. The irreverence and real-world focus of this profession translate effortlessly in Ortega's art and resonate strongly with Mexican art's larger tradition of cultural critique and satire.

Ortega is part of a generation of artists that has garnered world-wide attention to the Mexico City art scene. He has exhibited widely throughout North America, Latin America and Europe. Most recently, his work has received a one-person gallery exhibition at D'Amelio-Terras in New York and has been included in exhibitions at PS1, New York, and the Museo Serralves, Porto. This exhibition was initiated by ICA Director Claudia Gould.

With this first solo museum exhibition of the work of Amy Cutler (b. 1974), ICA continues its presentation of emerging artists. In her finely crafted, highly detailed drawings, Cutler creates surrealistic worlds where girls play tether ball with their own heads or young ladies have broomsticks and dustpans for hands. Floating in the midst of crisp, white paper, Cutler's scenes resemble illustrations for fairytales and hark back to the form's dark Germanic roots in Grimm. Often featuring women and animals in struggle or making displays of themselves, these fantasies unfold with a recklessness that is both easy and inscrutable. Adding to their "magic" is Cutler's high level of draftsmanship. Every detail is immaculate, whether a braid of hair, the ruffle on a dress, or a bloody, perfectly formed puncture wound.

Cutler lives and works in New York, where she attended the Cooper Union. She has had one-person gallery shows at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects in New York and at Miller Block Gallery in Boston, MA. Her work has also been featured in exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA; and New Langton Arts in San Francisco. This exhibition is curated by ICA Assistant Curator Elyse Gonzales.

Winter Schedule: January 18-April 6, 2003

Since the 1960s, Edna Andrade (b. 1917) has created a body of paintings that has pursued a formal logic based in geometric abstraction and opticality. Influenced by modernist painters such as Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, and Josef Albers, Andrade's paintings incorporate a pared-down vocabulary of shapes such as circles, triangles, squares, and pentagons and a deceptively simple color palate made more complex through the works' compositions. ICA's exhibition will focus on paintings from 1963 through 1988: a period when Andrade followed a distinctly optical course, and one which coincides with movements in art -- Op, Minimalism, Pattern Painting -- that relate to the pure pursuit of geometric and abstract design. Concerned more with the psychology of perception than with expression or narrative, Andrade has written, "with the new art, paintings are no longer to be looked at -- or into... They possess positive action." That is to say, they create an active, bodily, and visual engagement with their viewers. In many ways, Andrade's work from this period may be seen to presage our own technological Zeitgeist's fascination with data, repetition, and images as built perceptual machines.

A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Andrade has worked as an art teacher and a designer in addition to making paintings. Organized by the ICA and guest-curator Debra Bricker Balken, this exhibition marks the first large-scale major museum survey of Andrade's work and will be accompanied by a catalogue publication with essays by Balken and others. An exhibition of the artist's more recent figurative paintings will run concurrently at the Locks Gallery in Philadelphia, where she has shown for many years.

"Intricacy"
January 18-April 6, 2003

Guest curated by the architect and theorist Greg Lynn, this exhibition includes works by artists, designers, and architects that reflect an emerging sensibility Lynn has labeled "intricacy." This notion refers, in the abstract, to a new visual and spatial language of folding, interweaving, and layering -- parts relating to wholes -- that has been heralded by the digital and genetic engineering revolutions. Intricacy announces a gestalt of production: not just CAD-CAM drawings for architects or digital video for artists, but a new way of thinking about the inter-relation of concepts and techniques on an abstract, holistic scale. This exhibition, with an installation designed by Lynn himself, synthesizes a vast geography of ideas and practices drawn from many disciplines and cultural fields.

One of the most innovative theorists of architecture and technology at work today, Lynn serves on the faculty at ETH Zurich and the University of California Los Angeles and is the principal of the architecture firm Greg Lynn FORM, based in Los Angeles. In conjunction with "Intricacy," ICA will co-host, with the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Architecture, a symposium addressing issues raised by the exhibition. A 50-page catalogue publication, made as a tabloid-style magazine and featuring essays by Lynn and a preface by ICA Director Claudia Gould, will accompany the exhibition.

Justine Kurland
January 18-April 6, 2003

Justine Kurland's photographs are about adolescence, awkwardness, girls, the American landscape, secrets, and quiet, private dreams of community that hide behind tough exteriors and blank faces. Relatively large-scale, sumptuously rich in color, and theatrically staged, Kurland's images typically position teen-age girls hanging out together in some forsaken corner of some forgotten field, forest, highway underpass, lake or beach. The girls look "whatever" cool, bodies adrift from themselves and the world. Kurland's landscapes and her girls are analogies of each other, in-between spaces where identity and function have not yet been fixed or have begun to slip ambiguously into freedom. On some level these are images of innocence fading, but in a positive sense, where the transformation of na