Ramp Project: Amy Sillman

For its ongoing series of Ramp Projects, ICA has invited Amy Sillman (b. 1956, Chicago, Illinois; lives New York, New York) to do a large wall-work. Sillman paints according to an idiosyncratic method of post-Surrealist, latter day Chicago Funk School, stream-of-consciousness. At once figurative, decorative, narrative and abstract, her paintings channel a voracious and noodling intelligence about "anything intimate," including Italian fresco painting, Indian miniature painting, the films of Douglas Sirk, the surfaces of Abstract Expressionist painting, poetry, and television. Sillman's work has been widely exhibited since the early 1980s in group shows around the world. She is a founder of the artist-run gallery Four Walls, in Brooklyn, New York; Milton Avery Professor in the Arts at Bard College; and a 2001-2002 recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship.

installation views > click to enlarge

Amy Sillman, Procession, 2004. Latex paint, ink, and gouache. Courtesy the artist and Brent Sikkema, New York.
Photo: Aaron Igler

Amy Sillman, Procession, 2004. Latex paint, ink, and gouache. Courtesy the artist and Brent Sikkema, New York.
Photo: Aaron Igler

Amy Sillman, Procession, 2004. Latex paint, ink, and gouache. Courtesy the artist and Brent Sikkema, New York.
Photo: Aaron Igler

ICA acknowledges the generous sponsorship of the William Penn Foundation for this project. Additional funding has been provided by The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, The Dietrich Foundation Inc., the Overseers Board for the Institute of Contemporary Art, friends and members of ICA, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Image: Amy Sillman, Procession, 2004. Latex paint, ink, and gouache. Courtesy the artist and Brent Sikkema, New York. Photo: Aaron Igler