The ICA and Boston Harborwalk

Northeastern's school year has ended and this past week has been the first in a while where schoolwork has not consumed my calendar. It's been a weirdly rainy and cold week for May, but yesterday the sun came out and we took a trip to the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), a museum in downtown Boston that I've been wanting to visit for a while now.


















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The museum itself has only one floor of displayed art, the rest of the floors are theaters and studios for artists. The work is displayed on the fourth floor, where you can wander through and see all the different exhibits and installations. There is also a huge observatory window that overlooks the harbor and has an amazing view, which is another highlight of visiting. Admission is pretty reasonable at $10.00 for a student ticket. They also give you cool little green pin things to wear that can be recycled at the end of your visit.

Yesterday the second to last day that the ICA's current exhibits will be available for viewing. I had particularly wanted to see the work of Nick Cave, who creates these awesome giant sculptures which he calls sound suits. There was one on display in the MFA my freshman year that I loved to look at and I was excited to hear that there were multiple ones at the ICA. You can check them out in the photo below. They were amazing to see in person.

We arrived around 3:30 and wandered around until the museum closed. I loved all of the exhibits that were there, and was particularly mind boggled by Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg's A World of Glass installation. You enter a dark room that is full of rows and rows of fragile and tall glass sculptures. There are four different videos playing on the walls above your head and while you walk through and watch, a soundtrack of music mixed clinking and chipping glass plays. It gave me a cool, overwhelming feeling of everything being very breakable. It seemed like it all was.


Rather than trying to describe it further, I'll just provide this link to a video that was made of it here, which shows clips of the installation as well as an interview with the creators. In the clips of it in the video there is only one screen, though there were four in the ICA, which made it a much more surrounding expereince. I strongly recommend visiting it wherever it will next be exhibited.

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After the museum we noticed that we had accidentally begun walking on the Boston Harborwalk path and then decided to follow it. The Harborwalk is part of an initiative to display the newly clean Boston Harbor, which has had a reputation of being kind of skanky. The walk talks you from pretty much one end of Boston to the other along the water with lots of nice benches, art, and paths.

The section we walked traced it's way along the edge of the harbor, bringing us past Christopher Columbus Park, the Aquarium (where you can look at the seals for free!*!*!) and into the back of the North End. That was only the part that we followed yesterday -- the whole walk is quite long and we were also quite hungry and in the North End, which prevented us from finishing. I hope to be able to walk the whole length of it another day, but am really satisfied with what was accomplished yesterday.