Based in Dakar, Senegal, RAW Académie is a residential program for the research and study of artistic and curatorial practice and thought that is rooted in the question: “How do we learn from each other?” For the ninth session of its Académie, RAW will relocate its staff and organization to Philadelphia in an experiment in institutional exchange, alternative pedagogy, and hospitality. The session, Infrastructure, is directed by artist, curator, activist, and filmmaker Linda Goode Bryant.

Using the public art museum as both a point of connection and departure from art’s current infrastructure, and situated at ICA, Session 9 fellows will engage with and begin to answer these questions as they envision and conceive of an infrastructure that supports and expands the level and degree to which artists pursue a perpetual need to create and create anew. A structure that diversifies the ways and means for making artists more self-sufficient in meeting their living and creative needs, drawing on knowledge born from the artists and their works themselves. An infrastructure that can exist as creative hubs within local communities and that expands ongoing access and direct engagement with art as a natural, daily part of life.”

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A pivotal influence on contemporary art for over fifty years, Ulysses Jenkins (born 1946 Los Angeles, lives Los Angeles) has produced video and media work that conjures vibrant expressions of how image, sound, and cultural iconography inform representation. Using archival footage, photographs, image processing and elegiac soundtracks Jenkins pulls together various strands of thought to interrogate questions of race and gender as they relate to ritual, history, and the power of the state.

The exhibition is co-curated by Meg Onli, ICA Andrea B. Laporte Associate Curator and Erin Christovale, Associate Curator, Hammer Museum at UCLA, where the exhibition will travel this winter, February 6–May 15, 2022.

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Our Primary Focus Is To Be Successful—the title drawn from a work on view in this gallery—surveys the visual artist Jessica Vaughn’s new and recent work. In this exhibition, she examines late twentieth- and twenty-first-century office culture, the promise of malleability and universality of modular architecture, and marginalized workers who have been rendered invisible in these spaces. Vaughn transforms and repurposes employee training videos, career exploration tools, government occupational reports, and lighting fixtures in ways that urge us to reconsider the systems that shape the places where we work.

Our Primary Focus Is To Be Successful is organized by Meg Onli, Andrea B. Laporte Associate Curator.

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This exhibition gathered the many-layered and multi-faceted work of Milford Graves, exploring the practices and predilections of this extraordinary “jazz mind.” Click below to begin your virtual tour, featuring curator notes, recordings, performances, and more.

Milford Graves: A Mind-Body Deal was on view at ICA Philadelphia from September 25, 2020 to January 24, 2021, and was organized by Mark Christman, Artistic Director, Ars Nova Workshop, with Anthony Elms, Daniel and Brett Sundheim Chief Curator, ICA. Curatorial support provided by Jake Meginsky.

For more information on the exhibition, click here.