The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston presents Less Is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design, a sweeping survey examining how artists have used ornamentation, pattern, and decorative modes to critique, subvert, and transform accepted histories and trajectories related to craft and design, gender, multiculturalism, beauty, and taste. Less Is a Bore begins in the early 1970s with works of art that sought to challenge established hierarchies that privileged fine art over applied art, and Western art over other art histories and traditions. The exhibition continues to the present, dipping into 1980s postmodern painting and appropriation art, multiculturalist expressions of the 1990s, and more recent craft-based practices that chart the legacy and transformation of these trajectories. The exhibition features more than 40 artists and is comprised of over 60 works, including a new site-specific,
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