Book Art: Zoe Leonard Sculpture on Display at Penn’s ICA
By Gretchen Stiteler for Penn Libraries News
December 10, 2019
The University of Pennsylvania-affiliated Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) has no permanent collection. Instead, the ICA features rolling exhibitions of innovative artists both established and emergent. It was famously the first museum to present a solo Andy Warhol show and has hosted works by a miscellany of high-profile artists, among them Cy Twombly, Agnes Martin, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, Jenny Holzer, Yoshimoto Nara, James Turrell, Sol LeWitt, Phoebe Washburn, and Sun Ra.
Penn Libraries houses a comprehensive collection of ICA catalogs in addition to the physical records of ICA exhibitions, dating from 1963 (the year the ICA was founded) through 2000. “A lot of people access this collection — artists, galleries, museums, students working on projects,” says Donna Brandolisio, the Manuscripts Cataloger who supervised organization of the over-300 boxes of records upon their arrival at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts (Kislak). “It’s an incredible resource in terms of contemporary art history.”