The James and Audrey Foster Prize, a biennial award launched in 1999 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, offers the museum’s big stage to a cohort of artists who, in the city’s broader cultural narrative, are most often bit players: artists actually from Boston and its immediate surroundings. There are a tangle of reasons why that’s so — a contemporary art star system, for one, so completely devoted to New York or Los Angeles that it shoulders out almost everything else — and I’ll make no attempt to unravel the rest here...
The three 2023 winners — Cicely Carew, Venetia Dale, and Yu-Wen Wu, chosen by assistant curator Anni Pullagura, are currently featured in the ICA’s Foster Prize exhibition, on view through the end of the year. Shown in mini solo shows, the trio shares an affection for creative re-use: Carew, with the detritus of her studio; Dale, who works with remnants in the disparate materials of fabric and pewter; and Wu, with castoffs collected and reassembled as emblematic of the complex construction of immigrant identity...
