Institute of Contemporary Art

This guide to the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston follows a museum that spent seventy years unable to sit still or settle on a name, from its 1936 founding as the Boston Museum of Modern Art through borrowed rooms on Newbury, Beacon and Boylston streets. It centers on director James Plaut's 1948 manifesto renaming the place and denouncing modern art itself as a cult of bewilderment, and the Cold War suspicions that followed him. This waterfront building, cantilevered over the harbor, opened in 2006.