There are few things as stressful for a curator as installing an exhibition—particularly when said exhibitions are a part of the inaugural season of a museum’s eagerly anticipated and highly visible reopening. Since beginning the process of hanging our first shows in late July, when Sarah Cain first alighted the scaffold to make her ambitious new site-specific work Now I’m going to tell you everything, the final preparations for our September 9th opening advanced at breakneck speed—wrapping up the publication for Martín Ramírez: His Life in Pictures, Another Interpretation; launching our brand new website, courtesy of our friends at Linked by Air; and finishing touches on our new home.

The two fall projects, Sarah Cain’s outdoor work and Abigail DeVille’s first LA solo exhibition were my two contributions to our opening season, after a year of not installing any exhibitions and being fully in research mode. This time last year, I was in the process of either installing or de-installing three separate exhibitions— wrapping up my last projects for the Hammer, as well as a guest curated exhibition. I feared the complex “muscle” involved in hanging exhibitions—flexibility, patience, quick thinking and decision making, among other soft skills—may have atrophied in the year I spent mostly reading, writing, studio visiting, traveling, and seeing shows. It took all of five minutes, a cup of coffee, and sliding into my “installation sweatpants” to get back into shape. Pacing, pointing, grimacing, and making runs to Home Depot are as much a part of my curatorial process as editing and refining checklists and trying out one layout after another in a scale model. However, Sarah and Abigail’s projects allowed me to the opportunity to stand back and observe—rather than moving around and working with existing objects—providing support and an extra set of eyes as these new works were produced entirely onsite.

Sarah’s painting installation in ICA LA’s Courtyard is her second public work in Los Angeles, the first being hey babe, take a walk on the wild side on the facade of the Hollywood based nonprofit Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND). This being our first project outside, there were considerable lessons learned on how to tackle our generously sized, challenging 40 by 20 foot project wall. Sarah worked in extreme heat and haze for two weeks solid, facing a brick wall that transformed more and more by the day by her gestures and movements. With each layer—first the stretched canvases and vinyl flooring, then the painting and manipulations of the canvas (braiding, tearing, covering, exposing) and the wooden bench—Sarah’s process revealed itself as both improvisational and deeply intentional. Surprises abounded in the final days of the work’s making—the sequin book bags for one, a find while replenishing spray paint at the neighboring art supply shop. Also, finishing ahead of schedule, always a dream scenario for realizing best laid plans. What initially was a harebrained scheme (activating all corners of the museum, even the outside spaces) was pulled off in remarkable time, thanks to Sarah’s dedication and aspirational powers of concentration and endurance.

Abigail DeVille arrived in early August to begin collecting and sourcing materials for her installation in the Project Room, No Space Hidden (Shelter), followed by the arrival of a frequent collaborator who worked on site to fabricate the central structure of the exhibition—a room-sized steel vortex—based on Abigail’s sketches. After several weeks of running around LA and farther afield collecting discarded materials—wrought iron fences, mannequin parts, shopping carts, chicken coops, broken toys, just to name a few—Abigail and a small crew of production assistants got down to the business of an intensive, all hands on deck flurry of production. Abigail has a remarkable ability to edit down a refined selection of materials from an immense amount of stuff, acting first as a prospector or archaeologist, then an archivist, before moving towards a mode of production not unlike curation, especially since research does figure heavily into her practice and does inform some of the composition.

The foundation of the installation was prepared intricate hand labor—the assembly, painting, and puncturing of the cardboard boxes that line the room; the manual slicing by razor of the black asphalt paper that curls around each structure; and the painstaking preparation of the ceiling canopy, made from a layer of tarp and trash bags the artist stabbed to give its tattered effect, done to create a filter for the room’s ceiling lights, casting prisms of light reminiscent of the night sky throughout the space. After days of sorting and selection, the individual sculptures in each of the Project Room’s corners began to take their monumental shape, followed by the hanging of some eye-catching objects on the room’s central fixture. Taken as a whole, the installation is its own universe, one which collects the memories and presence of the many people whose objects have been skillfully repurposed and re-contextualized by Abigail.

Now that we’ve been open for a little over a month to the public, it has been a real treat to watch people engage with three exhibitions we have on view with great enthusiasm and interest. Of course, there is generally a little bit of sadness when an exhibition comes to a close, as these will at the end of December. However, these shows will always have a special place in our heart and history as an institution as the ones we celebrated our new beginning with, and how we welcomed back old friends and made new ones in our first season as the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. I look forward to sharing more installation diaries as we move forward with our new and very exciting program and hope that you will visit this season to see the shows for yourself! Stay tuned for the second part of this installation diary, a special playlist of songs selected (not curated, ahem) by yours truly.