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Robert Grosvenor Awarded 2020 Ezratti Family Prize for Sculpture, Marked by Presentation of Major Work

This spring, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA Miami) mounts exhibitions featuring a range of global voices shaping contemporary art. The spring season is anchored by the first solo museum exhibition for Janiva Ellis, entirely comprised of new and never-before-seen works, and the first museum survey of Chakaia Booker, which considers lesser-known areas of the artist’s practice. The museum also highlights important emerging voices in contemporary art with the first museum exhibition of Dalton Gata, as well as a presentation of photographs by Claudia Andujar. Advancing ICA Miami’s mission to provide the first museum platform for emerging and established contemporary artists, the museum’s spring exhibitions reflects its ambitious approach to programming and dedication to engaging audiences with a global range of artists and ideas.

The spring program also includes a presentation of the large-scale sculpture Untitled (1968/2019) by Robert Grosvenor, the 2020 recipient of the Ezratti Family Prize for Sculpture. Upon its installation at ICA Miami in 2019, the seminal work, which marks a crucial transformation in the artist’s work, had not been restaged for 40 years. Set to be reinstalled at ICA Miami this spring, the work was recently acquired by ICA Miami thanks to the Prize. The Ezratti Family Prize for Sculpture is awarded by ICA Miami to a living artist in recognition of their exceptional contributions in the area of sculpture. The inaugural winner, Damián Ortega, was awarded the prize upon its launch in 2019. Building on the museum’s history of commissioning and presenting new works, the prize reflects ICA Miami’s ongoing commitment to promoting experimentation in artistic practice and providing an international platform for influential voices in contemporary art.

“ICA Miami’s spring program showcases artists whose works advance important and inclusive narratives of contemporary art. Through these exhibitions, we invite audiences to engage with thrilling new works, grapple with some of the most pressing matters of our time, and consider how contemporary art challenges and responds to our current world,” said ICA Miami Artistic Director Alex Gartenfeld. “This spring, we also celebrate the pioneering artist Robert Grosvenor as the recipient of the annual Ezratti Family Prize for Sculpture. Grosvenor’s contributions to sculpture and influence on his generation merit greater recognition, and we are pleased to collect and preserve an important and monumental work by the artist.”

Following below is ICA Miami’s spring 2021 exhibition schedule:

SPECIAL EXHIBITIONS 

Janiva Ellis: Rats

February 25, 2021 – September 12, 2021

Second Floor, Special Exhibition Galleries

Featuring a suite of new paintings created over the past year, Rats is the first solo museum exhibition for the American artist Janiva Ellis, whose paintings use formal themes of speed and transformation to explore fractured states of personal and cultural perception. Her works express a tense intimacy that has been mischaracterized as descriptions of internal crisis. In actuality, the tension in her work comments on the pervasiveness of white delusion and its denial as a brutal and violent social and societal force. Her paintings make expert use of contemporary and historical styles—abstraction, figuration, landscape, and cartoon—to turn a lens to the insidious nature of whiteness. The exhibition traces recent and significant experimentation in the artist’s practice, marking an expansion of her critical approach to representation. 

Chakaia Booker: The Observance 

April 22, 2021 – October 31, 2021

Third Floor, Special Exhibition Galleries

As the first comprehensive museum survey of American artist Chakaia Booker, this exhibition explores the artist’s signature form—monumental works made of rubber—while showcasing her innovations across mediums. Featuring an expansive range of Booker’s sculptures, including totemic and anthropomorphic assemblages fabricated from cast-off tires, the exhibition highlights Booker’s ongoing expression of ecological and technological concerns, examinations of racial and economic disparities, and her interest in the symbolism of the automobile in American culture.

The Observance includes some of Booker’s most topical works, including Chu Ching (2012), which depicts a cross on a wheelbarrow resembling Jesus being dismounted from the cross, as well as two rarely seen series of paintings that explore landscape and language. The artist’s photographic series, Foundling Warrior Quest (2010) and Graveyard Series (1995), are also featured to explore the importance of performance and mythology in her practice. Anchoring the presentation is The Observance (1995), an immersive installation made of deconstructed rubber tires and tubes––Booker’s first work in this signature material, chosen by the artist for its associations with riots. Chakaia Booker: The Observance is curated by ICA Miami Artistic Director Alex Gartenfeld and Curator Stephanie Seidel.

PROJECT SPACE 

Dalton Gata: The Way We'll Be

May 7, 2021 – November 21, 2021

Ground Floor

In Cuban-born, Puerto Rico-based artist Dalton Gata’s first U.S. solo museum exhibition, ICA Miami presents his surrealistic installations across media, which explore his personal experiences, queer and popular culture, and psychological and mythical symbols. The artist’s recent focus on metaphysical still-lifes is reflected through newly commissioned paintings and sculpture that depict symbolic elements in human scale, such as monsters, masks, and a pearl that doubles as an 8-ball.

Trained as a fashion designer, Gata reimagines craft to consider its relationship to identity and sexuality, creating innovative works across mediums. Gata’s work draws from an expansive and deeply personal archive of images assembled by the artist over the past five years, including a trove of digital sources. His practice is also profoundly impacted by his experience of immigration, and explores the diasporic conditions of Cuba in the Caribbean through symbolic landscapes and the incorporation of cross-cultural references.

GROUND FLOOR

Claudia Andujar 

January 20, 2021 – May 2, 2021

On view is a concise selection of artist and activist Claudia Andujar’s most experimental and expressive photographs from her earliest series of the Yanomami people, dating from 1972-1976. Andujar became fully immersed in the complex culture of the Yanomami—who reside in the Amazonian rainforest of Northern Brazil—through photographing, working with, and fighting beside the Yanomami. With a lifelong commitment to advocating for the interests of the Yanomami, Andujar has continued to visit the community since her first visit in 1971, and created a unique record and political campaign that has helped to designate their homeland as a protected Indigenous reserve. The exhibition features images that see the artist creating her own documentary style defined by distorted light and soft colors through the use of infrared film, color filters, and the application of petroleum jelly to the camera lens. The resulting images are dramatic views of landscapes and intimate portraits. The exhibition is curated by ICA Miami Curator Stephanie Seidel.

Robert Grosvenor 

May 7, 2021 – November 21, 2021

ICA Miami presents a major work by the American artist and recipient of the 2020 Ezratti Family Prize for Sculpture, Robert Grosvenor. Untitled (1968/2019) represents the artist’s use of commonplace materials and exploration of monumental scale and poetic form. Recently acquired by the museum, the large-scale sculpture also showcases a historical dialogue with Minimalism, while challenging the movement’s limitations, and engages the site to provoke profound viewer experiences.