Mass MoCA, the World’s Biggest Contemporary Art Museum, Looks Fantastic

It started from scratch 20 years ago, in an abandoned factory complex, and overcame big challenges through vision and commitment.

O ne of the fascinating phenomena in the American art world is our flexibility in establishing new museums. In calcified, stratified Europe, building a new museum from scratch is counterintuitive. Doing anything new is hard. Though this is changing, great European private collections are usually sold at estate sales. The grand philanthropic gesture — giving a collection to a museum or starting one — is rare.

In America, it happens more often, in part because of our tax laws but mostly because Americans are naturally generous. Almost everything in the arts here happens through private initiative, and it takes plenty of initiative, even chutzpah, to form a museum from scratch.

I’ll write a couple of stories about new museums in America, one, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, or Mass MoCA, which just marked its 20th anniversary. It’s in North Adams, Mass., in the northwestern corner of the state, and it’s the largest contemporary art museum in the world. In October, I’ll write about the Museum of Texas Art, or MoTA, an ambitious museum-in-the-making.

I visited Mass MoCA last week. It’s a made-from-scratch museum, and what a story.

After 20 years and some near-death experiences, it still has the energy and madcap spirit of a start-up. That’s in its DNA. There’s no museum like it. The snootiest New York collector loves it. So does Rosie the Riveter. Anyone with a brain and a heartbeat will find something to bewitch, beguile, and, yes, bewilder since the art’s both cutting-edge and bleeding-edge. That’s fine. Bewilderment is the first step to learning something new.

The barebones story starts, well, with the bare bones: the setting. The museum repurposed the sprawling campus of the old Sprague Electric Company, which sounds like any mundane factory, but it wasn’t. Sprague occupied 26 big brick factory buildings, most built in the 19th century, on 16 packed acres by the Hoosic River. It’s a dense, urban site.

North Adams was once the quintessential mill town, yet the town and Mass MoCA are postage stamps. Out of Maa MoCA’s thousand windows, the visitor sees bits of the sprawling Berkshire Mountains that surround the tiny city. Depending on the season, they are a million greens, bright red, yellow, and purple, or dazzling, fresh white.

The factory complex once made textiles, but Sprague refitted it for the design and manufacture of electronics, and not just rinky-dink gadgets. Sprague’s scientists developed components of the atomic bomb. It was a pioneer in the semiconductor business.

At its peak, the family-owned company employed 4,000 workers. In 1985, employees tried to unionize. The company told the organizers that if there were a union, they’d close the factory and move. The workers unionized, and Sprague closed. Within weeks, thousands of workers in a sparsely populated corner of Massachusetts were out of work. Within months, the campus was empty.

I believe in miracles but know that plenty of good people and hard work delivered Mass MoCA from a mess of empty, rotting buildings, anger, and paralyzing despair.

First and foremost, though, what art did I see?

The place itself is a work of art. Unlike Dia Beacon, which has a high-tone Soho look (all sanitized white walls, like the inside of a fridge), MoCA feels industrial. The walls of most of the buildings are still brick. Not natty brick but brick with dings and the residue of old paint. Some of the spaces are cavernous. There’s a sweatshop feel from the days when the place was a textile mill. Some of the spaces are proper galleries with smooth, white walls, but most aren’t.

I loved a small Louise Bourgeois show in what’s called Building 6, which opened a couple of years ago. Mass MoCA is renovating one building at a time, so it’s always a work in progress. The Bourgeois show is a good example of the Mass MoCA look. Most of the galleries have the original support piers, high ceilings exposing the building’s innards, and long vistas. The spaces are both rough and elegant.

In another gallery, sculpture by Sarah Oppenheimer is tactile and rotates. Visitors can push and pull it — now, a gallery attendant is there to do it, since, thanks to the nuts running the government, we can’t touch anything. It’s metal but also reflective glass. As it rotates, the visitor sees different angles of the architecture, the neighborhood outside, which is still slummy but aesthetically bracing, and then angles of his or her body.

