MASS Appeal

Since the opening of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) in North Adams, Massachusetts, in May 1999, Natalie Jeremijenko’s Tree Logic—a row of six trees hanging upside-down in mid-air—has been a symbol of sorts for the museum’s sensibility. Not only is Tree Logic the first piece of art a visitor encounters, set as it is in the courtyard leading to MASS MoCA’s main entrance—it also encapsulates the progressive, outside-the-box, multimedia aesthetic of the museum. There are shades here, too, of the sometimes uneasy coexistence of nature, science, and technology, and of the dangerous qualities inherent in contemporary art throughout history. Writing in the Berkshire Eagle soon after MASS MoCA’s opening on that Memorial Day, Richard Nunley commented (in an otherwise quite positive review of the museum) that Tree Logic was “painful to behold.” A dedicated gardener, Nunley compared Jeremijenko’s work to stringing up puppies and kittens by their tails and predicted that the experiment would end in certain death.

A decade on, the work remains in place and, according to curator Susan Cross, not a single tree has died, though several in decline have been switched out and transplanted nearby at The Clark in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where by all accounts they continue to thrive. The easy analogy here is to the survival and thriving of MASS MoCA itself, as it celebrates a tenth anniversary that most in the art world and beyond never expected to see.

When the idea for MASS MoCA was first floated in the mid-1980s by three young curators (and one staff member, Rod Faulds) at the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA), “the state’s economy was not unlike today’s, namely, hemorrhaging [in] the last really significant state recession, and the notion of launching a large museum for contemporary art in North Adams at that moment was felt by many to be far-fetched,” says Joseph (Joe) Thompson, one of those three curators and now the director of MASS MoCA, a position he’s held since its beginnings.

Dressed in earth tones, with wavy, graying hair and a tall, lean frame, the fifty-year-old Thompson is relaxed, voluble, and quick to laugh. Pointing out specific buildings from the window of a fourth-floor conference room, he clearly knows this red-brick village of a museum—complete with courtyards, bridges, and a moat—like the back of his hand and loves it as one does a child who is by turns challenging, unpredictable, and utterly fulfilling.

Remembering the early years of the museum’s conception and journey to reality, Thompson recalls “there was tremendous doubt. Why spend state funds on an art museum when the economy was so grim? Even if you could get past that philosophical, political argument, would anybody come? Would anybody come a second time? We opened with no cash reserves and no endowment, which is a recipe for disaster [at] a not-for-profit.”

And yet a decade after the museum first opened its doors and more than two dozen years since the concept began its journey toward reality, MASS MoCA finally has an endowment—thirteen million dollars pledged toward the museum’s future, with seven million of that already paid in. There also has been concrete growth: already the largest center for contemporary art in the country, MASS MoCA has expanded its square footage of renovated gallery and performance space—located at the former Sprague Electric factory complex—from 200,000 to 430,000 square feet, including 270,000 allocated to performing arts facilities and other public programming spaces as well as new galleries housing the twenty-five-year exhibition, Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective, which opened in November.

And people keep coming. The museum welcomes some 110,000 visitors annually, with an additional 20,000 attending performing arts events each year—numbers that put MASS MoCA on a par with contemporary art museums located in downtown Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Philadelphia, and Chicago.

Much credit for the museum’s success goes to Thompson, according to those who have worked with him over the years. Former president of Williams College, Morton O. Schapiro, who taught Thompson in his senior seminar twenty-nine years ago, says, “Joe’s a genius. He’s an extraordinary entrepreneur, a brilliant fundraiser, a fabulous speaker, and an inspiring leader.”   

Thompson was called on to be all of those things and more during the long road that led to the establishment of the museum. That journey began with a very different goal in mind, he says, settling back in his chair to reminisce. The MASS MoCA that exists today is not the museum Thompson imagined when he and his WCMA colleagues Thomas Krens (who went on to direct the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation from 1989 through 2008) and Michael Govan (now director and CEO of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) began poking around for abandoned mill buildings in northern Berkshire County. Inspired by the European notion of kunsthalle—a German term for exhibition spaces, in castles or old industrial buildings, where changing art shows are mounted—they were looking for perhaps twenty or thirty thousand square feet of space where large-scale installations and exhibitions could be sited.

