Week 3: Site visit to Institute of Contemporary Art

Our site visit this Monday was to The Institute Of Contemporary Art Museum in West Philly. The first stop by me and almost everyone on our team was to the Elixir coffe bar inside the museum which may I say has the most amazing coffee and cappuccino. It is free to get into ICA and I would personally take full advantage of it. We met with Maori Holmes and Meg Onli. Maori is a curator, filmmaker and also the the founder of Blackstar Film Festival. She is the director of Academic + Public Affairs at ICA. Meg is the assistant curator at ICA. She created the Black Visual Archive website in 2010 and received a creative award for it in 2012. They are both strong and motivated black women. They showed us the exhibition Speech/Acts which is a group exhibition that showcases new and old art from Jibade Kahlil Huffman, Steffani Jemison, Tony Lewis, Tiana Nekkia McCloudden, Kameelah Janan Rasheed and Martine Syms. It explores black poetry and also how language has shaped Black American experiences. Almost everything in the exhibition was black and white aside from two or three pieces.The pieces were absolutely beautiful! Both women walked us through the different pieces and then sat down with us for an interview and group conversation. We discussed the issues surrounding the art, and the experiences all of us have went through in our personal and professional journeys. A huge thing that we all talked about was racism which we continued to talk about outside the exhibition.

Written by Lindsey Massarelli