Fondazione ICA Milano is an institute for all the arts, an organism for contemporary culture and an ecological project for art based on the principle of sustainability and on relations between people, their contexts and the art world.
ICA Milano is a non-profit institution created by the will, the desire and the passion of five people who identified the city of Milan as the ideal place to start a project oriented towards and focused on contemporary arts. As a 100% private foundation, its nature and juridical structure provides a totally public function where participation and sharing become crucial voices for the project's success.
Since its inception, several professionals belonging to different sectors have given their contribution, leading ICA to germinate and to come to fruition.
The exhibition programme spans from the 20th century up to now, also focusing on the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary languages, where categories fade to leave space for an inter-textuality of thoughts and actions able to involve every kind of public.
Art publishing, ceramics, cinema, performance, music, seminar activities, formation and therapeutics represent some of the dominant elements of the ecosystem that ICA Milano will establish.
Its projects follow a participatory model where the public, the patrons and friends of the institution will work together with the director and curators, sharing the process of construction and organization of its different aspects through direct involvement

Why in Milan and why this name
Milan is the context wherein the richness of the urban milieu and both public and private initiatives have led to the development of different ways of thinking and to several approaches to the culture of sharing on the artistic and social level.
The metropolitan panorama already provides the existence of a multitude of initiatives that, in various ways and to different extents, occupies a planning space of generosity and cooperation between the citizens and their context.
The balance between the public and the private, the on and off relationship conceived between big institutions and smaller organisms, between the best commercial system and public satellite activities has provided Milan strength in planning and importance of thinking ability, unique in Italy. ICA specifically fits within the interstice that has originated among these different models: it is a an institution supported privately - by artists, collectors, art professionals and, above all, by art lovers – whose mission entails a totally public activity aimed toward research and experimentation.
The name includes the new Milanese institution within the constellation of the Institutes of contemporary art that have their cultural matrix in Anglo-Saxon culture where they originated in the mid-1940's: the first one was in fact founded in London in 1946 and still represents the main model for the following ones.
Explaining the institution's mission and features, in 1968 ICA London director Michael Kustow stated that If the new ICA becomes merely another cultural amenity, in a city well stacked with galleries, theatres and concert-halls, it will have failed. It must become an active presence, a focal point where a nucleus of artists from all the contemporary arts can communicate urgent and needed messages. […] A free space, in which the deepest questions that concern us as individuals and society can be explored in continuity […] a sustained enquiry into the roots of our present possibilities and discontents. After fifty years, his words still well identify what ICA Milano has to be.