Curatorial Production—ICI’s History of Artist Collaborations

This year, Independent Curators International (ICI) is celebrating its 40th anniversary of producing world-class exhibitions, events, publications, and training opportunities around the globe. As the central hub of a vast network of emerging and established curators and artists, ICI has facilitated countless projects over the past 40 years, helping to continually expand the reach of contemporary art with hundreds of events and more than 400 exhibitions in 55 countries.

As part of its mission to make contemporary art available to as many people as possible, ICI has long partnered with artists to make limited edition works, allowing collectors and art lovers access to top artists while raising funds for the organization’s important work. Renaud Proch—who recently marked his second year as ICI’s Executive Director—offers his insight about ICI’s history partnering with artists, in conversation with the artists Jessica Stockholder and Robert Burnier, who both recently produced editions with ICI. 

Collin Munn: With ICI celebrating its 40th anniversary, can you expand on the history of how the organization began working with artists to produce limited editions?

Renaud Proch: ICI’s first limited editions were created in 1990 in celebration of the organization’s 15th anniversary. It was an initiative led by one of our cofounders, Nina Castelli Sundell, and it took the form of a large portfolio of prints in an edition of 75 each—referring to the year ICI was established, 1975. The works were the result of collaborations with artists close to ICI and master printers, and included pieces by John Baldessari (who later became an ICI trustee), Robert Morris, and Laurie Simmons, among others. I think these collaborations felt quite organic because they evolved from conversations between curators and artists. The works were therefore very successful and the process gratifying to everyone involved, so we have continued creating editions with artists regularly ever since. 

CM: What is the process for partnering with artists on producing editions? Is it a collaborative effort, or are artists selected and then given free range to create what they like?

RP: As curators, we have a huge deal of respect for the creative process and we work to support and foster it with each project. With this approach, there can’t be a single, systematic process—every collaboration is unique and responds to the artist in a way that reflects their practice and modes of production; but having said that, it generally tends to be a collaborative effort, yes. Our goal is to provide each artist with a production opportunity that generates genuine excitement, to dare to go down an unexpected path together, to give advice at each step of the process, while leaving as many doors open as possible. Often the conversation with the artists begins simply by asking them what an edition means to them, what interests it generates in them, and what role it might play in their career. I think that has been a very successful approach.

CM: Can you speak to ICI’s most recent edition with Jessica Stockholder? What about her work inspired ICI to create this edition?

RP: I was so excited to be able to work with Jessica Stockholder for the first time in 2014 on the IN/SITU projects that I curated for EXPO CHICAGO that year. Jessica was making a huge installation, called Once Upon a Time, that assembled scores of plastic bins to form a billowing cloud of smoke going up 40 feet in the air and reflected in mirrors mounted underneath stools. I really enjoyed working with her, seeing this project develop, and following her process, her intuition. I felt that we could translate this experience into a great collaboration on a limited edition, and when we first discussed it internally at ICI, everyone got very excited. Jessica was up for it. She was working on new production methods at the time that she immediately felt might provide interesting experiments that could lead to a smaller-scale work for a limited edition. She tried a few things and stayed with the process for several months, until she proposed a drawing for Two and Fro. We loved it and forged ahead! Throughout the process we worked very closely with Kavi Gupta too, her gallerist, who understands Jessica’s practice exceptionally well and was not only instrumental in the production aspect of the work but was also a guide through each step of the collaboration.

CM: Jessica, what was the process like for you? Do you see the edition as part of a larger body of work or more as a one-off project?

Jessica Stockholder: The Two and Fro (2015) edition is a unique work but grew from work I’ve been doing with mirrors over the past couple of years. I used mirrors in the work I made at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum called Hollow Places Court in Ash-tree Wood (2011); in a work I made last summer in Italy titled Lay of the Land (2014); and I used mirrors in a piece titled In Many Places, which is included my current show, “Door Hinges,” at Kavi Gupta Gallery. The process of making Two and Fro was collaborative—I made a drawing, Renaud sourced the mirrors, I made a prototype, and the crew at Kavi Gupta produced the work. I’m very happy with how this work turned out—simple and resonate on multiple levels, inspiring thoughts about car culture, the beauty industry, and my ongoing fascination with the back and forth between image and material volume.

CM: Renaud, from the many editions produced by ICI, can you select a few that you find particularly intriguing or successful? What specifically about the piece or artist grabs your attention?

RP: It’s difficult to choose, especially because we feel very close to these pieces after working on them. As I said, they each represent a working relationship.

I love the edition we created with Marina Abramović, which is sort of a starter kit for performance—a reference to Fluxus, a do-it-yourself toolbox to engage in the performative act. It takes into consideration her own relationship to ICI, which began with her participation in the first ICI iteration of Hans Ulrich Obrist’s exhibition “do it” in 1997, and the edition is actually anchored in the catalogue for that show.

Last year, we collaborated with Robert Burnier—I really liked his take on making an edition and greatly enjoyed being able to speak about his practice to more people through this project in addition to working together on his piece for IN/SITU last year.

Burnier trained as a mathematician, and the way he decided to approach the edition was by seeing in it a limited number of possibilities; each work is unique but part of a suite that constitutes the edition. The suite is basically 20 ways that the artist could achieve beauty with a sheet of aluminum. The artist’s process is important and clear in the work—in his interest in mathematical suites—but so is his relationship to beauty, abstraction, and the material, which is light as origami but has the feel of military strength.

CM: Robert, can you speak more to how you became involved with ICI? What was the edition process like for you?

Robert Burnier: Last year I was juggling several projects as well as providing work for a booth at EXPO CHICAGO with Andrew Rafacz. As the fair was approaching, Renaud Proch—guest curator for the IN/SITU program—came across the work as he was completing his planning. Renaud is really incredible to talk to about ideas and has a very direct and personable way about him; you can immediately tell how much he cares about the art. We decided on a large-scale version of something I was doing with art crates where I would subtly modify their form to a tipping point toward abstraction. It afforded me the chance to work outside the usual parameters of a booth at an art fair, and ICI in general really impressed me as an organization.

The title for the series I made—(“Ne Aro” 2014–15)—is in the somewhat obscure, utopian language of Esperanto, meaning roughly “Non Set” in English. I was playing with the idea of identity in repetition by starting from the same place and seeing what outcomes I could reach with my sculptures. To me it was like Allan McCollum meets John Chamberlain. When ICI asked me to do an edition for them, I saw it as a perfect fit for where I was—exploring the idea of what sameness is and on what level it exists in identity. I see the sculptures I made as siblings. I see my practice continuing, though not exclusively, in what I call a genetic disposition, by taking one thing and feeding it into the next, or by grappling with a given formal or structural quality. It’s about the spaces we walk through and live through, constructing and being constructed, and of a certain permeability of who we are. I have always felt my life was culturally ambiguous and that each day required a new awareness, new efforts to compose and be open to composition.

CM: Renaud, how do you see the production of limited edition artworks fitting into ICI’s broader mission?

RP: It’s important to remember that the art world should revolve around the artists. And it means so much to us to know that we have earned the respect and support of artists who are willing to work with us on producing editions that will support our program. In recent years, we have produced editions much more regularly than before. It has played a very significant role in supporting our programs, but it is also a sign that we enjoy working with artists in this way and are able to produce exciting, important works as limited editions.