This August, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens artist Portia Zvavahera’s (born 1985 in Harare, Zimbabwe) first solo museum exhibition in the U.S. Inspired by Zvavahera’s dreams, her layered compositions merge painting and printmaking techniques to create a dazzling array of flat layers and textures. These include the markings of wax relief, linocut stamps, cardboard stencils, lace, and palm leaves from her garden that form figures in atmospheric settings. This exhibition centers animals and the role they play in Zvavahera’s work and the many traditions she draws upon. Featuring a selection of seven of the artist’s works, Zvavahera's ICA presentation includes three new paintings on view for the first time. Organized by Ruth Erickson, Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, with Meghan Clare Considine, Curatorial Assistant, Portia Zvavahera is on view from Aug. 28, 2025, to Jan. 19, 2026.

Portia Zvavahera includes a selection of recent and new works that focus on the animals that populate the artist’s dreams and thus her pictorial world, revealing the significant and symbolic role animals play. A single powerful dream can produce several distinct and evocative paintings. Throughout the work, Zvavahera engages with Zimbabwean figurative painting as well as the Indigenous Shona and African Pentecostal faith traditions in which she was raised. Her works navigate a broad range of references, from the Shona belief that eagles travel between heaven and earth carrying messages, to the symbolic role of the snake in the biblical story of Adam and Eve, to the flattened pictorial field of modern art.

“Zvavahera compares her practice to the act of worship,” said Erickson and Considine. “Her vivid paintings conjure worlds glimpsed in her dreams, where animals repeatedly appear, bringing with them foreboding and prophetic associations that she is able to visualize in her work.”

In Ndirikumabvisa (2024), a hoard of rats is painted alongside a figure lying prostrate atop a dripping red background, referencing a nightmare during Zvavahera’s pregnancy. Rats reappear in Tinosvetuka rusvingo (2024), where they gather underneath a trio of winged figures that evoke associations with angels in Western painting traditions and large birds of prey, which are powerful creatures in Shona cosmology. A bull appears to commune with a figure in Prayer amid a battle (2021), and coiled and double-headed snakes appear in her most recent paintings completed in May 2025. This exhibition will be an opportunity for a wider audience to encounter the work of one of the most exciting contemporary painters working in Southern Africa today.