There are 37 temporary and permanent exhibitions there, some big, some, like Martin Puryear’s Big Bling, really big, single objects outdoors. Big Bling was displayed at Madison Square Park in 2016. It’s great and like any good work of art enlivens and changes its environment.

Puryear is a very big name and a great artist, but going to Mass MoCA is always a thrill for me because of the artists I don’t know. One show, enigmatic and spine-tingling, is Julianne Swartz’s Tonal Tunnel. It’s set in a space that looks like it’s from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It’s sound art that starts with recordings of singing that are manipulated to evoke desolation, calm, hope, and strength.

There’s so much more to adore there. Mass MoCA is in Berkshire County, an arts mecca, and I would call it among the biggest rocks in its crown jewels of culture. I loved the Ledelle Moe exhibition of concrete monoliths. It’s a show about the impulse to memorialize through sculpture. It’s in a gallery the size of a football field with a cascade of tall windows facing north and south so the light is always changing.

Moe is South African. Her work has the totemic feel of indigenous art, but I also thought of Stonehenge, Luxor in Egypt, and the ruins of old Roman baths. Her work looks unmovable and permanent, but it’s hollow concrete. Its permanence is skin-deep. Nothing, even our memorials, lasts forever.

Mass MoCA has no permanent collection, sort of. “Sort of” because the space I like the most — it’s outlandish, monumental, surreal, exotic, fantastic — is the Sol LeWitt retrospective, which has a 35-year run. It’s three stories of LeWitt, from his early days to his death in 2007.

LeWitt is one of the founders of minimalism and conceptual art, and MoCA is hosting a vast survey of his wall drawings, wall after wall of funky form and color juxtapositions. He goes from monochromatic and subtle, barely seen lines to psychedelic, to drawings that pulse from contrasting colors. Sometimes they’re playful, sometimes aggressive, sometimes quiet. MoCA had the space, but the secret sauce was open-mindedness and entrepreneurial spirit.

On view until 2025 is a very beautiful James Turrell show of “Light and Space” art. Light illuminates. It’s ubiquitous, save for the grave, and it’s there but invisible. In art, it’s an object to be manipulated, by architecture or by where we position ourselves, by the time of day or the season. The Turrell show is an immersive experience in a big, specially built gallery. It’s magical. I’ve been through it before and didn’t visit again last week. Only a handful of people are allowed at a time.

Mass MoCA is a big complex with lots of moving parts. It rents space to businesses and not-for-profits. The Artists Book Foundation is there. There are also museums within the museum. The distinguished, quiet Hall Art Foundation has a space to display the best work by Anselm Kiefer. The Halls are astute, sublimely tasteful, daring collectors of contemporary art.

There are two more things I want to say about Mass MoCA. First, art made today can be very political, and that’s fine until it’s nauseatingly one-dimensional. I don’t want to get beaten over the head, ever, but art that says just one thing — isn’t racism, misogyny, or homophobia bad? or “I hate Trump” — is boring. I wouldn’t call Mass MoCA’s interpretation bland, but the museum’s mood is catholic. The art invites lots of interpretations. That’s the character of the place. It’s a start-up with few rules. It’s egalitarian. It’s experimental. Straitjacket art need not apply. Not allowed. Neither is pomposity nor jargon.

Blane De St. Croix’s How to Move a Landscape shows art reflecting on the permafrost melt in Barrow, Alaska. Mass MoCA can accommodate sculpture that’s three stories high, which St. Croix made for the show, but the galleries are so perfectly conceived and built that smaller spaces off big spaces can show more intimately scaled art, too. The galleries of prints and small sculpture by St. Croix are perfect. A beautiful work of video art shows everyday life in Barrow, shot appropriately from the air since Barrow is near the top of the world. St. Croix makes sculpture from the muck he finds there. Everything in Barrow is rough, even ratty, though it’s probably too cold for rats, so the art’s textured. Even the prints feel cut from rock and ice.

