From Artists to Issues: Cultural Authority and Institutional Selection at the ICA Boston

This paper examines how cultural authority is reproduced in a contemporary art museum that defines itself against the canon. Taking the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) as its case, it asks what the museum's commitment to diversity, experimentation, and public engagement actually selects for, and how that selection works. The argument is that canon formation has not disappeared but changed register: instead of consecrating individual artists, the ICA increasingly consecrates issues—migration, displacement, belonging—into which artists are placed. Two coded datasets support the analysis: a thematic coding of the twenty artists in When Home Won't Let You Stay (2019), and a coding of 47 ICA exhibition descriptions from 2014–2018. The paper concludes that presenting itself as an alternative does not exempt an institution from canon-making; it relocates the mechanism from artists to issues.