In brief

  • Lucy Raven has two solo exhibitions open simultaneously at Institute of Contemporary Arts Boston and Allen Memorial Art Museum in Ohio.
  • Lucy Raven: Rounds arrived at ICA Boston this May after its debut at the Barbican Centre in London.
  • At ICA Boston, two of Raven's newest works are being presented to the American public for the first time.

Lucy Raven has two solo exhibitions open simultaneously at Institute of Contemporary Arts Boston and Allen Memorial Art Museum in Ohio. Lucy Raven: Rounds at the ICA Watershed features several works by Raven, including the US premiere of her latest work, Hardpan (2025). Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College is featuring two of Raven's animated videos.

After its debut at the Barbican Centre in London, the exhibition Lucy Raven: Rounds arrived at ICA Boston this May, where two of her newest works are being presented to the American public for the first time. In the final instalment of her series The Drumfire, Murderers Bar (2025), Raven contemplates the removal of a monumental, century-old concrete dam that spanned the Klamath River in Northern California. She tracks the impact that this imposing man-made structure had upon the surrounding environment and the changes that followed after the river returned to its natural course. The other work on view is Hardpan, a colossal kinetic light sculpture in which a revolving electronic arm sheds light (literally and figuratively) on the effects that industry, infrastructure and technological advancement had on shaping the American West.

A lo-fi, hand-drawn, monochrome picture of a house.
Lucy Raven, A Crisis Passed in Sleep, 2005. Hand-drawn animation, 4 minutes, 1 second. Image courtesy of the artist.

In the exhibition Video Space: Lucy Raven at Allen Memorial Art Museum, the artist brings two seemingly unrelated phenomena – the poverty of sharecroppers during the 1930s and the advent of production lines in the creation of Hollywood cartoons – into relief in the video works A Crisis Passed in Sleep and When the Ceiling Has Become Visible. Through a series of hand-drawn animated sequences, she recreates scenes from the 1941 photobook Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

Encompassing a wide array of media in her artistic practice, from film, installation, sculpture, photography and drawing, Raven leverages these modes of expression to examine the dynamics of material transformation that are the concomitants of rapid adaptation of technology, visualizing the human labor that is inherent in the production of images. Lucy Raven: Rounds at ICA Watershed opened on May 20, 2026 and is on view until September 7, 2026. Video Space: Lucy Raven opened on May 26, 2026 and closes on August 21, 2026. More information on these shows can be found at the sites for ICA Boston and Allen Memorial Art Museum.

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