Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art
Encyclopedia
The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, commonly referred to as MASS MoCA, is a museum
in a converted factory building located in North Adams
, Massachusetts
, USA. It is one of the largest centers for contemporary visual art
and performing arts
in the country.
MASS MoCA opened with 19 galleries and 100000 sq ft (9,290.3 m²) of exhibition space in 1999. In addition to galleries and performing arts spaces. MASS MoCA also rents space to commercial tenants.
Along with a large variety of contemporary art
displays, the museum
also hosts film screenings and has seen performances by a variety of musical acts, including Joan Baez
, Cat Power
and Steve Earle
. MASS MoCA is the home of the Bang on a Can
Summer Institute, where composers and performers from around the world come to create and perform new music. The festival, started in 2001, includes concerts in galleries for three weeks during the summer. Starting in 2010, MASS MoCA has become the home for the Solid Sound Music Festival, curated by Wilco
. The three-day long festival takes place all over MASS MoCA's campus.
In December 1871, a fire swept through Arnold Print Works factory buildings, destroying eight in total. Rebuilding started almost immediately and an expanded complex was finished in 1874. Despite a nationwide depression during the 1870s Arnold Print Works purchased additional land along the Hoosic river and constructed new buildings. By 1900, every building but one in today's Marshall Street complex was constructed.
At its peak in 1905, Arnold print works employed over 3000 workers and was one of the world's leading producers of printed textiles. Arnold produced 580,000 yards or 330 miles of cloth per week. Arnold had offices in New York City and Paris. In addition to printing the textiles, Arnold Print Works expanded and built their own cloth-weaving facilities in order to produce "grey cloth," which was the crude unfinished textile from which printed color cloth was made.
In 1942, Arnold Print Works was forced to close its doors and leave North Adams due to the low prices of cloth produced in the South and abroad, as well as the economic effects of the Great Depression
.
In addition to manufacturing electrical components, Sprague had a large research and development department. This department was responsible for research, design, and manufacturing of the trigger for the atomic bomb and components used in the launch systems for the Gemini moon missions
.
At its peak during the 1960s Sprague employed 4,137 workers in a community of 18,000. Essentially the factory was a small city within a city with employees working alongside friends, neighbors and relatives. The company was almost completely self-sufficient, holding a radio station, orchestra, vocational school, research library, day-care center, clinic, cooperative grocery store, sports teams, and a gun club with a shooting range on the campus.
In the 1980s Sprague began to face difficulties with global changes in the electronics industry. Cheaper electronic components were being produced in Asia combined with changes in high-tech electronics forced Sprague to sell and shutdown its factory in 1985. As a result North Adams was left "deindustrialized" and found itself on a steep economic decline.
The site was formerly listed as a superfund
contaminated site.
were looking for large factory or mill buildings where they could display and exhibit large works of modern and contemporary art that they weren't able to display in their more traditional museum/gallery setting. They were directed to the Marshall Street complex by the mayor of North Adams. When they spent time with the space, they quickly realized the buildings had much more potential than an off-shoot gallery. The process for MASS MoCA began.
It took a number of years of fund-raising and organization to develop MASS MoCA. During this process the project evolved to create not only new museum/gallery space but also a performing arts venue.
The museum was granted $18.6 million by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts after a public/private coalition petitioned the state government to support the project. In 1999, MASS MoCA opened its doors.
Designed by the Cambridge architecture firm of Bruner Cott & Assoc, it was awarded highest honors by the American Institute of Architects
and The National Trust for Historic Preservation. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places
.
wall drawings in partnership with Yale University Art Gallery
and Williams College Museum of Art
. The exhibition, Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective occupies a 27000 square feet (2,508.4 m²) building located at the center of the campus. Over 100 monumental wall drawings and paints conceived by the artist from 1968-2007 will be on view through 2033. Cambridge-based Bruner/Cott & Associates converted the historic mill building and worked with LeWitt to design the gallery space. LeWitt designed the final placement of the drawings before his death in April 2007, and the drawings were installed by a team of draftsmen between April 1 and September 30, 2008. The exhibition was chosen as the "top museum exhibition of 2008" by Time Magazine.
Katharina Grosse, wielding a spray gun instead of a brush, Grosse often paints directly on the walls, floors, or facades of her exhibition sites. At MASS MoCA the artist has applied her atmospheric veils of paint to four mounds of soil which seem to spill from the upper balcony into the enormous space below. Stacks of Styrofoam shards rise out of the seductive mountains of color, mirroring the white of the gallery walls -- the metaphorical canvas of Grosse's tremendous painting.
