Ida Applebroog: Mercy Hospital

For half a century, Ida Applebroog has innovated across styles and mediums. Working across mediums—painting, drawing, film, and sculpture—Applebroog is renowned for her provocative and prescient examinations of gender and sexual identity, power, politics, and the role mass media plays in desensitizing the public to inequity.

For “Mercy Hospital,” the artist’s first solo US museum exhibition in nearly two decades, ICA Miami creates a dynamic combination of historic and recent work. The exhibition features a comprehensive selection of Applebroog’s “Mercy Hospital” series, drawings made by the artist while she was a patient in the eponymous hospital, and which stunningly combine text, cartoon, image, and abstraction. Over the past decade, Applebroog has continuously innovated with line in order to reinvent her world. Her recent “Catastrophe” works are bold drawings, equal parts stylized, simple, and sophisticated, depicting human figures and historic scenes with acute psychological depth.

ABOUT IDA APPLEBROOG

Ida Applebroog (b. 1929, The Bronx, NY) lives and works in Manhattan, New York. She is the recipient of many awards, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Achievement Award and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the College Art Association. Applebroog’s work has been shown in major solo exhibitions at museums and galleries in the United States and internationally, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (1998); The Brooklyn Museum, New York NY (1994, 1983); Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston TX (1990); High Museum of Art, Atlanta GA (1989); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY (1978), among others. In 2012, Applebroog presented in a large installation at dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany—her second appearance at the celebrated international exhibition, having participated in dOCUMENTA 8 in 1987. Applebroog’s work resides in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York NY; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York NY. In February 2016, “Call Her Applebroog,” a biographical documentary on the artist, debuted at MoMA’s annual Doc Fortnight festival.