The visitor moved at his or her own pace, some shuffling, some kicking, as if moving through clouds.
#CAKE MASS MOCA SKIN#
Above, 40 mechanized dispensers dropped single sheets of onion skin paper, which fell like leaves. The space’s 3,500 spaces were draped in red silk organza, the sun bathing the gallery in a soft crimson. My favourites include Ann Hamilton’s 2004 show, Corpus, set in the museum’s largest gallery, which is only a tad smaller than a football field. So is the number in each of the museum's cycles, with up to a dozen new shows on at any given time, big and small. It does great temporary shows, as do many museums, but their size and the focus on new commissions is unusual. It has, but only with respect to its exhibitions, with many new commissions of immense scale and ambition. In the early 1980s, everyone thought the museum should, must, and would elide into a conventional art museum. Much of the brick and concrete is exposed, reinforcing the sense both of a raw urban environment and an unpolished, lean and mean start-up.
Few of the galleries are the clean, white boxes we expect in contemporary art museums. For Mass Moca, it is both a challenge and an opportunity. When Sprague was there, it functioned as a watch with intricate, different, but complementary parts. The campus is a maze but not an incoherent one. Launching Mass Moca entailed a massive, ongoing architectural retrofit. John Barrett, the mayor of North Adams knew next to nothing about contemporary art, was inclined to view artists as crazies, but was still willing to jump out of a plane using a parachute packed by eggheads with Williams degrees Moore refused to attend the opening and Krens started to dream of the empty 800,000 sq foot tomb in North Adams. During his time at Williams, the building was expanded by the architect Charles Moore-but the project was so bungled by a cost-conscious university president that it was already too small the day it opened. Mass Moca-at least the initial idea-was the vision of the curator Thomas Krens, who taught at the nearby Williams College and directed its museum before going on to lead the Solomon R. I lived in North Adams and am now back in Vermont and see many of Mass Moca’s shows. I studied at Williams, and I was a curator until 2004 at the Clark Art Institute. My parents owned a small farm in Stamford, Vermont, about five miles from Sprague. This caused unemployment in the rural northwestern Massachusetts region to approach nearly 20%. The museum began with a catastrophe, when in 1985 the Sprague Electric Company-a leading maker of transistors, circuits, and rocket innards-shut down, leaving more than 3,000 workers unemployed and its vast campus of 26 industrial buildings empty. The project was once inconceivable, then impossible, then nearly fatally broke, and now is thriving. The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass Moca) in North Adams celebrates its 20th anniversary this week. James Turrell's Perfectly Clear (Ganzfeld), 1991 © Florian Holzherr and courtesy of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art
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