Meanwhile, Sprague Electric was in the midst of closing down its North Adams mills, including the thirteen-acre, twenty-seven-building site on Marshall Street that had been in use as a manufacturing hub since the late 1700s, when it housed an array of businesses including a sawmill, a sleigh-maker, and an ironworks. Beginning in 1860, the Arnold Print Works made fabric and printed textiles here. Sprague Electric bought the complex in 1942 and converted it into a production facility for electrical components, first for World War II weaponry and then for the fast-growing consumer-electronics market, until competition from foreign manufacturers closed its doors in 1985.

Mayor John Barrett III, a former elementary school teacher who has served as mayor of North Adams since 1984, remembers when Krens first came to his office to pitch the idea of a contemporary art museum as an anchor for the city. Barrett took a few days to consider the “crazy idea” and decided it wasn’t so crazy, after all. “We had staggering social problems and an unemployment rate of fourteen, fifteen percent,” he recalls. “We were getting called things like ‘a dirty old mill town,’ ‘a classic case of urban blight.’ I knew if North Adams was going to succeed and rebuild its economy with many small, diversified businesses, we needed a catalyst. To me it was never about the art—it was about economic development, job creation, and changing the image of the community. If this was even semi-successful, it would forever change the face of this community, as much as Sprague Electric did when it came here in 1929.”

In 1988, with $35 million in state funds promised from the Commonwealth, that legislation passed, Thompson set out to sell public and private supporters on his original vision of the museum, which he now refers to as MASS MoCA One—a permanent collection of contemporary work to which people would return again and again. That image, however, didn’t fly. “What I heard over and over again was, Joe, it’s great that you love Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and Donald Flavin, but does the rest of the world love them as much, and will people come back? ” Thompson says. “I spent the better part of four-and-a-half years trying to convince people that it was a beautiful idea and that people would come back many times. And at the end of the day, people were not convinced, and that led to a fundamental re-conceiving of the idea.” What he envisioned as MASS MoCA One, Thompson says, was later realized as Dia:Beacon, which opened in 2003 in a former Nabisco plant in Beacon, New York, and houses the permanent collection of the Dia Art Foundation.

Barrett remembers a time when he and Thompson seemed to be the only ones still on board. “Joe and I couldn’t get anyone to return our calls—everyone had abandoned us.” It took steadfast work from both men, a new plan for the museum, and millions of dollars raised in matching funds by city businesses to demonstrate their faith in the project and convince the state and then-governor William Weld to release the funds that had been promised.

“In the beginning, we had a lot of local supporters, but foundations wouldn’t even talk to us—we had no track record because we weren’t even open,” recalls Jennifer Trainer Thompson, the museum’s director of development (she and Thompson married three years after he hired her in 1988). “When Governor Weld asked us to raise $500,000 in pledges … we went around to local businesses and asked them what their businesses looked like now and what they would look like with the museum in town. We ended up raising over a million dollars. It was very much like a barn raising, a grassroots effort.” Though Jennifer Thompson now raises some $3 million each year from private donors, foundations, and corporations across the country, she says the dedication and enthusiasm of regional supporters has been steadfast.

Barrett still has a copy of the Berkshire Eagle with a headline declaring, “The Barrett-Joe Thompson Dream Comes to Reality.” (The city actually owns the property via a municipal authority, the Cultural Development Commission, which leases the complex to the nonprofit MASS MoCA Foundation.)

That vision of the museum, the one that was built and exists today—what Joe Thompson calls MASS MoCA Two—is dedicated to community involvement and the nurturing of both visual and performing artists and focuses on change rather than stasis. Artists-in-residence stay for weeks or sometimes even months in order to create new pieces to be mounted; performing artists show their work for one or perhaps two nights, for a local and regional audience, and then move on. Like Tree Logic, the galleries sprout new growth and shed it when the season changes, making space for new images.

When MASS MoCA opened its doors to the public on an unseasonably hot and humid Memorial Day weekend in 1999, “there was a lot of fun in the air, sort of like a carnival,” recalls Elizabeth Kolbert, a Williamstown resident and frequent contributor to the New Yorker, who wrote a piece on the opening for that magazine. “People were excited and curious, and a little bit baffled.”

