Inaugural $100,000 Meraki prize for women artists awarded to Sarah Sze
Sze's work often weaves together elements of painting, sculpture, and video into outsized installations held together with wire, string, and slim wooden armatures. Always on the edge of chaos, its precarious nature both beguiles and unsettles as a reflection on the instability of the modern world and the random accretion of memory across the slippage of time. Sze's work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Guggenheim Museum, and The Tate Modern, among others.
Advertisement
Demoulas, a long-time supporter of the ICA, has been a member of the museum's board since 2009; the prize, and the gift of artworks, is a culmination of that longstanding relationship,
an ICA spokesperson said.
Sze, a professor of visual arts at Columbia University and former MacArthur fellow, will accept the award at the ICA's annual Women's Luncheon on May 5.
Murray Whyte can be reached at
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Boston Globe
02-06-2025
- Boston Globe
The Market Basket boardroom battle is a real-life ‘Succession' saga
Demoulas's ouster is an example of the ugly maneuvering that can happen when the relationships underpinning a family business go sour. And some of the same dynamics that have made Market Basket one of the juiciest business stories of the century are strikingly similar to those that made HBO's boardroom epic a hit. Kimberly Eddleston, a professor at Northeastern University who teaches courses on family-owned business management, said that the hallmarks of the show — 'the family infighting, the dysfunction from brothers, cousins, siblings; that absolute discord, not learning from past mistakes' — all appear to be happening at Market Basket. Related : Advertisement In both cases, the dysfunction can be traced back decades. In the first season of the show, family patriarch Logan Roy (played by Brian Cox) has long been estranged from his brother Ewan (James Cromwell), a fact that becomes pivotal to the schemes of Logan's son Kendall (Jeremy Strong). Similarly, the power struggle at Market Basket has its roots in the 1990s, when the families of two Demoulas brothers — the sons of founder Athanasios Demoulas — went to court over a dispute about company shares. (The cousins, Arthur S. and Arthur T., even got into a fistfight in court). Advertisement The court eventually ruled in favor of Arthur S.'s side of the family, giving them majority control over the business. And yet, in 2008, a wayward board member on the Arthur S. side was the deciding vote to name Arthur T. as CEO. The rivalry between the two branches erupted into all-out war in 2014, when the Arthur S. side of the family attempted to push out his cousin. Arthur T., who characterized it as a fight between shareholder profits versus lower prices and employee benefits, Employees and customers held a rally in support of Arthur T. Demoulas in 2014 in Tewksbury. Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff But When the board's executive committee pushed Demoulas out on Thursday, they said that he had refused to cooperate with board members over budgeting, capital expenditures, and a clear succession plan. The shifting family loyalties are also apparent, both on screen and in the grocery business. Like in 'Succession' — where Kendall is betrayed by brother Roman (Kieran Culkin) and sister Shiv (Sarah Snook) eventually takes sides against both — the move against Demoulas was apparently spearheaded by the same three sisters who had once helped him finance the 2014 buyout that kicked his cousin, Arthur S., out of the picture. Advertisement 'That's a real similarity, that shows you the lack of trust between family members, and the lack of communication too,' Eddleston said. 'It just created all this conflict and tension.' Eddleston said that roughly 60 percent of family-owned businesses don't have a succession plan. Or, as in 'Succession,' 'the leader has one in his head, but doesn't communicate it, which is just as damaging.' There are, of course, key differences from the show. For one thing, there is no Logan Roy figure holding everything together for Market Basket; family patriarch Athanasios Demoulas is long gone, and there's an argument to be made that the current jockeying is essentially the long-delayed fallout from his death. Arthur T. Demoulas might even be closer to Kendall — the proverbial 'eldest boy' who (though he rarely conducts interviews) has shown he's willing to And more obviously, 'Succession' took place in the halls and boardrooms of a massive, multinational media conglomerate — a far cry from a Tewskbury-based regional supermarket chain. The Roy children, for their part, would no doubt be uncomfortably out-of-place in an everyday grocery store environment. Jesse Armstrong (center, holding trophy) and the cast and crew of "Succession" accepted the Outstanding Drama Series award onstage during the 74th Primetime Emmys on Sept. 12, 2022, in Los Angeles. Kevin Winter/Getty But both companies, real and fictional, inhabit a shifting industry landscape that makes their continued relevance uncertain. Just as Waystar Royco is shown straddling the gulf between cable news and digital media, Market Basket's peers are Advertisement 'Retail is brutal,' Eddleston said. 'It's a very tough industry, especially the grocery store industry. That could add pressure, all these changes and the level of competition.' Arthur T. Demoulas has The question of whether and how the company should modernize its shopping experience may be another factor in the turmoil. 'The board definitely sees some different visions,' Eddleston said, 'Which we definitely saw those conflicts play out in the show. ' Camilo Fonseca can be reached at
New York Times
26-05-2025
- New York Times
Building a Home From 100 Miles of Cord
