The Director's Guide: MASS MoCA, Massachusetts
Among the largest contemporary art museums in America, MASS MoCA's vast, varied and continually changing collection has long drawn art and culture lovers from the world over to the small Massachusetts town of North Adams.
With the site hosting a multitude of festivals and one-off events alongside holding an impressive collection of works from the likes of James Turrell and Jenny Holzer, there is invariably much to see - even if every visit is different. Here MASS MoCA direct director Joseph Thompson presents his insider guide to its most striking works and unexpected facets.
How should first-time visitors structure their visit?
MASS MoCA occupies a 16-acre site: with 22 buildings, and an intricate network of courtyards and elevated walkways, there is a lot of art to cover.
Most of our shows rotate every year - and most of our shows only appear at MASS MoCA, since we specialise in very large, often impossible-to-replicate installations. After you've covered the temporary exhibitions, visit as many of our long-term shows that you can. And here's a tip: many don't realise that MASS MoCA is as much a performing arts venue as museum, so align your trip with one of our almost weekly presentations of music, theater, dance, and film.
What should visitors ensure they see?
We always have a big roster of exciting, temporary exhibitions of new art: every year two-thirds of our galleries change. That said, our "must see" long-term installations include definitive retrospectives of the wall drawings of Sol LeWitt and the light and space installations of James Turrell.
Laurie Anderson and Jenny Holzer also have long-term dedicated spaces at MASS MoCA. With the Hall Art Foundation, we co-host a magisterial suite of Anselm Kiefer paintings and sculpture, sited within a gallery created from an abandoned one-million gallon concrete water tank.
For visitors with limited time, which rooms or exhibits should be prioritised?
Make an online reservation to see James Turrell's Perfectly Clear. But on your way to it, walk through our massive Building 5 gallery, where you will see football field-sized immersive installations by established artists, and by mid-career artists on the rise.
On the way out of Perfectly Clear – which floods your entire neuro-optical system with pure light – see Jenny Holzer's installation, based on America's interrogation policies and practices in Guantanamo, which is sobering, sometimes shattering. I'd suggest making your way back towards the lobby via our Sol LeWitt tour de force — nearly an acre of gloriously colorful wall drawings.
Which works best give insight into America?
It is perhaps the place itself that speaks most dramatically of America: we are only the third tenant of this factory campus, which is on the National Register of Historic Places. Arnold Print Works built the mill complex, and from 1862 to the 1930s it grew to become the largest manufacturer of printed cotton fabric in the country.
Sprague Electric, the second tenant, was a high-tech powerhouse in the great age of TV and radio, inventing and producing capacitors and other electronic components, right until the early 1980s. At MASS MoCA, we make and present art.
So, from the most material of things (the very clothes on your back), to electronic components, to MASS MoCA's "products" (comprised largely of pure ideas, and the smiles and looks of wonderment on the faces of our visitors as they leave) — the progression from hardware to software, from the material to the immaterial — describes the arc of industrial and post-industrial economy, all right here, in one place.
What are your favourite works?
We present what must be one of the world's largest gathering of sound-based art, and I'm fond of the way they enliven our site (and indeed, our entire city, invisibly). To name a few — Julianne Swartz has installed a beautiful sound work in one of the stark industrial walkways that interconnect our buildings. Christina Kubish re-animated our historic Clocktower, making its carillon responsive to the current location and intensity of the sun.
Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger gather urban noise in the key of C from all over town, and channels it under a big overpass that visitors experience as they walk to Main Street: it's like becoming suddenly engulfed in a mysterious Gregorian chant on the walk to downtown. Attentive visitors will encounter new sound art works all across our campus.
Which work has the most interesting history?
It's a fabricated history, but I love the narrative that Michael Oatman based his All Utopias Fell on, which is an Airstream trailer, converted to a spacecraft for solar exploration by a slightly mad engineer at the former Sprague Electric Company, which launched in 1973 (and it is a perfect time capsule of that year), and which, by strange coincidence, crash-landed atop one of our building structures in 2008. Intrepid visitors can climb industrial catwalks and enter the intricately detailed carcass.
What is likely to be the most controversial work?
Many people find Tree Logic, by Natalie Jeremijenko, in which six trees are suspended upside down, and contort themselves toward the sun, to be a tough image. I like to think of the trees as having been liberated from the ground. (We're on our third generation of twisted trees in this work, and have replanted all the previous trees which now grow upright elsewhere in the area.)
What's unique about the institution?
We actually make a lot of the art that we show, right here, through workshop residencies, and often the work-in-progress is visible to the public. And I know of no other museum that devotes fully half its financial and human resources, and emotional bandwidth, to the performing arts.
You can feel that best during our multi-venue, multi-day music festivals, including Solid Sound, which we co-host with the indie rock band Wilco; FreshGrass, our own take on progressive American roots music, especially bluegrass; and Bang on a Can, the best festival of new music in America.
What is interesting about the building MASS MoCA occupies?
The imprint of nearly a century and a half of human labor within this factory complex is everywhere evident. We used the lightest of hands in our renovation — exposing surfaces, allowing layers of paint, brickwork, and worn wooden floors to reveal the changing use of these buildings. I think that the raw material authenticity of the place will only resonate more with visitors – as an antidote to our all-consuming online, digital lives.
Where else do you recommend visitors visit in Massachusetts?
We like to think of this neck of the woods as ArtCountry. The Clark Art Institute, Williams College Museum of Art, and the Williamstown Theatre Festival, in neighboring Williamstown, and the Bennington Museum, just a few miles across the border in Vermont — all set within the Berkshires, one of the nation's most beautiful outdoor settings, offer unparalleled culture in concert with dramatic hiking on the slopes of Mt. Greylock (Massachusett's highest mountain), country road biking, excellent kayaking and birding, and a thriving agriculture and farm-to-table scene. It's a rare density of world-caliber arts destinations, amidst rural splendor.
Visiting MASS MoCA:
Opening hours and times: Summer: 10am-6pm Sunday to Wednesday and 10am-7pm Thursday to Saturday; in autumn, winter and spring MASS MoCA is open from 10am to 5pm Wednesday to Monday, and closed on Tuesday.
Prices and tickets: full admission is $20, with tickets valid for two days in a row; concessions available.
Address: 1040 MASS MoCA Way, North Adams, MA 01247, Massachusetts.
