Streaming on YouTube Live, Instagram Live, Facebook Live, and here.
Join us for a virtual evening honoring Virgil Abloh and Sterling Ruby, two of the most influential artists of our time, each breaking boundaries and redefining the worlds of art, fashion, and design.
Enjoy special performances from 2020 Grammy nominee Tank and the Bangas and experimental pop and performance artist serpentwithfeet. Hear tributes from renowned artist, director, and cinematographer Arthur Jafa and former New York Times chief fashion critic and editor-at-large for New York Magazine’s The Cut Cathy Horyn as well as appearances from our very own ICA teens. And as a special treat, join us for inspiration and conversation with the honorees themselves!
“WALLPAPER” pattern piece property of Virgil Abloh™️ & Sterling Ruby ©️2020. Designed exclusively for the ICA Gala.
Program
Performance / serpentwithfeet
Welcome / Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director
Testimonial / Rafael Andrade, ICA Teen Arts Council
Introduction / Nathan DeJesus, ICA Teen Arts Council
Tribute / Cathy Horyn
Intro / Beatrice Jackson, ICA Teen Arts Council
Tribute / Arthur Jafa
Conversation / Virgil Abloh + Sterling Ruby
Thanks / Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director
Performance / Tank and the Bangas
HONORING
VIRGIL ABLOH
Artist and designer Virgil Abloh has pioneered a practice that cuts across media and connects visual artists, musicians, graphic designers, fashion designers, and architects. Abloh cultivated an interest in design and music at an early age, finding inspiration in the urban culture of Chicago. While pursuing a master’s degree in architecture from the Illinois Institute of Technology, he worked on album covers, concert designs, and merchan- dising. In 2013, he launched his fashion house Off-White, and in 2018 he was named artistic director of Louis Vuitton’s menswear. Next July, the ICA opens Abloh’s first museum exhibition, Virgil Abloh: “Figures of Speech,” organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and set in an immersive space designed by Rem Koolhaas’s renowned architecture firm OMA* AMO. Offering an in-depth look at defining highlights of Abloh’s career, the exhibition includes signature clothing collections, video documentation of iconic fashion shows, and distinctive furniture, graphic design work, and collaborative projects with other artists.
STERLING RUBY
Sterling Ruby is a leading contemporary artist whose work has been presented in solo exhibitions throughout the globe. Since his earliest works, Ruby has investigated the role of the artist as an outsider. Critiquing the struc- tures of modernism and traditional institutions, Ruby ad- dresses the repressed underpinnings of American culture and the coding of power and violence, employing a range of imagery from the American flag to prison architecture and graffiti. Based in Los Angeles, Ruby also privileges craft in his work, informed by his interest in California’s radical ceramics tradition and the quilt-making and other handicrafts of Pennsylvania Dutch country, where he grew up. The artist’s first comprehensive museum survey, co-organized with ICA Miami and on view at the ICA, features more than 70 works that demonstrate the relationship between material transformation in Ruby’s practice and the rapid evolution of contemporary culture, institutions, and labor. Spanning more than two decades, the exhibition features works ranging from his renowned ceramics and paintings to lesser-known drawings and sculptures.
SPECIAL GUEST SPEAKERS
ARTHUR JAFA
Renowned artist, director, and cinematographer Arthur Jafa has captured the history and experience of black Americans from groundbreaking collaborations with Beyoncé and Spike Lee to major museum presentations across the globe. The ICA presented his powerful video installation Love is the Message, The Message is Death in 2018.
CATHY HORYN
Former New York Times chief fashion critic and current editor-at-large for New York Magazine’s The Cut, Cathy Horyn is celebrated for her fearless and provocative reviews and was recognized by the Council of Fashion Designers of America with the prestigious Eugenia Sheppard Award for fashion writing.
PERFORMANCES BY
SERPENTWITHFEET
Experimental pop and performance artist acclaimed for his voluminous, operatic flourish and electroacoustic milieu.
TANK AND THE BANGAS
Unpredictable 2020 Grammy nominees for Best New Artist full of funk, soul, hip-hop, jazz, and spoken-word freshness.