Over-the-top Baroque style pieces are displayed in 4 different galleries in MASS MoCA's main floor. One piece, Scalapino/Nu Shu, comes upon you as a former apple-bearing tree. Coyne had it uprooted, after it stopped bearing fruit, and brought to the museum. Petah's exhibit also includes a selection of her photography.
Based in Prague, artist and architect Federico Diaz will create a large sculpture formed from a pixilated abstraction of the museum’s entrance courtyard, rendered in 3D, then decomposed by fluid dynamics. Fabricated from polyethylen and aluminium spheres, the work will address man’s relationship to the universe, and the uncanny moment caught between movement and stasis, permanence and change, fullness and emptiness. The museum clocktower is transformed to wave motion.
Sean Foley's new work occupies the over-100-foot-long wall outside of the Hunter Center for the Performing Arts.
Jörg Immendorff was one of several prominent artists of the past four decades who studied under Joseph Beuys at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art. This exhibition is the second in an occasional series of shows focused on Beuys and those influenced by his work and teaching.
Six live trees are inverted and suspended from a truss, displaying the contrived growth responses of the trees over time. In this age of the commodification of information, Jeremijenko has made data her medium.
. The museum had commissioned Mr. Büchel to create a massive new installation, "Training Ground for Democracy," The exhibit was to include a re-built movie theatre, nine shipping containers, a full size Cape Cod-style house, a mobile home, a bus, and a truck.
The museum, which had already invested significantly in the exhibit and had amassed literally tons of materials in its largest gallery, filed a lawsuit to determine its rights and those of artists were in relation to showing or removing the materials. Büchel claimed allowing the public to view it in an unfinished state would misrepresent his work and did not respond to requests by the museum to come and remove the materials. On September 21, 2007, Judge Michael Ponsor
of the Federal District Court for Massachusetts
, Springfield
, ruled that there was no distortion inherent in showing an unfinished work as long as it was clearly labeled as such. Judge Ponsor said that his opinion would likely not be viewed as creating a legal precedent.
Though the museum was granted permission to open the gallery, it chose not to and the materials were discarded without ever being seen by the public.
presented her first indoor projection in the United States at Mass MoCA. Holzer's projection at Mass MoCA filled a large chamber first with selected poems by Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska, and later with selections from prose by Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek
. Holzer placed expansive beanbags around the floor of the chamber, inviting the audience to sit, lie, and bathe in the light of the work. Holzer's installation immediately followed, and took place in the same space as, the Büchel installation.
's The Nanjing Particles opened in December 2008. When he came to MASS MoCA he did a bit of research about the museum's factory buildings and North Adam's history. In doing so he found a small stereoscopic photograph
depicting a large group of men in front of a factory building. It turns out that the building depicted was the Sampson Shoe Factory and the large group of men were about a hundred or so Chinese workers who Sampson had brought east from California in order to break a strike. As a result North Adams had the largest population of Chinese workers this side of the Mississippi. His next step was to view the stereograph image underneath a one million volt electron microscope, allowing him to see individual metal particles that comprise the photograph and allowing that to propel him towards the creation of two large scale sculptures that ultimately were manufactured by hand in Nanjing, China.
campus in Chicago.
When the flag was removed from The Knitting Machine it was folded into the traditional flag triangle and was on display in a presentation case which Cole described as "slightly smaller than a Volkswagen Beetle", accompanied by the 20' knitting needles, and a video of the knitting process. [6].
Working in a range of modest, industrially produced materials—from plastic sheeting to fishing line—MIchael Beutler, Orly Genger, Tobias Putrih, Alyson Shotz, Dan Steinhilber, and collaborators Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B Nguyen engage the former factory spaces of the museum's second and third floors, creating extradordinary evironments from ordinary things.
A group exhibition of works by artists who explore the line between visibility and invisibility and, in so doing, invite viewers to participate in a deeper act of looking. The exhibition examines the demands and subtleties of the viewing experience and includes works that test the limits of perception.
Artist/actor Leonard Nimoy will exhibit his recent photographic series. Shooting in nearby Northampton, Massachusetts, Nimoy recruited volunteers from the local community with an open call for portrait models willing to be photographed posed and dressed as their true or imagined "secret selves." These various secret identities (offer an intimate, sometimes humorous, and often profound new look at the residents of Northampton and the inner yearnings and fantasies that we all share.