The city of North Adams had spent many months in preparation, building new schools and new playgrounds, remodeling the downtown, and repaving streets and sidewalks. Meanwhile, renovations had been going on deep within the guts of the Sprague complex, mostly invisible to the local community. Finally, North Adams residents were seeing the results. Not everyone appreciated the art, but what they did appreciate, Barrett says, was the museum’s effort to retain the city’s history, to preserve the structures in which their fathers, mothers, and grandparents had labored for Sprague Electric.

An initial feasibility plan put together by a “juggernaut of architectural firepower” (Joe Thompson’s words) that included Frank Gehry and Robert Venturi had proposed a slick complex of clean-lined galleries, condominiums, and cafés. But in the wake of the state’s economic downturn in the late 1980s, a new master plan was developed that took into account both practicalities and the desire to preserve the historic mill buildings that had been central to the lives of so many in the community. Lead architect Simeon Bruner of Bruner/Cott & Associates in Cambridge, Massachusetts, describes this new vision for the museum as “a catalyst for community and economic development … not a box in which to display art, but a place that was grittier, integrated with the community; a place where you could see art being made as well as on display.”

The museum itself was placed in the center of the complex, in the oldest buildings that required the most work. Here Bruner carved out galleries of many different sizes and shapes, from the vast Building 5 to the intimate spaces on the first, second, and third floors of Building 4, while preserving or complementing the original feel. “We left as much of the patina as we could—we were not anxious to erase the past,” he says. “We had to find a way to make these buildings work in the twentieth century, with all the codes and technology, and yet look as if they were just found that way.” Ergo the faux-industrial bathrooms in the basement, and the bridge in the newly restored Building 7 that retains its original interior structure within a brand-new, insulated shell.

The 31.4-million-dollar project (which does not include the value of the buildings or privately raised funds which would increase it to fifty million) also included the renovation of sixty thousand square feet of office and retail space, located in the surrounding buildings. Today, the museum’s twenty-three tenants range from restaurants and single-person offices to larger companies such as the law firm Donovan & O’Connor, which rents an entire floor of Building 13. Having businesses located at MASS MoCA is good for the museum and for the city, says Blair Benjamin, director of real estate and community development at MASS MoCA, who adds that he’s seen steady growth in leasing over the decade.

“MASS MoCA serves as a linchpin between North Adams and the rest of the Berkshire creative economy,” Joe Thompson says. “When MASS MoCA opened, the whole ecosystem of Berkshire County changed.” Tourist traffic patterns have also changed, he says, with MASS MoCA, WCMA, and The Clark exerting a combined pull that magnetizes visitors to northern Berkshires.

These three institutions remain close collaborators, partnering on projects such as the recently expanded Kidspace, an art-making, education, and exhibition area for children at MASS MoCA. Now in its ninth year of operation, Kidspace “has become the de facto art education program for all three North Adams elementary schools,” Joe Thompson says. “We’re soon to have a whole generation of North Adams young people who consider not only MASS MoCA but also The Clark and WCMA to be part of their stomping grounds.” This spring, a new Kidspace installation created by Matt Bua enlisted local students to create their own sculptures, write poems and stories inspired by Bua’s work, and actually enter the piece by climbing into a part of Bua’s crib sculpture that extends up to a second-story window.

Like Bua’s crib, the art at MASS MoCA has a way of inviting you in. You can stick your head inside a glass-enclosed ecosystem (Vaughn Bell’s Personal Home Biospheres) and smell green things growing; stand in the very center of Pawel Wojtasik’s 360-degree video installation, ; and step into the vibrant pulse of the LeWitt exhibition, which hums with light and color. Rounding each corner of the LeWitt gallery into another bright, wide hallway, you encounter wall after wall of bold images that pop inside the clean white space.

