On July 4, Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art will debut a satellite outpost on the East Boston waterfront, across the harbor from the museum’s Seaport/Innovation District home. Called the ICA Watershed, the building recycles a derelict former copper pipe facility in the Boston Harbor Shipyard and Marina into a handsome, 15,000-square-foot exhibition hall.
Anmahian Winton Architects of Cambridge designed the renovation. For flavor, they’ve kept the raw concrete floor and cinderblock walls, some graffiti and winches and cranes. Original support columns have been removed and replaced with a truss structure. There’s also a new corrugated metal roof, hanger doors that open at both ends, and a skylight running 250-feet along the right side of the building (for the first exhibition, the artist has covered it with gels in rainbow hues).
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The exterior’s new translucent cladding rhymes with the ICA’s 2006 Diller Scofidio + Renfro-designed building across the harbor in Boston’s Seaport/Innovation District. Out the backdoor is a parking lot, boat crane, and dock. A ferry will shuttle visitors from the ICA’s main building to the Watershed, docking at the sailing center at Piers Park.
The Watershed offers 9,400 square feet of gallery space (compared to 65,000-square-feet of space total in the mothership across the harbor). Basically, the Watershed is a monumental hollow shoebox, designed to be open to artistic possibilities.
The ICA says it is leasing the building from Massport for 10 years, with options to renew it twice. It’s a seasonal facility, debuting to the public on July 4. Then will operate until Oct. 8. Next year the ICA expects it will be open from late May to early October.
A visit to the Watershed opens with a brief video history of the area—from ships to immigrants—screening in the “Shipyard Gallery” along the front wall, to the left of the ticket desk. At the very back of the building, nearest the water, the “Harbor View Room” offers handsome photos by local teens of East Boston—the neighborhood curiously almost completely empty of people.
In between, for the building’s first temporary exhibit, are seven artworks by Diana Thater of Los Angeles. They’re mainly silent video installations that seem to be part extinction tourism, part meditative bliss-out.
Up first is Thater’s 2008 “Untitled Videowall (Butterflies),” a set of five flat-screen televisions on the floor plus two orange fluorescent lights. The screens show swaying, up-close footage of one monarch butterfly lazily flapping its wings. A pamphlet notes: “The year that Thater filmed …. a winter frost killed millions of butterflies.”
Her 1999 installation “Delphine” features four videos of freckled dolphins and bubbling human divers projected on two walls and the floor. To the side is a stack of nine televisions screening footage of a blue and violet sun swirling with incredible heat.
Beyond are three screens showing images from her 2013 works “Day for Night.” One screen shows white scratches raining down. The other two feature blurry images that I first took to maybe be beehives, but are apparently flowers.
To the left, a gallery offers two video installations projected onto two freestanding screens intersecting in an X formation. Thater’s 2017 “A Runaway World” shows clouds and a tree and a herd of endangered elephants drinking from a concrete water trough in Kenya. It’s joined by Thater’s 2017 installation “As Radical as Reality.” In the videos, men in fatigues carrying automatic rifles stand guard over the last male northern white rhinoceros (which later died in March 2018) and occasionally reaching out to tenderly pat its flank. Thater occasionally wanders into the scene, carrying a camera with a long lens. A pamphlet says: “By shooting at dusk, Thater reminds us that the sun is literally setting on the white rhino.”
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