Spring Benefit
Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles announces our annual Spring Benefit, which will be held on Saturday, April 22, 2023 at the studio of Los Angeles painter Mary Weatherford. The evening will feature a special performance by the wonderful New York-based comedian, writer, and musician Morgan Bassichis and dancing to the beats of DJ Huneycut. Venice-based restaurant Gjelina—highly regarded for their focus on locally-sourced, produce-forward foods—will serve delicious appetizers, fresh pizza, and a selection of desserts from their brick oven truck, alongside signature cocktails and a full bar. Guests will have exclusive access to Weatherford’s studio, collaboratively designed by interior designer Oliver M. Furth and Kulapat Yantrasast of WHY Architects, the same visionary architect behind ICA LA’s DTLA building.
The fundraiser will celebrate ICA LA’s dynamic community of artists and devoted patrons and will toast our future by sharing some exiting announcements. As the only museum in the DTLA Arts District, ICA LA is an epicenter of artistic experimentation and incubator for new ideas. Our mission is to support art that sparks the pleasure of discovery and challenges the way we see and experience the world, ourselves, and each other. We are committed to offering all our exhibitions and programming to the public free of charge. The generosity of our community of supporters through our annual Spring Benefit goes directly to support our exhibitions and Learning & Engagement programs and is essential to allowing us to continue to serve diverse communities across Los Angeles and beyond.
Don’t miss it!
Widely recognized as one of the leading painters of her generation, Mary Weatherford (b. 1963, Ojai, California) is one of the most astute and daring practitioners taking on the legacies of abstraction. As she explores and expands the medium’s possibilities, she honors its history by seizing opportunities to break with tradition at every turn. Over the course of her career, she has produced feminist revisions of large-scale Color Field painting, posited new directions for the landscape genre, and explored the social histories of California. Her notable incorporation of sculptural elements—including the neon tubes that have been a presence in her work since 2012—as well as her fearless and physically embodied approach to painterly gesture, have allowed her to employ abstraction as both a formal language and a poetic, highly personal mode of engagement with the world outside the studio. The twelve paintings she presented last summer at Museo di Palazzo Grimani in Venice, Italy inspired by Titian’s tragic and grisly painting The Flaying of Marsyas—described by the artist as an investigation the ways in which punishment can easily devolve into hubris and ignorance—were critically-acclaimed as visually potent and captivating explorations into man’s cruelty to another.
Morgan Bassichis (b. 1983) is a New York-based comedic performer who has been described as “fiercely hilarious” by The New Yorker. Bassichis’s performances combine stand-up comedy and mysticism into beguiling tales of queer alienation, love, and liberation. Embracing the critical potential humor holds for introspection and personal discovery and employing strategies of self-deprecation and disruption, Bassichis wryly dives into the language of self-care while manifesting sincere affection for the idealism behind it. With TM Davy, Don Christian Jones, Michi Osato, and Una Osato, Morgan adapted Larry Mitchell and Ned Asta’s 1977 fairytale-manifesto The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions for a performance during the New Museum’s 2017 exhibition, Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon. They published the book The Odd Years with Wendy’s Subway in 2020 and wrote the introduction to Nightboat Books’ 2019 edition of The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions. Bassichis released the musical album March Is for Marches with Ethan Philbrick in 2019 and More Protest Songs! Live from Saint Mark’s Church in 2018, and is currently working on an antizionist bat mitzvah album. GABE—Bassichis’s newest collaboration with artists EJ Hill, [jef]Frey Michael Austin, and DonChristian Jones combines music, sculpture, comedy, and performance in a concerted meditation on queer kinship and commodification—recently performed at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles. A Crowded Field, which use humor and music to explore Jewish radicalism, opens at Abrons Art Center in New York City on March 31.
Huneycut is a prominent female DJ and Designer based in Los Angeles. Her versatile sound in music is sultry and eclectic, known to bring together any diverse audience. From collaborating with brands like Gucci, Maison Margiela, Spotify and more to DJing some of LA’s most elite parties. Huneycut continues to evolve her style, taste and sound across the globe.
Host Committee:
Carmen Argote
Vera Campbell
Laura Donnelley
Claudia Flores
Andrea Fraser
Oliver M. Furth
Jade Gordon
Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork
Todd Gray
Betsy Greenberg
Stella Hall
Brooke Kanter
Thomas Lawson
Sarah & Joel McHale
Rodney McMillian
Marla & Jeffrey Michaels
Rebecca Morris
Kathleen & Chip Rosenbloom
Malik Gaines & Alexandro Segade
Randi Malkin Steinberger & Harlan Steinberger
Mary Weatherford