“People feel comfortable here,” says Cross. “It feels like a place you walk into and there aren’t a lot of rules.” Some of that is due to the architectural design. Bruner has built visual cues into the museum’s design—glass doors, balconies overlooking three-story-high galleries, courtyards that serve as outdoor stages—that draw visitors in and lead them instinctively from one space to the next. You may not always know exactly where you are at MASS MoCA, but you never feel lost.

“Given the size of it, it could feel alienating, but it doesn’t,” says curator Denise Markonish. “Part of that is keeping the flavor of the space, so it’s not just big white cubes, and part of it is the spirit of MASS MoCA, this non-traditional art museum where people bring their kids [and know] this is a place where it’s okay to come in and hang out.”

Group and solo shows feature art-world luminaries such as Jenny Holzer and Anselm Kiefer as well as emerging artists—some so “emerging” that they are still without gallery representation. If there is a criteria (beyond the proviso of “contemporary”), both curators agree it lies in the greater relevance and thematic scope of an artist’s work, whether he is “taking the pulse of the general sensibility of what’s going on in the world,” as Markonish puts it.

“The artists I think are significant are doing something that’s innovative or that speaks to a larger movement,” explains Cross, who recently curated a show that looked at Western views of China. “Often a contemporary museum is a platform for ideas or perspectives on the culture at large.”

Central to the museum’s mission is “its commitment to giving artists a chance to make new work on a scale they couldn’t do anywhere else … which allows viewers to sense and experience art in a different way,” says Markonish. A new work is commissioned each year for the vast Building 5, which currently houses the Simon Starling work The Nanjing Particles. Of the six artists featured in Markonish’s new group show, These Days: Elegies for Modern Times, which opened in April, four—including Wojtasik—were awarded commissions and residencies by the museum to produce work for the show. Markonish was involved in nearly every aspect of Wojtasik’s project, from the construction of the thirty-five-foot-diameter, twelve-foot-tall cylindrical “theater” in Building 4 to networking in New Orleans, where the piece was filmed.

“MASS MoCA somehow creates a space or atmosphere where things can grow and there’s room for unpredictability,” Wojtasik says. “They’re very open to experimentation, [yet] there’s a degree of professionalism that’s really reassuring to the artist.”

“Our view of ourselves as a workshop for artists to make new work is really near and dear to us,” Joe Thompson says, and the LeWitt wing, despite its semi-permanence, fits neatly into that vision. In accordance with LeWitt’s established mode of working, some sixty artists were involved in executing the wall drawings, following instructions LeWitt laid out before his death in 2007. “When you look at Sol as a person, he almost made everything we do here possible—his generosity, the way he looked at art-making, his support of other artists,” Markonish says.

Joe Thompson can just about pinpoint the exact moment when he knew MASS MoCA was going to make it. On Christmas Eve 2005, he was still reeling after the board had taken a cold hard look at the museum’s finances at a meeting “that could only be described as grim,” he recalls. “We were living off current revenues, scraping by week to week.… The word we liked to use was ‘fragile,’ and that was a polite word. The truth of the matter was we were hanging on by our fingernails and stumbling from one near-bankruptcy to the next—all the while making this parade wave to the world. At that meeting on December 17, we looked each other in the eyes and asked, ‘How long do we really think we can hold this together?’”

The board agreed to launch a “now-or-never” fund drive that became known as the Permanence Fund campaign. On December 25, Thompson received a call from a board member who laid out a challenge grant, coupled with a set of incentives, that if met would fundamentally change the museum’s financial structure. “That was the turning point,” Joe Thompson says.

In the four-and-a-half years since—particularly with the installation of the LeWitt exhibition—Thompson has been thinking a lot about MASS MoCA One. “I obviously love MASS MoCA Two—it’s lively, with a breadth and a range of programmatic offerings that might not be unprecedented, but is certainly unusual,” he says. “That said, I do believe that long-term, permanent collections are really important. For me, the perfect institution would be one that has all the dynamic liveliness of MASS MoCA Two, coupled with five or six points of reference—LeWitt installation like the LeWitt that draw you back and ground your experience in ways that are really fundamental.”

