The Institute of Contemporary Art

After a nice walk around the Boston Harbor, I arrived at my day's cultural destination (I've decided to explore Boston's neighbourhoods and/or sights each weekend): The Institute of Contemporary Art. I almost failed to recognise the building, the lonely modern cube in the middle of huge parking place, as its most photogenic side is facing the sea. The area around is going through a major transformation from a poor neighbourhood to a trendy area; the choice of ICA to have its new museum here is part of the face-lift of Seaport District. However, the parking slot around the museum is obviously still under construction.

I got lucky to get on a free guided tour and learnt that the magnificent building was finished just four years ago (2006) by the architect studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro (their website is by the way pretty cool). Our tour guide mentioned that I as a Finnish should probably know their work in Switzerland - I don't. I wonder what kind of a geographical understanding she had of Europe or maybe she just overestimated my architectural knowledge. As a Finn, I also had the chance to teach her to pronounce some Dutch names... The idea of European unity is well taken here...

The museum's own collection was quite small but still very interesting consisting of three rooms: one for paintings, one for sculpture and one for photography. I especially enjoyed the paintings by Dutch-South African Marlene Dumas. Her works have been sold for millions of euros so I am not the only one to appreciate her dramatic and vivid close-ups of faces or bodies and watercolour reproductions of photos of people like Brigitte Bardot.

Jule-die Vrou 1985. Image from ICA's website.

The Painter, 1994. Image from New York Times article on Dumas.

Die Baba, 1985. Image as above.

The views from the museum are great. However, according to my tour guide, the architects actually thought that this view was "pornographic" in a sense that it reveals too much, fortunately their decision to partly cover the view wasn't accepted. More about the building, see http://www.hughpearman.com/2006/32.html