Two Tours: Leilah Babirye & Cynthia Daignault

Join MA-NMWA for two special tours at the ICA, led by Ruth Erickson, Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs.

Leilah Babirye: Embaga ya Naki ne Naki (Wedding of Naki and Naki): The evocative, adorned sculptures of Leilah Babirye (b. 1985 in Kampala, Uganda) feature the artist’s inventive reuse of debris with her deft carving of wood and work with ceramics. She uses the metal gears and chains of bicycles to create elaborate headdresses and jewelry, and the rubber inner tubes of bicycle tires to form long tresses that mingle with the burnt-black angles of her carved sculptures and the colorful glazes of her bulbous ceramic forms. For the ICA, Babirye premieres a new body of ceramic and wood sculptures inspired by the idea of the queer wedding. Each sculpture adopts a role—bride, groom, ring bearer, flower girl, bridesmaid, or groomsman—in a vivid installation that is both wedding ceremony and celebration.

Cynthia Daignault: Valley: Baltimore-based artist Cynthia Daignault (b. 1978 in Baltimore) conceives of her work as “long-form painting.” She creates interrelated groupings of impressionistic canvases that are infused with a cinematic sense of narrative unfolding over time.. Throughout, painting is a means to slow down the ceaseless flow of time, to meditate on what to memorialize and remember, and, to capture, according to the artist, “what it means to be alive at a specific moment in time.” For the ICA, Daignault is creating a monumental, multi-panel installation of an iconic image of the American landscape: the view looking up the Merced River through the sheer granite valley to the sky beyond at Yosemite National Park.