The artist Chiharu Shiota has drawn a simple shape in thin air and at monumental scale — a rectangle with a pitched roof, instantly recognizable as the universal symbol of home. This ethereal installation is made of polyester cord — some 21,000 lengths of it, streaming down 23 feet from the ceiling of the ICA Watershed, a massive exhibition space at an active shipyard in East Boston. A rectangular forest of blood-red cords hangs nearly to the floor of this former factory space. Inside, the cords shift to lengths of black that form a dark silhouette of a house. Visible within this mirage-like structure are antique furnishings — a four-poster bed, rocking chair, dinette set, sewing table and chair — with a spectacular flock of paper, some 6,000 sheets, fluttering above the domestic tableau. Shiota's new commission, titled 'Home Less Home,' opened Thursday under the banner of the inaugural citywide Boston Public Art Triennial and will remain on view through Sept. 1. 'The house shape looks like a shadow because home does not exist,' Shiota said in a recent interview at the Watershed, as she reached among the cords to affix the final pieces of paper with a stapler. 'Home is like something in your heart, inside,' added the soft-spoken artist, 53, who grew up in Osaka and has lived and worked in Berlin since 1997. Shiota's immigrant story, both personal and age-old, echoes those of many residents living in East Boston near the shipyard, once the second largest point of immigration in the United States after Ellis Island. Earlier this spring the ICA distributed a flier asking the local community to consider Shiota's open-ended questions of 'what home means, what it feels like to leave home and what it takes to rebuild it.' Their personal stories, photographs, drawings and documents were reproduced on the sheets of white paper animating her installation. For almost three decades, the artist has created haunting, visceral environments using vast webs and fields of her signature cords — she calls them 'threads' — entwined with accumulations of well-worn objects, like shoes or beds that evoke both human presence and absence. At the Venice Biennale in 2015, Shiota transformed the Japanese Pavilion with an atmospheric matrix of red thread embedded with thousands of collected keys raining down into wooden rowboats — objects poetically summoning ideas of entry, exit, passage, afterlife. A midcareer retrospective that opened in 2019 at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, 'The Soul Trembles,' has toured Busan, South Korea; Shanghai and Shenzhen, China; Taipei, Taiwan; Jakarta, Indonesia; Brisbane, Australia; and most recently Paris — with an accompanying monograph published this spring by Skira (the show travels next to Italy and Canada). Mami Kataoka, the director of Mori Art Museum who organized the retrospective, said by email that she has been astonished by visitor numbers worldwide that have far exceeded each institution's expectations. 'Beyond cultural differences, this response underscores the universality of the themes in Chiharu's work,' Kataoka wrote, including 'our shared fear about an uncertain future and our common quest to understand the meaning of life and what may lie beyond it.' Shiota left her own home in Japan with just one suitcase to study abroad, eventually finding her way to Berlin. She trained as an abstract painter but early on shifted to 'painting in the air,' she called it, using networks of wool thread, a medium she felt better conjured the intangible tangles of emotions and invisible connections among people. 'Many times I'm using red string, the color of blood,' she said, symbolic of 'family, nation, religion, survival.' In Berlin, a city she found weighted with history, and inspiring to her artwork, Shiota met her husband and raised their daughter, who is 18. 'Now I have the feeling I have two home countries,' said the artist, who often collects discarded suitcases and other commonplace items at Berlin flea markets for her installations. For the ICA Watershed, Shiota's largest museum show in the U.S., she has also adapted her 2014 piece 'Accumulation — Searching for the Destination' near the entrance as part of her reflection on home. Thirty pieces of vintage leather luggage, dangling inside another shower of red threads, lead viewers into the show. Some of the suitcases are packed with an internal motor, making them bob as though adrift at sea. 'Each person, one suitcase — they're ready to go but we don't know where,' said Shiota, who will have solo shows in New York this fall at the Japan Society and Templon gallery. 'Chiharu is incredible at picking these objects that feel like they have this lifetime of wear and use and memory in them, that can be a kind of surrogate for a human story,' said Ruth Erickson, the chief curator at the ICA. She invited Shiota to make the site-specific installation for the cavernous Watershed space, calling her 'an artist who understands how to work at a scale that can be a real challenge.' 'Home Less Home' comprises around 100 miles of cord, roughly the distance from the Watershed to Cape Cod. Walking the processional length of the installation, a visitor experiences it perceptually dissolving into singular threads up close, while in longer views, it coalesces into a majestic volume. Shiota has created a winding pathway through the heart of her project, and viewers can see at close range what's printed on the fluttering sheets of paper. There are photographs of airport reunions, children playing on front lawns, a Venezuelan's first experience of snow in Boston. One person offered a recipe for apple dumplings. A child's drawing of a house includes the handwritten line, 'Home is all the important people who makes the life better.' A woman contributed her own falsified adoption papers deeming her an orphan, with the accompanying message: 'May all Korean adoptees find their way back home.' While none of Shiota's work is overtly political, 'this idea of where one makes one's home and what the connections are to a place could never be more at the forefront of our minds,' Erickson said. 'We see a country and an administration really analyzing those rights.' Against the backdrop of court cases and debates raging in the news cycle about the fate of immigrants, who so often are portrayed as a faceless monolith, the testimonies in 'Home Less Home' are acute in their individuality. Sifting through these collected stories, they touched Shiota like a chorus of voices. 'I never met this person,' she said, 'but I feel like I know this person.'
