The warm glint of sunshine floods the building-length channel of skylight at the ICA’s Watershed inEast Boston, playing on the surface ofEl Anatsui’s“Area B,” 2007, a glittering tableaux pinned looselyto the wall midway through the big, bright space. Itevokes a regal tapestry spun of shimmering silk, fitfor a king. But look closely. To make it, Anatsui, agroundbreaking Ghanaian artist now in his70s, knittogether thousands of foil scraps salvaged from thenecks of thrown-away liquor bottles in one of themost spectacular acts of radical recycling you’ll see.“Area B” is one of a half-dozen works by as manyartists on much the same theme, with the Watershed itself an unofficial seventh.Opened four years ago, thebuilding, a former waterfront fabrication facility for the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation, was derelict fordecades before the ICA did some radical recycling of its own. The Watershed has opened four of the lastfivesummers—2020 was a miss, given the fever pitch of early pandemic anxieties—as an unofficial herald of thesunny season. After a winter of Omicron and its still-lingering spawn, bring it on, I say.