Accompanying the large, life-size photographs is a video documenting the artist's conversations with his subjects.
Museum
A museum is an institution that cares for a collection of artifacts and other objects of scientific, artistic, cultural, or historical importance and makes them available for public viewing through exhibits that may be permanent or temporary. Most large museums are located in major cities...
in a converted factory building located in North Adams
North Adams, Massachusetts
North Adams is a city in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, United States. It is part of the Pittsfield, Massachusetts Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 13,708 as of the 2010 census, making it the least populous city in the state...
, Massachusetts
Massachusetts
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...
, USA. It is one of the largest centers for contemporary visual art
Contemporary art
Contemporary art can be defined variously as art produced at this present point in time or art produced since World War II. The definition of the word contemporary would support the first view, but museums of contemporary art commonly define their collections as consisting of art produced...
and performing arts
Performing arts
The performing arts are those forms art which differ from the plastic arts insofar as the former uses the artist's own body, face, and presence as a medium, and the latter uses materials such as clay, metal or paint which can be molded or transformed to create some physical art object...
in the country.
MASS MoCA opened with 19 galleries and 100000 sq ft (9,290.3 m²) of exhibition space in 1999. In addition to galleries and performing arts spaces. MASS MoCA also rents space to commercial tenants.
Along with a large variety of contemporary art
Contemporary art
Contemporary art can be defined variously as art produced at this present point in time or art produced since World War II. The definition of the word contemporary would support the first view, but museums of contemporary art commonly define their collections as consisting of art produced...
displays, the museum
Museum
A museum is an institution that cares for a collection of artifacts and other objects of scientific, artistic, cultural, or historical importance and makes them available for public viewing through exhibits that may be permanent or temporary. Most large museums are located in major cities...
also hosts film screenings and has seen performances by a variety of musical acts, including Joan Baez
Joan Baez
Joan Chandos Baez is an American folk singer, songwriter, musician and a prominent activist in the fields of human rights, peace and environmental justice....
, Cat Power
Cat Power
Charlyn Marie Marshall , also known as Chan Marshall or by her stage name Cat Power, is an American singer/songwriter and occasional actress and model. Cat Power was originally the name of Marshall's first band, but has come to refer to her musical projects with various backing bands...
and Steve Earle
Steve Earle
Stephen Fain "Steve" Earle is an American singer-songwriter known for his rock and Texas Country as well as his political views. He is also a producer, author, a political activist, and an actor, and has written and directed a play....
. MASS MoCA is the home of the Bang on a Can
Bang on a Can
Bang on a Can is a multi-faceted classical music organization based in New York City. It was founded in 1987 by three American composers who remain its artistic directors: Julia Wolfe, David Lang, and Michael Gordon...
Summer Institute, where composers and performers from around the world come to create and perform new music. The festival, started in 2001, includes concerts in galleries for three weeks during the summer. Starting in 2010, MASS MoCA has become the home for the Solid Sound Music Festival, curated by Wilco
Wilco
Wilco is an American alternative rock band based in Chicago, Illinois. The band was formed in 1994 by the remaining members of alternative country group Uncle Tupelo following singer Jay Farrar's departure. Wilco's lineup has changed frequently, with only singer Jeff Tweedy and bassist John...
. The three-day long festival takes place all over MASS MoCA's campus.
Arnold Print Works
The buildings that MASS MoCA now occupies were originally built between 1870-1900 by the company Arnold Print Works. These buildings, however, were not the first to occupy this site. Since colonial times small-scale industries had been located on this strategic peninsular location between the north and south branches of the Hoosic River. In 1860, the Arnold brothers arrived at this site and set up their company with the latest equipment for printing cloth. They began operating in 1862 and quickly took off. Aiding their success were large government contracts to supply cloth for the Union Army.In December 1871, a fire swept through Arnold Print Works factory buildings, destroying eight in total. Rebuilding started almost immediately and an expanded complex was finished in 1874. Despite a nationwide depression during the 1870s Arnold Print Works purchased additional land along the Hoosic river and constructed new buildings. By 1900, every building but one in today's Marshall Street complex was constructed.
At its peak in 1905, Arnold print works employed over 3000 workers and was one of the world's leading producers of printed textiles. Arnold produced 580,000 yards or 330 miles of cloth per week. Arnold had offices in New York City and Paris. In addition to printing the textiles, Arnold Print Works expanded and built their own cloth-weaving facilities in order to produce "grey cloth," which was the crude unfinished textile from which printed color cloth was made.