There is certainly enough space at MASS MoCA to encompass both visions; Building 6 contains another 120,000 square feet that has yet to be renovated. Clearly inspiration is in plentiful supply, and—unlike a decade ago—so is public support. “They’ve just scratched the surface,” Barrett says. “If the second ten years are anything like the first, it’s unlimited where they can go.” Perhaps in another decade, those six trees in the front courtyard will finally touch the ground. (JUNE 2009)

Tresca Weinstein is a freelance writer and editor for national and regional publications.

THE GOODS

MASS MoCA
87 Marshall St.
North Adams, Mass.
413.662.2111
www.massmoca.org

Performance Enhancers

As it turns out, it’s not just tourists who “get” MASS MoCA. Original estimates assumed that at least 90 percent of the museum’s visitors would come from out of state; in fact, that number is about 70 percent. Joe Thompson credits much of the local traffic to the museum’s performing arts series, which, he says, is just as large as the visual arts program in every aspect, from marketing to staffing to creative output. The idea that choreographers, dancers, musicians, filmmakers, directors, and actors need time and space to create just as much as visual artists do was first brought to Thompson’s attention by Sam Miller, then-director of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in Becket, Massachusetts, who urged him to give performing arts a prominent place at the museum.

“So many art organizations spring up as impermeable citadels of high art that have nothing to do with their communities,” says Rachel Chanoff, the museum’s curator for performing arts and film. “Contemporary art can often be daunting … but everyone loves movies and concerts. We realized [performing arts] could be a wide doorway into the museum. We are the stewards of this place that is so central to the community and we want to keep it as warm and inviting and friendly as we can.”

Chanoff has built the trust of local audiences, and the interest of those who are farther-flung, with shows ranging from crowd pleasers such as the Los Lobos concert on the museum’s opening weekend to participatory dance parties and outdoor cinema. Early on, she programmed a series of film and performances followed by cooking lessons, which featured, among others, Buckwheat Zydeco’s Cajun-style music and food and movies and Indian delicacies from Madhur Jaffrey. The goal, Chanoff says, was to make the museum’s Hunter Center feel like “your culturally interesting living room.”

Work-in-progress showings and open rehearsals, typically followed by question-and-answer sessions, offer viewers a way into work that might otherwise seem impenetrable. One afternoon during this year’s February public school break, Dutch choreographer Anouk van Dijk was running her four dancers through their paces in a corner of the ten-thousand-square-foot Hunter Center—fine-tuning their timing and entrances as they flung themselves against a wall and slid to the floor. Some two dozen audience members sat watching at the edge of the lit space; even the very youngest children seemed captivated.

Among the seventy performances and some hundred and fifty to two hundred performers featured each year are established but not yet boldfaced artists, such as van Dijk; household names, including Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson, both of whom return frequently; emerging New York City-based artists; and companies such as Bang on a Can and Working Films, with whom the museum has built longstanding relationships. In addition to offering a venue for performances, MASS MoCA provides housing, technical support, and rehearsal space for seven performing artists each year, who come to the museum for one- to three-week residencies.

“They’ve been instrumental in supporting my career as a creator of my own work as well as a collaborator and composer,” says Cynthia Hopkins, whose alt-rock band, Gloria Deluxe, opened for Patti Smith in an outdoor concert at the museum in 2000. The booking was the beginning of a relationship between artist and museum that has continued through three residencies, during which Hopkins developed and staged her Accidental Trilogy. MASS MoCA also commissioned her to write a work to be played on Tim Hawkinson’s Uberorgan, a gigantic pipe organ-player piano-bagpipe hybrid that was installed in Building 5 from June 2000 to October 2001.—TW

The Business of Art
According to a 2006 report by the Center for Creative Community Development (C3D), a project between Williams College and MASS MoCA that examines the effect of the arts in community redevelopment, forty-four new businesses opened in North Adams in the three years following the museum’s opening. Local salaries increased by 8.5 percent, and property values of houses close to the museum went up by about $11,000 per home. The museum’s presence has directly or indirectly created several hundred jobs—not only in the hospitality and retail industries but also in educational services, such as art classes and conferences, says Stephen Sheppard, director of C3D. In addition, Sheppard says, “MASS MoCA has played a central role in developing and building the social network of North County,” bringing together leaders in the arts, social services, and business sectors of the Berkshires.—TW