MoCA of the Month
MASS MoCA is the largest center for contemporary arts in the United States. The institution is dedicated to the creation and presentation of provocative visual and performing arts pieces, and of works that blur conventional distinctions between artistic disciplines. In addition, MASS MoCA functions as a laboratory for the contemporary arts, fostering experimentation by artists, encouraging collaborations among institutions, and allowing visitors a behind-the-scenes look at the creative process.
This June we would like to present it at MoCA of the Month.
With annual attendance of 120,000, it ranks among the most visited institutions in the United States dedicated to new art. More than 80 major new works of art and more than 50 performances have been created through fabrication and rehearsal residencies in North Adams, making MASS MoCA perhaps the most fertile site in the country for new art. The museum thrives on making and presenting work that is fresh, surprising, and challenging.
Visual arts
MASS MoCA exhibits work by many of the most important artists of today—both well known, and emerging—focusing on large-scale and complex installations that are impossible to realize in conventional museums. Our broad, soaring galleries with 110,000 square feet of open, flexible space and their robust industrial character have proven both inspiring and empowering to artists.Performing arts
An essential and integral part of MASS MoCA’s mission are the more than 75 performances staged year-round, including popular music, contemporary dance, alternative cabaret, world music dance parties, outdoor silent films with live music, documentaries, and avant-garde theater.Education
Kidspace is a collaboration among MASS MoCA, the Clark Art Institute, and the Williams College Museum of Art where every elementary student in the region—more than 10,000 annually—comes to study and create art. In addition, more than 5,000 children annually experience world-class music, theater, and dance through school-time performing arts events offered by our Art Assembly program.Economic and Commercial Development
To offset operating costs and stimulate job growth in our region, MASS MoCA develops and leases space to a wide range of exciting business, including restaurants, publishing companies, law firms, photography studios, and computer-generated special effects. We also collaborate with many partners across the county to strengthen regional tourism, improve infrastructure for small business development, aand attract and retain residents. Much of this work has been documented and analyzed by our partners at the Center for Creative Community Development, a national research and policy organization operated by Williams College and located on our campus.Simeon Bruner of Bruner/Cott & Associates, Frank Gehry, Robert Venturi, and David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
MASS MoCA is housed on a 13-acre campus of renovated 19th-century factory buildings in North Adams, Massachusetts. The complex occupies nearly one-third of the downtown business district.
By coupling the versatility and size of its spaces with the latest digital, fiber optic, and new media technologies, MASS MoCA is able to present and catalyze the creation of works that can be shown nowhere else in the world. These facilities serve as a testing ground to expand and redefine the nature of contemporary art.
Facilities include: 19 light-filled galleries with more than 100,000 square feet of exhibition space, including a single gallery as long as a football field.
10,000-square-foot black box theatre with a clear-span 30-foot ceiling, which can accommodate up to 850 seats.
3,500 square foot lab theater.
Outdoor cinema with a 50-foot-wide movie screen and a 70 mm projector.
Two performance courtyards, one of which spans 22,500 square feet.
Workshop and art fabrication facilities.
5,000 square feet of rehearsal and production support space.
60,000 square feet of office and retail space for commercial tenants in the communications, high tech, and new media industries.
Mission Statement
If conventional museums are boxes, MASS MoCA strives instead to be an open platform—a welcoming environment that encourages a free exchange between the making of art and its display, between the visual and performing arts, and between our extraordinary historic factory campus and the patrons, workers and tenants who again enliven it. That is, we strive to make the whole cloth of art making, presentation and public participation a seamless continuum.
MASS MoCA’s performing arts residencies offer well equipped and professionally staffed technical facilities and stages, and a sophisticated, diverse and sympathetic audience for new work—especially technically complex work that requires generous allocations of time and space impossible in conventional theatrical settings. MASS MoCA’s vast galleries and expert fabrication staff offer visual artists the tools and time to create works of a scale and duration impossible to realize in the time and space-cramped conditions of most museums. We take every opportunity to expose our audiences to all stages of art production: rehearsals, sculptural fabrication, and developmental workshops are frequently on view, as are finished works of art.
