Institute of Contemporary Art Miami ICA Miami

For “Ida Applebroog: 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.

For half a century, Ida Applebroog (b. 1929, The Bronx, NY) has innovated across styles and mediums. Working across mediums—including 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. The artist lives and works in Manhattan, New York.