Two San Diego-area art spaces, the San Diego Art Institute and the Lux Art Institute, announced they will combine to form a new organization, the Institute of Contemporary Art, San Diego in September. The executive director of the new ICA, San Diego will be Andrew Utt, who has served as the executive director of Lux since June 2019. The ICA will begin a year of thematic programming responding to the environment with the first California solo show by Mexican conceptual artist Gabriel Rico, whose installation will bring together man-made and natural materials coalescing into “a radical vision of this delicate point of human life,” according to a press release. The new organization will have a combined exhibition space of 15,000 square feet of gallery space and will extend beyond the confines of the institution.
“The mission for the organization is to question everything,” Utt said in an interview. “What if we don’t have a white space, or can’t get there, or are intimidated? How do we think outside our walls? Our vision is to be everywhere and for everyone. The two spaces, that experience will never go away, but we have other ways of engaging with art and ideas. We see them as a jumping-off point.”
Utt added that the merger came from his desire for collaboration with other art institutions as director of Lux. He reached out to the Art Institute about partnering, specifically to revive their artist residency program. “They were super excited about it, got funding, then Covid happened. All that got thrown out the door,” he explained, “but we continued to have the desire and need for partnering. I proposed to the director of the Institute, ‘How about we come together as one organization? ’”The boards of both institutions agreed to consolidate, and with a grant from the Sahm Family Foundation making the merger possible, the ICA, San Diego was born. Staff from both institutions will be retained, although prior to the merger decision, the board of the Art Institute chose not to renew the contract of its then director, Jacqueline Silverman.
The first exhibition at ICA North will showcase Christine Howard Sandoval, an artist of Obispeño Chumash and Hispanic ancestry who investigates contested histories of representation, land use, and ecology, through sculpture, video, and performance. Following Sandoval’s show on August 21, ICA North will host shows by New York-based media artist Marina Zurkow, and Mexico-City born conceptual artist Minerva Cuevas. Leading up to the ICA’s opening, Lux will round out its exhibition program with shows from sculptor Beatriz Cortez, painter Amir Fallah, and Baseera Khan who investigates the messy, often violent intersections of culture, identity, and capitalism.
Utt believes that San Diego’s status as a border town with a rich Latinx history is central to the new ICA’s identity and mission. “San Diego’s population is 34% Latino. There are a lot of people who live in Tijuana and work in the US. It’s the most trafficked border in the world,” he said. “Bi-national identity, and trans-border identity, has a very long history here. It’s important for us to be a part of that.”
Utt added that this merger is a great opportunity to evolve and become more aligned with what’s happening with the world and engage with people in new and creative ways.