If MASS MoCA’s mission is to nurture and present exciting new art of the highest quality in all media—and in all phases of its production – MASS MoCA works equally hard to leverage the arts as a catalyst for community revitalization: the creation of new markets, good jobs and the long-term enrichment of a region in economic need are all part of our driving purpose. We at MASS MoCA are convinced that advancement of the arts, increased tourism and community participation, and regional economic redevelopment are mutually reinforcing and inextricably linked, and we act forcefully on that belief.
The arts create and bestow community identity. A strong identity rallies confidence, hope, productivity, pride and economic vibrancy. These are base conditions for a healthy community; they cannot be created, however without risk, adventure, and the willingness to embrace the new.
Collection
Collection Focus
History
The history of MASS MoCA’s site spans more than two hundred years of economic, industrial, and architectural development that traces the trajectory of industrialism in New England. The 13 acres of grounds in North Adams, Massachusetts, encompass a vast complex of 19th-century factory buildings and occupy nearly one-third of the city’s downtown business district. Listed in the National Historic Register, the site’s 26 buildings form an elaborate system of interlocking courtyards and passageways rich with historical association. Bridges, viaducts, elevated walkways, and red brick facades lend a distinct architectural ambiance to the complex, which throughout its history has been a place for innovation and fabrication using the most advanced knowledge and technology of the day.
1942, the Sprague Electric Company bought the site. While largely leaving the building exteriors as they were, Sprague made extensive modifications to the interiors to convert the former textile mill into an electronics plant. Sprague physicists, chemists, electrical engineers, and skilled technicians were called upon by the U.S. government during World War II to design and manufacture crucial components of some of its most advanced high-tech weapons systems, including the atomic bomb.
Outfitted with state-of-the-art equipment, Sprague was a major research and development center, conducting studies on the nature of electricity and semi-conducting materials. After the war, Sprague’s products were used in the launch systems for Gemini moon missions, and by 1966 Sprague employed 4,137 workers in a community of 18,000, existing almost as a city within a city. From the post-war years to the mid-1980s Sprague produced electrical components for the booming consumer electronics market, but competition from lower-priced components produced abroad led to declining sales and, in 1985, the company closed its operations on Marshall Street. In 1986, just a year after Sprague’s closing, the business and political leaders of North Adams were seeking ways to creatively re-use the vast Sprague complex. Williams College Museum of Art director Thomas Krens, who would later become Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, was looking for space to exhibit large works of contemporary art that would not fit in conventional museum galleries. When Mayor John Barrett III suggested the vast Marshall Street complex as a possible exhibition site, the idea of creating a contemporary arts center in North Adams began to take shape.
Joseph C. Thompson, Krens’ colleague at the Williams College Museum of Art, was named founding director of MASS MoCA and spearheaded the project’s launch. Thompson led the campaign to build political and community support for the proposed institution, which would serve as a platform for the creation and presentation of contemporary art, and develop links to the region’s myriad cultural institutions. The Massachusetts legislature announced its support for the project in 1988. Subsequent economic upheaval in Massachusetts threatened the project, but broad-based support from the community and the private sector, which pledged more than $8 million, ensured that it continued to move forward.
The feasibility study for MASS MoCA was led by renowned architects Simeon Bruner of Bruner/Cott & Associates, Frank Gehry, Robert Venturi, and David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Bruner/Cott was named project architect in 1992 and, in 1995, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based firm completed the master plan and final designs. They proposed exploiting the unparalleled scale and versatility of the complex’s industrial spaces, while establishing a dialogue between the facility’s past and the new life it would have as the country’s largest center for contemporary visual and performing arts.
As designs for the complex developed, so did the articulation of MASS MoCA’s mission. Originally conceived as an institution for the display of contemporary visual arts, MASS MoCA evolved, under Thompson’s leadership, into a center that would both present and catalyze the creation of works that chart new creative territory. MASS MoCA celebrated its opening in 1999, marking the site’s launch into its third century and the continuation of a long history of innovation and experimentation.
Information compiled from press material provided by the institution.