Boston Globe
21-05-2025
- Boston Globe
Nine ways to kick off summer in Boston this Memorial Day weekend
REASON FOR THE SEASON Seamus Gagne, 10, helped to plant some of the 37,000 flags for the Memorial Flag Garden on Boston Common last May ahead of Memorial Day. Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff Keep the holiday's meaning in mind. There are plenty of area parades this weekend. To name a few: Somerville's Memorial Day Parade steps off at 11 a.m., May 25, from Davis Square, with a ceremony following at Somerville Veterans Cemetery, Get Love Letters: The Newsletter A weekly dispatch with all the best relationship content and commentary – plus exclusive content for fans of Love Letters, Dinner With Cupid, weddings, therapy talk, and more. Enter Email Sign Up Meanwhile, the annual Advertisement BOSTON CALLING & DUNKIN' POP-UP Boston Calling attendees take a picture at the entrance on the first day of the music festival. Erin Clark/Globe Staff What do Dave Matthews, Luke Combs, TLC, Megan Moroney, Vampire Weekend, and Public Enemy have in common? They're all spending Memorial Day weekend in Boston. Yup, as the old-timers say, 'tis not really summer in Boston until Fall Out Boy takes the stage at Harvard Athletic Complex … or something like that. Advertisement Catch big names May 23-25 — from Sheryl Crow to The Black Crowes to Harvard alum Tom Morello. Ride the Ferris wheel, and eat your way through an entire food village — And it's back, baby: The fest's Fest tickets from $181. Details: CAMPFIRE SONGS Singer/songwriter Lori McKenna/file Looking for something more low-key? Passim's semiannual Now in its 27th year, Passim's managing director/fest founder Matt Smith Advertisement The heart of the festival is 'about those new discoveries,' he said. This year, some 60 artists play over the course of four days. You may even be able to say you saw-them-when: some major names have made their Passim debut via the event, including 47 Palmer St., Cambridge. Tickets from $15, free for students. Details or . HOP ON THE ICE CREAM TRAIL Juice Bar, Nantucket. Brie Bristol Beep beep! This is not a drill, people; 2025 marks the state's first Memorial Day weekend with an official ice cream trail. Unveiled last July, Map and guide at . Stops in Greater Boston include: Summer staple Crescent Ridge Dairy Bar — perhaps Advertisement 'JAWS' AT 50 Beachgoers run from the water in a scene from the 1975 release of "Jaws." AP Duuun-dun. Duuuun-dun. Dun-nun-dun-nun-dun-nun … Yup, the shark movie turns 50 this summer, and there's no better way to kick off beach season than by giving yourself beach nightmares. We're gonna need a bigger boat: FREE ART BY THE WATER ICA patrons take the water shuttle over to the ICA Watershed space in East Boston. Lane Turner Soak up two free days of art by the ocean. Kick off the long weekend May 22 with the ICA's ' Plus, it's the ICA's Watershed season opener. It kicks off with ' Ticket includes regular ICA admission, $20, 25 Harbor Shore Drive, . GO, VAN GOGH 'The Yellow House (The Street)' by Vincent van Gogh, 1888. Vincent van Gogh/Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Boston's MFA offers Tickets available in person, first-come, first-served, 465 Huntington Ave., Boston, Advertisement A WHALE OF A CRUISE New England Aquarium and Boston Harbor City Cruises join to offer a whale watching cruise. Handout The New England Aquarium and Boston Harbor City Cruises have collaborated to kick off whale watch season with a . Cash bar available, snacks available for purchase. From $70. 3-4 hours. Meet at 1 Long Wharf. Details: BURGER KINGS Burger from Hojoko in Fenway. Delaney Gardner What turkey is to Thanksgiving, burgers are to Memorial Day weekend. Who makes the best in Boston? Globe Magazine's 'burger aficionados' crowned its Eight Dorchester's buzzy 2255 Dorchester Ave. 159 Newbury St., . For veggie burgers, Globe's Best of the Best team picked 50 Massachusetts Ave., . Lauren Daley can be reached at ldaley33@ Follow her on Twitter and Instagram at . Lauren Daley can be reached at
