Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA) is proud to announce the next work in its Artist Edition series by renowned artist Andrea Fraser. Fraser is a groundbreaking artist, a passionate educator, and a respected member of ICA LA’s Board of Directors and Artist Advisory Council.

Fraser is widely regarded as one of the most influential and provocative artists of her generation, with a practice that has defined the art historical arena we know as institutional critique. With pathos and humor, poetry and incisive analysis, her works investigate and confront the systems and practices that structure our social, cultural, and political institutions. For over four decades, Fraser has moved fluidly across the mediums of performance, video, text, and a range of other forms, to analyze and intervene in the contexts in which art is produced, consumed, and distributed. Exploring the intimate entanglement of financial, reputational, and emotional motivations among artists, curators, collectors, gallerists, art audiences, and patrons, she challenges us to consider the conflicting investments that haunt our engagement with art.

In her performance and video works, Fraser has taken up a range of art world roles in order to embody and enact the motivations that define them. Originally performed live at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and then adapted for film in 1989, Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk features Fraser as a museum docent delivering a script composed of quotations from museum publications and other sources. Uprooting descriptions of art works and applying them randomly to other art and non-art objects, Fraser highlights the values imbedded in the often grandiose language of museums. Juxtaposing descriptions of art object to descriptions of people of different classes, including herself, Fraser performs the social and emotional stakes of the legitimacy offered by museums.

Based on a now-iconic photograph of a memorable stop on her Museum Highlights tour at a drinking foundation, Fraser’s ICA LA edition is a rendering of the artist’s silhouette captured in a dramatic gesture. At ICA LA, the edition is presented next to the museum’s own drinking fountain. As a conceptual component of the edition, the fountain has been dedicated to the artist with a naming agreement, which typically recognize patrons making major donations. Collectors acquiring the edition can install the silhouette in locations of their choosing—next to a favorite artwork in their home or to something as mundane as a kitchen appliance. Activated as such, the work can stage a dialogue with an array of objects, sites, or architectural details, complicating perceptions of value and challenging the boundaries between artist and audience, artwork and display.

Thanks to Katja Bruhin, Nicholas Gaby, and Vincent Hernandez.

For sale inquiries please contact Nick Stephens-Seckler or visit ICA LA.