On a chilly February afternoon at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Jill Medvedow, its long-time director, walked into a gallery and stepped 27 years backward in time.
A few hours later, “Believers: Artists and the Shakers” would open with a roster of many of the same artists Medvedow had hosted at her first-ever exhibition as the ICA’s new director in 1998. That show, “The Quiet in the Land,” was about the Shakers, too, and the symmetry is no coincidence. At the end of this month, Medvedow will leave the ICA, the institution she all but created from scratch over her nearly three-decade tenure. The revival of the Shaker exhibition, she acknowledged, is a tacit farewell.
Despite the weight of circumstance, she wasn’t in a sentimental mood, effusively lauding the exhibition, the current social relevance of the Shakers’ devotion to communal spirit, the insightful choices made by Jeffrey De Blois, the show’s curator. “I try very hard not to look back,” she said.
Still, the opening celebrations that night — her last in the director’s chair — would stir emotions. “It’s not an easy moment,” she said. “For me, leadership has always been the ability to both compartmentalize and to care deeply. So right now I’m trying to lean into the compartmentalization, or I think I could just weep tonight. And I think I just might anyway.”
Medvedow is a reluctant nostalgist, but if she’d permit those around her a few words of appreciation, this is what she’d hear: “Jill has truly been a once-in-a-generation visionary director,” said Steve Corkin, the president of the ICA’s board. “She has always put civic life first, the museum second, and herself a distant third.”
“Jill paints a vision of what’s possible, and then fully believes in it with her whole heart,” said Chris Smith, executive director of Boston After School and Beyond, a nonprofit program for Boston Public School students that provides outside-the-classroom learning. “She sees potential in you that you might not see yourself, and keeps pushing.”
“Jill leads with authenticity,” said Eva Respini, Medvedow’s deputy director and chief curator until 2023,“You always know where you stand with her, and what she stands for.”
There is, of course, more where that came from. Twenty-seven years spent anywhere, by anyone, leaves a mark. Medvedow, though, is not just anyone, and she’s made sure the ICA isn’t just any place. She arrived with a mission to infuse the city’s art world with a sense of civic purpose, and that animating force doesn’t end when she walks out the door. On a recent afternoon in her office, Medvedow was looking squarely at the moment the country finds itself in now. “I have always invented my own jobs,” she said. “I thought, after the ICA, I wouldn’t have to. But I do think now that I will.”
Like many, Medvedow has watched with increasing horror as a new federal government takes dead aim at the things she’s spent a lifetime advocating for, most often with the ICA as the platform: Diversity. Education. Culture, in easy reach for all. She’s less concerned about the museum itself than the ethos it represents. “We’ve never really gotten much federal funding,” she said, “and honestly, the clarity of purpose we’ve built here together, with the board, with the staff, is my best work.”
For her, that purpose is the work. “I’m really curious about what the world will look like to me without the lens of the ICA,” she said. “There are a lot of things I feel like I’m good at, and I think it would be worthwhile for me to put them into a more political, social context. I just wish the need wasn’t so urgent.”
Medvedow is no stranger to the political arena. Her father, Leon, was a legendary progressive politician in New Haven, where she grew up; her mother, Phyllis, was an artist and volunteer organizer for a slate of civic projects, making their daughter a fusion of the two. And Medvedow’s political affiliations run deep. Former governor Deval Patrick invited her to chair his 2009 Working Group on the Creative Economy, and he returned the favor: He’s a longstanding member of the ICA board. Medvedow is “a big thinker, a big doer, with a big heart,” Patrick said, praising “the immense contribution she made to all of our thinking, well beyond museums and other art venues.”
She declines to be more specific about her post-ICA plans, but true to form, the new task she’s starting to articulate for herself is momentous. In the few months since last year’s rancorous presidential campaign, the American social order has fractured more deeply than any time in recent memory as the Trump administration moves to dismantle government agencies and to accelerate mass deportation of undocumented migrants. “Right now, we have a democracy to fight for,” she said. “This is not a time to batten down the hatches and stick one’s head in the sand.”
