Ida Applebroog: Mercy Hospital

As one of the last great Post-Movement artists of the 1970s, Ida Applebroog has innovated across styles and mediums for half a century. Working across mediums—painting, drawing, film, and sculpture foremost—Applebroog is renowned for her provocative and prescient examinations of gender and sexual identity, power, politics, and the pernicious role mass media plays in desensitizing the public to violence.

For the artist’s first solo U.S. museum exhibition in nearly two decades, ICA Miami creates a dynamic combination of historic and recent work. The exhibition features examples from Applebroog’s “Mercy Hospital” series, works that the artist made in the hospital and which combine haunting narrative text and image in revolutionary ways. Over the past decade, Applebroog has re-examined the role of line in her work. Her recent “Catastrophe” works are bold drawings, equal parts stylized, simple and sophisticated, depicting human figures and historic scenes with acute psychological depth.

Born in the Bronx, New York, in 1929, Applebroog lives and works in Manhattan. She is the recipient of many awards, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Achievement Award and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the College Art Association. Applebroog’s work has been shown in major solo exhibitions at museums and galleries in the United States and internationally, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (1998); The Brooklyn Museum, New York NY (1994, 1983); Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston TX (1990); High Museum of Art, Atlanta GA (1989); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY (1978), among others. In 2012, Applebroog presented in a large installation at dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany—her second appearance at the celebrated international exhibition, having participated in dOCUMENTA 8 in 1987. Applebroog’s work resides in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York NY; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York NY. In February 2016, “Call Her Applebroog,” a biographical documentary on the artist, debuted at MoMA’s annual Doc Fortnight festival. As part of the ICA SPEAKS series, Julia Bryan Wilson, associate professor of modern and contemporary art at University of California, Berkeley, will present a talk on Applebroog’s life and work.