2017 James and Audrey Foster Prize Exhibition
February 15, 2017 – July 9, 2017
The Institute of Contemporary Art

The James and Audrey Foster Prize Exhibition is the ICA’s biennial showcase of exceptional Boston-area artists. The ICA established the James and Audrey Foster Prize (formerly the ICA Artist Prize) in 1999 to nurture and recognize Boston-area artists of exceptional promise.

The 2017 prize and exhibition will feature the work of Sonia Almeida, Jennifer Bornstein, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, and Lucy Kim, who are all women artists working at a national and international level but whose work has received limited exposure here in Boston. The exhibition includes painting, sculpture, printmaking, film, and video works, and it explores a range of themes and subjects. All the artworks that the artists present engage with themes of the human body, with a tactile approach to its cultural, psychological, and historical resonances. Each of the artists will present a major work, or group of works, on view for the first time in Boston.

This year, the exhibition will feature a new program, The Foster Talks, enabling audiences to engage more deeply in the work and practice of the Prize winners. Over the course of the exhibition, each artist will present their work and invite an important writer, artist, performer, researcher, or other cultural producer who has influenced their artwork, or whose own work resonates with the artist’s. The conversations will be followed by a free reception, open to the public. The Foster Talks will connect questions around contemporary art to a broad range of cultural, intellectual, and political issues, creating relationships between the art world and the world at large.

—Maryam Yoon