We get a bit of the tired old saw about “ice melts, humans bad,” but the pitch never becomes an assault on logic and intelligence. Alas, dear ones, the earth is 4 billion years old. The climate is always changing. It takes a rare amalgam of hubris and naïveté to believe we mortals can do much about it.

Scientists should plumb the psychiatric dynamics of global-warming fanatics rather than push groupthink theories that are obviously bogus. Believers in apocalypse have always been with us. There are always sky-is-falling cults somewhere. Global Warming, Inc. makes billions from them. At Mass MoCA, I read the wall text for the St. Croix show and then forgot about it and focused on the art, a tact MoCA invites. I felt unfettered by ideology and superstition passing as science.

In one label in one of the shows there is a tear or two shed for fentanyl junkie, pusher, and violent ex-con George Floyd, but that’s it. In many museums, the PC Kool-aid is in the water supply, but at Mass MoCA, it’s all about freedom to look and think. It’s not a pushy place. It’s the most family-oriented art museum I know, which means everyone has leeway. Its only agenda is quality, found in considerable risk-taking.

Second, I’ve dived into art but left an unanswered question. How does a place like Mass MoCA — inventive, confident, aesthetically and intellectually generous, a well-put-together million-piece puzzle — emerge from the anger and despair left from by Sprague Electric’s unceremonial exit?

It took a mix of many people over many years and a mix of commitment, imagination, and daring. It took money, for which much begging occurred. The two early catalysts were Tom Krens, who was director of the college museum at Williams before he went to the Guggenheim in New York to build a museum empire, and John Barrett, the mayor of little North Adams.

Krens was then a young American art scholar. Barrett was a teacher who’d just been elected mayor when Sprague bailed. Krens had the dream of creating the museum. Barrett had the political smarts and, I’ll add, a bulldozer personality. That altruistic, mild-mannered teacher became a small-town Mayor Daley, with a bit of Machiavelli and a splash of Al Capone. Barrett knew nothing about art, but desperation is the mother of invention. He sensed in Krens a star, and he hitched his wagon to it.

Mass MoCA is Krens’s first new museum. What he did at the Guggenheim Bilbao and what’s happening at the in-construction Guggenheim Abu Dhabi starts at Mass MoCA.

Krens’s vision soon had legs, then a skeleton, then meat and potatoes. Barrett enlisted a corps of politicians, Republicans and Democrats, from Governors Dukakis and Weld to local legislators. He finagled $20 million from the Massachusetts legislature, on the surface a miracle in itself but, in reality, a feat of remarkable, textbook-worthy cunning, and I love cunning and consider myself a student of its arts.

North Adams is in the very northwest corner of Massachusetts. It’s as far from Boston as a place can be and still call itself part of the Commonwealth. In Boston, people think they’re the center of the universe, hence the tag “The Hub.” State government is Boston-centric. To the legislature, Berkshire County is Mars.

Once in a while, every blue moon or so, when the stars align, or when Halley’s Comet swings by, that legislature — led by pols from East Boston, the North Shore, South Shore, and, here and there, tony Lincoln, Belmont, and Wellesley — turns its greedy eyes and grabby hands from the self-serve trough, stops snorting like a pig, and thinks, “We need to do something for the Berkshires.” Barrett was there at that moment, tin cup in hand.

With a pot of $20 million, good things happened. Over the years, planning, renovating, raising millions more, and surviving such recessions as the dot-com bubble and the financial crisis make Mass MoCA’s story seem like one battle, one quagmire after another. Yet the passion was there. So was the third catalyst, Joe Thompson, who is retiring next year after 32 years as director. Barrett and Krens were visionaries and movers and shakers, but Thompson was the strategist and tactician. He ran the museum once it got off the ground. He found the money to pay the bills. Sometimes, on Monday morning, he was certain he’d make Friday’s payroll.

