Home, Yard, Entryway: The ICA’s fall exhibitions regard our most familiar and intimate spaces with new nostalgia.
By Katrina Itona for 34th Street Magazine
September 4, 2024
Walking into the Institute of Contemporary Art on Penn’s campus, the inaugural work of the Entryways project greets you: Nontsikelelo Mutiti’s cut–vinyl depiction of ironwork and braided hair calls upon African craftsmanship and memories of the design and textures that have guarded her life. The curling imagery pays homage to the protective hairstyles and gates found in African communities around the globe: particularly, Mutiti’s motherland of Zimbabwe and neighborhoods in Brooklyn. The ornate visage adds to the otherwise flat, modernist architecture of the building.
Entryways: Nontsikelelo Mutiti is one of three exhibitions on display this fall at the ICA. All of the installations take a look at intergenerational tradition, vulnerable performance, and the built environment of our homes.
Where I Learned To Look: Art From the Yard, curated by artist and art historian Josh Franco and organized by two ICA curators, Hallie Ringle and Denise Ryner, is the exhibition on the ground floor. Placed as though it were a front yard of a home, the exhibition sees Franco examine the practically quirky, adoringly sentimental, and handmade work of yard art. Within a collection of over 30 works by varying artists, paintings, videos, sculpture, and assemblage represent the yard, a space which Franco describes on the wall text as “a patch of grass, a strip of sidewalk, a fencepost, the open woods, or even a notebook” and a transition “between the home and wider world.”