In 1942, Arnold Print Works was forced to close its doors and leave North Adams due to the low prices of cloth produced in the South and abroad, as well as the economic effects of the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
.
Sprague Electric Company
Sprague Electric Company, a local North Adams company, bought the Marshall Street complex to produce capacitors. During World War II Sprague operated around the clock and employed a large workforce of women - not only because of the lack of men, but because it took small hands and manual dexterity to construct the small, hand-rolled capacitors.In addition to manufacturing electrical components, Sprague had a large research and development department. This department was responsible for research, design, and manufacturing of the trigger for the atomic bomb and components used in the launch systems for the Gemini moon missions
Project Gemini
Project Gemini was the second human spaceflight program of NASA, the civilian space agency of the United States government. Project Gemini was conducted between projects Mercury and Apollo, with ten manned flights occurring in 1965 and 1966....
.
At its peak during the 1960s Sprague employed 4,137 workers in a community of 18,000. Essentially the factory was a small city within a city with employees working alongside friends, neighbors and relatives. The company was almost completely self-sufficient, holding a radio station, orchestra, vocational school, research library, day-care center, clinic, cooperative grocery store, sports teams, and a gun club with a shooting range on the campus.
In the 1980s Sprague began to face difficulties with global changes in the electronics industry. Cheaper electronic components were being produced in Asia combined with changes in high-tech electronics forced Sprague to sell and shutdown its factory in 1985. As a result North Adams was left "deindustrialized" and found itself on a steep economic decline.
The site was formerly listed as a superfund
Superfund
Superfund is the common name for the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 , a United States federal law designed to clean up sites contaminated with hazardous substances...
contaminated site.
MASS MoCA
The development of MASS MoCA began a year after Sprague vacated the buildings. In 1986 a group of staff from the nearby Williams College Museum of ArtWilliams College Museum of Art
The Williams College Museum of Art is a teaching museum located in Williamstown, Massachusetts. It is a department of Williams College. The museum's mission is to "advance learning through lively and innovative approaches to art for the students of Williams College and communities beyond the...
were looking for large factory or mill buildings where they could display and exhibit large works of modern and contemporary art that they weren't able to display in their more traditional museum/gallery setting. They were directed to the Marshall Street complex by the mayor of North Adams. When they spent time with the space, they quickly realized the buildings had much more potential than an off-shoot gallery. The process for MASS MoCA began.
It took a number of years of fund-raising and organization to develop MASS MoCA. During this process the project evolved to create not only new museum/gallery space but also a performing arts venue.
The museum was granted $18.6 million by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts after a public/private coalition petitioned the state government to support the project. In 1999, MASS MoCA opened its doors.
Designed by the Cambridge architecture firm of Bruner Cott & Assoc, it was awarded highest honors by the American Institute of Architects
American Institute of Architects
The American Institute of Architects is a professional organization for architects in the United States. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the AIA offers education, government advocacy, community redevelopment, and public outreach to support the architecture profession and improve its public image...
and The National Trust for Historic Preservation. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places
National Register of Historic Places
The National Register of Historic Places is the United States government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects deemed worthy of preservation...
.
Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing Retrospective Exhibition
On November 16, 2008, the museum opened a landmark exhibition of Sol LeWittSol LeWitt
Solomon "Sol" LeWitt was an American artist linked to various movements, including Conceptual art and Minimalism....
wall drawings in partnership with Yale University Art Gallery
Yale University Art Gallery
The Yale University Art Gallery houses a significant and encyclopedic collection of art in several buildings on the campus of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Although it embraces all cultures and periods, the Gallery possesses especially renowned collections of early Italian painting,...
and Williams College Museum of Art
Williams College Museum of Art
The Williams College Museum of Art is a teaching museum located in Williamstown, Massachusetts. It is a department of Williams College. The museum's mission is to "advance learning through lively and innovative approaches to art for the students of Williams College and communities beyond the...
. The exhibition, Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective occupies a 27000 square feet (2,508.4 m²) building located at the center of the campus. Over 100 monumental wall drawings and paints conceived by the artist from 1968-2007 will be on view through 2033. Cambridge-based Bruner/Cott & Associates converted the historic mill building and worked with LeWitt to design the gallery space. LeWitt designed the final placement of the drawings before his death in April 2007, and the drawings were installed by a team of draftsmen between April 1 and September 30, 2008. The exhibition was chosen as the "top museum exhibition of 2008" by Time Magazine.
