As the MFA’s impressive new wing reopens and the ICA celebrates its fifth high-profile year on the waterfront, Geoff Edgers wonders: Is this town big enough for two major collections of contemporary art? Photographs by Ion Sokhos.

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  MFA // “Endlessly Repeating Twentieth Century Modernism” by Josiah McElheny
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  MFA // The MFA opened its new Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art in September.
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  MFA // “I would call the Linde Family Wing a potential gateway,” says Jen Mergel, the museum’s senior curator of contemporary art. “Somebody might come in and say, ‘I’m much more curious about contemporary art, and I may want to spend a day at the ICA.’ If that happened, I would feel that I did my job. Mission accomplished.”
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  MFA // Maurizio Nannucci’s “All Art Has Been Contemporary“
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  MFA // Josiah McElheny’s “Endlessly Repeating Twentieth Century Modernism”
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  MFA // Jonathan Borofsky’s “ I Dreamed I Could Fly”
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  ICA // “I can tell you that we’re certainly not sitting here worrying,” ICA trustee Bridgitt Evans says. “There’s so much room in Boston for an increase in attention and excitement around contemporary art.”
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  ICA // “In some way, a little bit of competition is a good thing,” curator Helen Molesworth says. “The more diversity you have, the healthier that subculture tends to be. I think it will make us better.”
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  ICA // Swoon’s “Anthropocene Extinction”
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  ICA // Josiah McElheny’s “Czech Modernism Mirrored and Reflected Infinitely”
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  ICA // Cornelia Parker’s “Hanging Fire (Suspected Arson)”