BOSTON, MASS.- This summer, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston opens its 2026 Watershed season with Lucy Raven: Rounds, on view May 20 through Sep. 7, 2026. The exhibition marks the United States’ premiere of Hardpan, 2025, a large-scale kinetic sculpture co-commissioned with Barbican Centre, London, and Murderers Bar, 2025, the final installment in Raven’s series The Drumfire. Sited at the ICA Watershed, the exhibition is organized by Ruth Erickson, Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the ICA, with Meghan Clare Considine, Curatorial Assistant at the ICA.
“We are thrilled to present the U. S. premiere of Raven’s Hardpan and Murderers Bar, two riveting and ambitious immersive works at the Watershed,” said Nora Burnett Abrams, Ellen Matilda Poss Director at the ICA. “Presented in the industrial setting of the Watershed, a former copper pipe and sheet metal factory located on a working shipyard at the edge of the Boston Harbor, Lucy Raven: Rounds invites visitors to consider the social and political impact of industrial progress and expansion through an immersive experience.”
Raven’s wide-ranging practice encompasses film, installation, sculpture, photography, and drawing. Across these media, she examines the dynamics of material transformation, and the entwined histories of image capture technologies and infrastructural systems. Anchored by four moving image installations, the body of work that comprises The Drumfire explores themes of pressure, force, and cycles of violence in the (de- and re-)formation of the Western United States, including: the transformation of solid rock into concrete in Ready Mix, 2021; the accumulation of shock waves caused by explosive blasts in Demolition of a Wall (Album 1), and (Album 2), both 2022; and the propulsive effects of fluid dynamics and water in Murderers Bar, 2025.
Raven created Murderers Bar on the occasion of the largest dam removal and river restoration project in American history. In the film, dynamite is installed inside Copco 1, a large-scale concrete gravity dam in Northern California. After its detonation, the camera follows the rush of the river 200 miles to the Pacific Ocean and then turns upstream to return to the drained reservoir behind the dam—a stark landscape of sediment that will be transformed in years to come. Projected on a large-scale curved vertical screen, the installation visualizes the landscape’s transformation at a monumental scale. The installation is accompanied by an immersive, four-channel soundtrack composed and performed by Raven’s frequent collaborator Deantoni Parks, echoing the senses of force, rupture, and turbulence in the film.
The exhibition also premieres Raven’s newly commissioned kinetic light sculpture, Hardpan. As with rotating devices that utilize centrifugal force—to separate solids and liquids, or to increase pressure and scale through acceleration—Hardpan spins an electronic arm, sweeping light around an aluminum and concrete enclosure and pushing light into the exhibition space.
“The artworks in Rounds are united in the artist’s exploration of force, extreme speed, and fluid dynamics,” said Erickson and Considine. “In Murderers Bar, Raven uses a range of aerial and underwater imaging strategies, finding form in the material transformation of land and landscapes; and in Hardpan, this visual experience is brought off the screen for visitors to physically experience.”