Katharina Grosse
One Floor Up More HighlyKatharina Grosse, wielding a spray gun instead of a brush, Grosse often paints directly on the walls, floors, or facades of her exhibition sites. At MASS MoCA the artist has applied her atmospheric veils of paint to four mounds of soil which seem to spill from the upper balcony into the enormous space below. Stacks of Styrofoam shards rise out of the seductive mountains of color, mirroring the white of the gallery walls -- the metaphorical canvas of Grosse's tremendous painting.
Petah Coyne
Everything That Rises Must ConvergeOver-the-top Baroque style pieces are displayed in 4 different galleries in MASS MoCA's main floor. One piece, Scalapino/Nu Shu, comes upon you as a former apple-bearing tree. Coyne had it uprooted, after it stopped bearing fruit, and brought to the museum. Petah's exhibit also includes a selection of her photography.
Federico Diaz
Geometric Death Frequency: 141Based in Prague, artist and architect Federico Diaz will create a large sculpture formed from a pixilated abstraction of the museum’s entrance courtyard, rendered in 3D, then decomposed by fluid dynamics. Fabricated from polyethylen and aluminium spheres, the work will address man’s relationship to the universe, and the uncanny moment caught between movement and stasis, permanence and change, fullness and emptiness. The museum clocktower is transformed to wave motion.
An Exchange with Sol LeWitt
LeWitt consistently traded works with admirers whom he did not know but who had nevertheless sent their work to him, as well as amateur artists with whom he interacted in his daily life. LeWitt's exchanges —- he responded to every work he received by sending back one of his own -— fostered an ongoing form of artistic communion and, in some cases, a source of support and patronage. Cabinet and MASS MoCA issued an open call for gifts to Sol LeWitt in any form of an image, an object, a piece of music, or a film, books, ephemera, and other non-perishable items (e.g. wine) for a two-part exhibition taking place at MASS MoCA and at the offices of Cabinet.Sean Foley
RuseSean Foley's new work occupies the over-100-foot-long wall outside of the Hunter Center for the Performing Arts.
Jörg Immendorff
Student of Beuys, 6 paintingsJörg Immendorff was one of several prominent artists of the past four decades who studied under Joseph Beuys at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art. This exhibition is the second in an occasional series of shows focused on Beuys and those influenced by his work and teaching.
Natalie Jeremijenko
Tree LogicSix live trees are inverted and suspended from a truss, displaying the contrived growth responses of the trees over time. In this age of the commodification of information, Jeremijenko has made data her medium.
Christoph Büchel's installation
In May 2007, the museum became embroiled in a legal dispute with Swiss installation artist Christoph BüchelChristoph Büchel
Christoph Büchel is a Swiss artist.-Biography:Christoph Büchel was born in Basel, Switzerland, in 1966. Büchel creates hyper-realistic environments that are, in essence, like walking into a mind at work...
. The museum had commissioned Mr. Büchel to create a massive new installation, "Training Ground for Democracy," The exhibit was to include a re-built movie theatre, nine shipping containers, a full size Cape Cod-style house, a mobile home, a bus, and a truck.
The museum, which had already invested significantly in the exhibit and had amassed literally tons of materials in its largest gallery, filed a lawsuit to determine its rights and those of artists were in relation to showing or removing the materials. Büchel claimed allowing the public to view it in an unfinished state would misrepresent his work and did not respond to requests by the museum to come and remove the materials. On September 21, 2007, Judge Michael Ponsor
Michael Ponsor
Michael Adrian Ponsor is a senior judge on the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts. He serves in the court's western region, in the city of Springfield....
of the Federal District Court for Massachusetts
United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts
The United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts is the federal district court whose jurisdiction is the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, USA. The first court session was held in Boston in 1789. The second term was held in Salem in 1790 and until 1813 court session locations...
, Springfield
Springfield, Massachusetts
Springfield is the most populous city in Western New England, and the seat of Hampden County, Massachusetts, United States. Springfield sits on the eastern bank of the Connecticut River near its confluence with three rivers; the western Westfield River, the eastern Chicopee River, and the eastern...
, ruled that there was no distortion inherent in showing an unfinished work as long as it was clearly labeled as such. Judge Ponsor said that his opinion would likely not be viewed as creating a legal precedent.
Though the museum was granted permission to open the gallery, it chose not to and the materials were discarded without ever being seen by the public.