Thompson is an icon in museum leadership, and leadership does makes a difference. He’s creative, smooth, articulate, and patient. He can think from short term to long term. His taste is good and all-embracing. He has navigated big and small storms. I’ve never heard anything bad about him.

Thompson, as far as I know, is the only museum director to push loudly for an end of senseless, dispiriting museum lockdowns, which I consider cultural theft. He understood, as I did, that it was possible to simply, easily and speedily develop and implement good health protocols. The vast number of his peers, once my peers, turned Lockdown Lazy. It’s the biggest scandal in the history of American museums. Thompson loves seeing people at Mass MoCA. Most of his director colleagues couldn’t care less, for all their inclusion and access babble. They’re poseurs. They’d rather hide from their staffs than serve the public.

Mass MoCA was conceived as a cultural center. This, along with not collecting, distinguishes it from many museums. It conceives and hosts an edgy program of dances, concerts, and stand-up comedy acts. It draws talent from New York since, being in Berkshire County, it’s at the edge of the New York art world.

The thinking behind this was clever and simple. The Berkshires are a performing-arts mecca, with Tanglewood, Jacob’s Pillow, and many theater companies. A big population of rich people from New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey have summer homes in Berkshire County. They’re accustomed to giving money for the performing arts. Mass MoCA needs to raise money to run the place. Brilliantly, it has developed a fundraising base among the weekenders and summer people who like the art and already felt comfortable with funding performing arts.

Insane culture-killing lockdowns, pushed by neurotics, bed-wetters, End of Timers, and yahoo, knucklehead public-health bureaucrats, have strangled Mass MoCA’s finances, which depend in large part on events and admissions income. Used to overcoming adversity, Mass MoCA reopened in early July with a truncated but good set of live performances.

A few weeks ago, I went with friends to part of its Bang on a Can concert weekend. The Pretenders, Annie Lennox, and Debbie Harry have performed at Mass MoCA in the last year or so, but I wanted to see and hear something more contemporary.

Thurston Moore performed pitchfork music, a genre I didn’t know. Robert Black improvised on the bass, and Gregg August led a trio for violin, bass, and piano. It was long past my bedtime and the music was, well, advanced for someone like me who is happiest listening to Bobby Darin, Dinah Washington, and toe-tapper show tunes. I enjoyed the night out. The event seemed like a big hit.

Because of senseless health rules — there’s negligible COVID-19 in these rural parts, and we were outside — the audience was vastly reduced and the music went up in the air to the stars. Dr. Doom, oops, no, I mean Dr. Cover My Ass, no, what’s wrong with me, you know, Dr. Fauci, that’s it! He’s the dude who is intent on killing theatre and live music. Mass MoCA has risen above much. It’ll take more than a public-health lifer and martinet to do discernible harm to it.

Is Mass MoCA’s success a template? There are lots of abandoned mills and sad mill towns in America. Yes and no. Mass MoCA took 20 years to become financially stable. This year was a near-death experience. Its location — on the New York press’s and audience’s radar screen and with a potential, tappable, rich donor base — certainly helped.

So did Williams College and the Clark Art Institute in neighboring Williamstown. Both are loaded, and both are committed to Mass MoCA’s success, not just its survival. Each of these features as well as a corps of great leaders was essential. Can all of this be reproduced? Not likely. Williams, the Clark, and proximity to New York were indispensable. The combination is rare.

Krens, Thompson, and some of Mass MoCA’s biggest donors went to Williams College, but Barrett didn’t. He busted heads, sold a positive vision to demoralized townspeople, persuaded them to take a chance on living artists, the iffiest cohort ever, reached far out of his element to Williams and rich New Yorkers, and created something good and durable — and his town’s salvation. He’s relentless and heroic. Public officials, take note of someone who knows how to get things done.

My next new-museum story will take us back to Texas, another place that won’t take “can’t be done” for an answer.