Medvedow, of course, is used to big lifts. When she took over at the ICA in 1998, the museum was a tenant in a former police station on Boylston Street. Perennially marginalized amid a Boston cultural scene more enamored of its European art-historical bona fides, it struggled to find an audience. When she arrived after a stint as the Gardner Museum’s first-ever contemporary curator, the ICA had become a near-insolvent also-ran.
The ICA she leaves this month is an architectural landmark — a luminous slab of glass and steel, the first major buildingin the United States by the now-renowned American firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro. It perches on the water’s edge in the bustling Seaport district which, when the ICA arrived in 2007, was mostly a sea of parking lots. “We had a frontier mentality, which meant we could do something bold,” she said. “And to be honest, I still find it a little hard to believe.”
From the beginning, Medvedow saw artists as powerful messengers for social good, and the ICA as a platform for their voices. Her ideas spurred a revolution in contemporary art in New England that this newspaper called “The ICA Effect” in 2011. Capping Medvedow’s tenure, maybe, was the pinnacle of contemporary art achievement: The ICA won the commission to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, in 2022, with “Sovereignty,” a project by the artist Simone Leigh.
But what happens outside the museum has always been as important to Medvedow as what happens within it. Boston After School and Beyond creates programs for BPS students at the museum, and the ICA’S relationship with BPS allows students to earn credits there during the school year. At the Seaport Studio, a youth-run space just down the street, the ICA’s educational, community-driven mission comes to life with teen programs from student exhibitions to new media classes. Happen by on an opening night, and you’ll see it in full bloom, with young people from all over the city, communing — loudly, ebulliently — over the power of creative expression.
“Jill didn’t build a museum,” Corkin said. “She built an institution for contemporary culture and learning.”
Medvedow would never pick favorites, but the ICA’s constant efforts to reach into the community might be what she’s most proud of. “The focus, the relentless focus, has always been on people who are outside the mainstream of museum-going,” she said. “When you connect with a work of art, you can literally feel your heart swelling,” she said. “Having a bigger heart to me seems like a very, very direct way of having a more compassionate world.”
In her office in mid-March, she sat perched on a sofa with a commanding view of Boston Harbor. There was an inevitable sense of a circle closing; that same day, she had returned from New York, where she’d spoken at a memorial service for Ricardo Scofidio, of the firm that had built the new ICA, who became a close friend. “It’s been a hard couple of days,” she said. “But a good couple of days, too.”
Across the water in East Boston, the ICA’s Watershed, an annex the museum launched in 2018, is preparing for the summer season with an exhibition by the Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota, focused on the theme of migration. The Watershed expanded the ICA’s footprint, surely; but it also reached audiences outside the typical museum-going core. With its diverse roster of artists focused on themes of migration, dispossession, and difference, the Watershed was built at least partly with East Boston’s migrant-heavy population in mind, inviting the local community in with educational programs and exhibition space. When the COVID pandemic hit in 2020, Medvedow quickly partnered with the East Boston Community Health Center to transform the warehouse-size Watershed into a food distribution center for those in need.
In the final days of her tenure, there was no sense of a victory lap. Her schedule remained packed with a to-do list devoted to making the institution stronger and better than it was the day before. Last week, Medvedow announced the Meraki Prize, a new annual $100,000 prize administered by the ICA, to be awarded with the institution’s mission of supporting women artists in mind. As her final act, she’s working on the ICA’s 2026 budget plan for her successor, Nora Burnett Abrams, who arrives May 1.
She leaves with both confidence and a little anxiety. “The waters are very, very choppy,” she said. “Steering any institution through that is really hard. But if there’s a tiny ounce of relief, it’s that we all built this boat to be strong enough, together.”
As the day draws closer, Medvedow is looking forward, she said, to catching her breath. “I’ll be doing a lot of walking; that’s where I do my best thinking.” A current stint as a fellow at Harvard Divinity School has helped her put that thinking down on paper. And she won’t disappear for long. “My work has been consistent, forever,” she said. “Where I’ve done it has changed, and it’s going to change again. But I’m not dying, and I’m not leaving.”
Expect to hear from her soon.
Murray Whyte can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @TheMurrayWhyte.