Many years ago, I started seeing a boy I thought I liked, but there was a problem. It was baseball season. This was in Boston in the late eighties, and the boy was a devoted Red Sox fan. Whenever I went over to his place, the TV was on, and he and his friends were…

“I went to Carnegie Tech for one year, for Bauhaus training,” Ann Wilson says. “But my parents wanted to know where I was every night.” Of course they did: this was in the early 1950s. Seated at one end of a long table in ICA’s auditorium, the painter and performance artist describes how she finally…

“I was a designer at the Coconut Grove for four years in Florida,” Peter Harvey says, recalling the years in the 1950s when he lived with Paul Thek. “Paul painted. He had a little job at the Doubleday bookstore at night, so he could paint during the day. But I must confess, he spent a…

“Would you like to draw?” It’s noon on a bright spring Saturday. Ingrid is wearing a black-and-white puppy Cerberus t-shirt with a short navy blue artist’s apron over her jeans. Zippy with excitement, she stands in ICA’s lobby welcoming every visitor. “This is drawing-all-over ICA day!” she explains. “We’ve got a still life set up…

Dear citizens of Philadelphia, I am looking for volunteers who are willing to pose for a portrait, sitting and communicating.Time spent: 1–3 hours. My goal is to create a story about the city of Philadelphia, its past and its presence, through the stories which you are willing to tell me about yourself and your life…

On the last morning of April—the morning of ICA’s benefit—we awake to rain. Rain pours down from glowering clouds. It rushes and burbles through the streets as we scuttle to work, our party dresses and suit jackets, sheathed in plastic, flung over our arms. Rain lashes the museum’s big glass doors and drums numbingly onto…

  Bill opens a box, takes out a contact sheet, and peers at the images. “Okay, so here’s Richard Neutra,” he says, pointing. “And Eugene Feldman. And there’s Bob and Denise [Venturi and Scott Brown]…And isn’t that Roy Lichtenstein?” He passes the contact sheet to Ingrid who confirms his ID. “And that’s Bruce Conner,” she…

[Editor’s note: After five years offering a singular view on ICA, Miranda has shed her skin. Join our mailing list for updates on this blog’s next iteration.] Besides being the name of the heroine in The Tempest, and the warning policemen read to the people they’re arresting, Miranda was the corn snake I owned from…

In the previous Miranda, Suzanne Delehanty sat down for tea with ICA staff and reminisced about the museum under her directorship in the 1970s. This week we pick up with a second cup of tea. On the floor in ICA’s upstairs gallery, two wooden beams with subtly concave edges lie side by side. This is…