Jenny Holzer Projections
On November 18, 2007, Jenny HolzerJenny Holzer
Jenny Holzer is an American conceptual artist. Holzer lives and works in Hoosick Falls, New York.-Education:...
presented her first indoor projection in the United States at Mass MoCA. Holzer's projection at Mass MoCA filled a large chamber first with selected poems by Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska, and later with selections from prose by Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek
Elfriede Jelinek
Elfriede Jelinek is an Austrian playwright and novelist. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004 for her "musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power."-...
. Holzer placed expansive beanbags around the floor of the chamber, inviting the audience to sit, lie, and bathe in the light of the work. Holzer's installation immediately followed, and took place in the same space as, the Büchel installation.
Simon Starling
Simon StarlingSimon Starling
Simon Starling is an English conceptual artist and was the winner of the 2005 Turner Prize. He lives and works in Copenhagen and Berlin, and is a professor of art at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main.-Biography:...
's The Nanjing Particles opened in December 2008. When he came to MASS MoCA he did a bit of research about the museum's factory buildings and North Adam's history. In doing so he found a small stereoscopic photograph
Stereoscopy
Stereoscopy refers to a technique for creating or enhancing the illusion of depth in an image by presenting two offset images separately to the left and right eye of the viewer. Both of these 2-D offset images are then combined in the brain to give the perception of 3-D depth...
depicting a large group of men in front of a factory building. It turns out that the building depicted was the Sampson Shoe Factory and the large group of men were about a hundred or so Chinese workers who Sampson had brought east from California in order to break a strike. As a result North Adams had the largest population of Chinese workers this side of the Mississippi. His next step was to view the stereograph image underneath a one million volt electron microscope, allowing him to see individual metal particles that comprise the photograph and allowing that to propel him towards the creation of two large scale sculptures that ultimately were manufactured by hand in Nanjing, China.
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle
Opening in December 2009, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle's Gravity is a Force to be Reckoned With opened with an ambitious installation of an upside-down Mies van der Rohe glass house in MASS MoCA's large Building 5 gallery space. The architecture of the house comes from plans made by Mies van der Rohe for his house with four columns or the 50x50 house (1951), that was never realized. Within the house, whose furniture defy gravity sitting firmly on the floor that is the ceiling, there is evidence of an occupant who has been up to something. Accompanying the house is a film, titled Always After (The Glass House) (2006), that might answer some questions about the house or just raise even more. The film was created at Crown Hall, Mies van der Rohe's 1950 School of Architecture building on the Illinois Institute of TechnologyIllinois Institute of Technology
Illinois Institute of Technology, commonly called Illinois Tech or IIT, is a private Ph.D.-granting university located in Chicago, Illinois, with programs in engineering, science, psychology, architecture, business, communications, industrial technology, information technology, design, and law...
campus in Chicago.
The Knitting Machine
On June 30, 2005, MASS MoCA presented an American sculptural installation by Dave Cole. Cole was in residence at MASS MoCA with his project The Knitting Machine which comprised two excavators specially fitted with massive 20' knitting needles. The knitting project was expected to be completed by July 3. The product of The Knitting Machine is an oversized American flag - a flag which can be seen as both a celebratory gesture of pride and a commentary on America's role in world affairs.When the flag was removed from The Knitting Machine it was folded into the traditional flag triangle and was on display in a presentation case which Cole described as "slightly smaller than a Volkswagen Beetle", accompanied by the 20' knitting needles, and a video of the knitting process. [6].
Material World
Sculpture to EvnironmentWorking in a range of modest, industrially produced materials—from plastic sheeting to fishing line—MIchael Beutler, Orly Genger, Tobias Putrih, Alyson Shotz, Dan Steinhilber, and collaborators Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B Nguyen engage the former factory spaces of the museum's second and third floors, creating extradordinary evironments from ordinary things.
InVisible
Art At the Edge of PerceptionA group exhibition of works by artists who explore the line between visibility and invisibility and, in so doing, invite viewers to participate in a deeper act of looking. The exhibition examines the demands and subtleties of the viewing experience and includes works that test the limits of perception.
Leonard Nimoy
Secret SelvesArtist/actor Leonard Nimoy will exhibit his recent photographic series. Shooting in nearby Northampton, Massachusetts, Nimoy recruited volunteers from the local community with an open call for portrait models willing to be photographed posed and dressed as their true or imagined "secret selves." These various secret identities (offer an intimate, sometimes humorous, and often profound new look at the residents of Northampton and the inner yearnings and fantasies that we all share.
Accompanying the large, life-size photographs is a video documenting the artist's conversations with his subjects.