Diana Al-Hadid: Self-Evident 

Production | Exhibition Grant

In 2028, Diana Al-Hadid’s monumental Corinthian column, Self-Evident will rise from the rooftop of the Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU and channel history into the future. Al-Hadid reimagines the ancient form as a vessel for femininity, enlivening Richmond’s skyline and signaling the ICA as a place for art’s transformative power. Al-Hadid’s architectural feat will be situated in dialogue with the ICA’s Steven Holl–designed Markel Center.

With Self-Evident, Al-Hadid’s larger-than-life classical column will be cracked, fragmented, and dispersed through a modernist shell of glass and zinc. Al-Hadid presents a ruin without nostalgia and a monument still in the process of becoming. Here, history does not sit quietly; it leans, fractures, and asks to be reconsidered.

Self-Evident is part of Broad Signals, a public art commissioning series at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University (ICA at VCU) that invites artists to respond and transform its architecture and surrounding landscape into a site that is alive and experimental. Broad Signals commissions will occur annually, activating the bustling intersection of Broad and Belvidere Streets and staging an encounter between art and the street. Expanding the ICA’s mission to listen, create, and make art public. Broad Signals creates opportunities to observe art within the rhythms of everyday life. The series takes a wide range of approaches, from large-scale works visible across Richmond’s skyline to more intimate interventions embedded within the building’s façade and surrounding environment. While monumental projects function as visual signals within the urban landscape, intimate works foster reflection and close-looking among visitors, students, and passersby.