Mass MoCA Shines on the Eve of Its Big Birthday

Ditch the video of Senator Fake Pawnee Warren, though.

T his past Columbus Day, I headed to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, known as Mass MoCA, in North Adams in the northwestern corner of ye olde commonwealth. It’s the largest contemporary art museum in the world and is about to enter its 25th-birthday year. I haven’t visited in a couple of years, and the place has a new director. Kristy Edmunds succeeds its inaugural director, Joe Thompson, who began his tenure in the late 1980s when MoCA was a mere glint in the eye of its wild and crazy founders.

Mass MoCA shows bleeding-edge art, some of which I like, some of which is inscrutable, but little — not nothing — is bad. It’s not a collecting museum, so it fills its galleries with rotating exhibitions. And did I say it’s got 250,000 square feet of gallery space, much of it sunlit? It’s at the base of Mount Greylock, Massachusetts’s tallest mountain, and northwestern Berkshire County is mostly rural.

Though North Adams itself is an old mill town, Mass MoCA is the opposite of cramped. It occupies the former — and massive — home of the Sprague Electric Company, the circuit-producing and electronics-innovating company. The fledgling museum took the campus of old brick buildings after Sprague left for a cheaper southern setting.

Bit by bit, MoCA renovated the place for the display of art while keeping its industrial aesthetic. Walls are mostly brick. Windows rule. North Adams might be a city, though it’s the smallest in Massachusetts, but nearly every window has a view of hills and forests. Galleries vary in size. Artists love it since their stage proposes a “let’s make things” vibe. Visitors know they’re in a mecca of creativity and energy. It always feels like a start-up.

No need to dive more into Mass MoCA’s history, which involves gritty North Adams, elite Williams College, and the very tony Clark Art Institute. I have written about it before and will only say it’s a miracle, and one that keeps on giving. At any given time, MoCA has more than a 30 exhibitions on view, an energetic program of performances, and lots of outdoor sculpture.

So what’s happening now at this most happening place? Love from Vicki Island, Daniel Giordano’s first one-man exhibition, was my favorite and a total surprise, which is Mass MoCA’s specialty. I’d never heard of Giordano (b. 1988), who lives and works in Newburgh, N.Y., a small city near Poughkeepsie. He’s a sculptor working in the former factory home of Vicki’s Clothing Company, once a family business specializing in coats. Giordano calls the building, now his studio, Vicki Island in salute to his great aunt, after whom the company was named, to Newburgh’s industrial heritage, and to the Hudson River, of which Newburgh is a port.

What to say? His sculptures are earthy and fantastic, nostalgic and apocalyptic, funny, chaotic, and visionary. They’re impeccably crafted, though fortuitous accidents happen, and look rough. Giordano is immersed in Newburgh history. It was one of Washington’s many headquarters and a hub for the first Gothic Revival architects in America. Little factories made things from bleach, baking powder, steam boilers, and carburetors to perfumes, silks, plush goods, and felt hats. Televisions were test-marketed there in the late ’30s. Today, Newburgh is what Giordano calls “a husk of its former opulence.” Giordano is from a close-knit Italian-American family. This personal heritage figures in his work, too.

Among his materials are mascarpone, eagle excrement, butterfly wings, nail polish, Murano glass shards, aluminum, copper, wood, and maple syrup. Then there’s deer fur, hair pomade, socks, gravel, duct tape, horseshoes, marble bits, epoxy, and don’t forget the Italian cookies. Spotted, too, are mop heads, tennis balls, coat hangers, thread, glitter, medicated foot powder, and deer jaws. Sometimes he’ll deep-fry objects in batter to get the look of experience, though crusty and crispy.

Gothic indeed. Some of the sculpture looks like it descends from Gothic cathedral gargoyles. His mother was, in her brazen youth, a Playboy Bunny cocktail waitress, so rabbit feet and high heels take a bow. I think of Old Master vanitas paintings when I look at them. There’s lots of stuff happening, but nothing’s fussy. His work is gnarled, dark, and very much about abandonment and decay. I find it visceral and magical, like tribal fetish sculpture from Africa.

There’s a gallery of masks that are riffs of Pulcinella, a stock character in 17th- and 18th-century Italian comic theater. Sometimes a buffoon, sometimes a braggart, he’s a cunning, deceitful, perverted social climber, always horny, often disappointed, and, overall, a parody of male privilege. Giordano sees some of these as self-portraits. He sees a bit of the Italian stallion in himself.

Love from Vicki Island is beautifully arranged in galleries with especially tall ceilings and lots of light. Sculptures are placed on drum-shaped bases made of what looks like scuffed fiber topped by an aluminum cover. They seem very industrial and cleverly complement the work. They came from the old coat factory where Giordano works. They evoke factory ghosts and are a brilliant touch.

Parts of three stories at Mass MoCA display a retrospective of the work of Sol LeWitt (1928–2007). Call him a minimalist or a conceptualist if you will. I call him the great colorist of our age as well as art’s savviest egalitarian. Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective is unique. It has been up for 25 years and keeps getting extended, in part because it’s so grand and so comprehensive that it’s a destination in itself.

LeWitt’s “work of art” is both the big wall drawing, and some are 20 feet wide, and the diagram and instructions developed by LeWitt, which are the concepts that make his work Conceptual Art. LeWitt collectors, private and museum, buy and own the diagram and instructions. In museum-speak, that’s the accessioned work of art. Anyone, and that means you or me, can be enlisted to follow the instructions and create the drawing.

That’s the egalitarian element. Instructions are often geared to the physical proportions of the installer, meaning “draw a line starting from the floor to your full height.” The drawings we see at Mass MoCA are the physical work of art handlers, students, and, if the concept’s complicated, LeWitt’s studio, which is ongoing.

I’ve visited the space probably two dozen times over the years, focusing on different sections. This week, it was LeWitt’s late work. LeWitt’s early work can be very, well, mathematical as well as aggressively linear, with a pastel palette and lots of pencil. This visit, I wanted crazy. Late in life, LeWitt embraced arcs, curves, and waves, prescribing acrylic paint in vibrant, saturated red, yellow, green, purple, and orange, often with a glossy varnish. He uses black, too.

These galleries always look great. The wall drawings often are floor-to-ceiling. They’re often an immersion in color and always an immersion in form. It’s an essential art experience.

I skipped the virtual-reality video To the Moon, made by Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang. It intrigued, purporting to be a simulated trip to the moon and a walkaround on its surface. I watched a preview and interviews with the artists. It’s cant about the global-warming hysteria — a cherished, boutique state of hypnosis and enthrallment in left-wing Berkshire County. Dinosaurs turn into Cadillacs running on malignant fossil fuels . . . and we awful humans want to trash the moon, having come close to destroying Mother Earth. Pre-bored, I opted out. One can’t see everything.

In What Way Wham is a retrospective of the work of Joseph Grigely (b. 1956), who lost his hearing in an accident at age ten.  He creates work about language, communication, and human interaction. It’s a big, fine show with lots of exhibitions-within-the exhibition. I liked Craptions, a seried from 2023. Grigely screenshoots clips, mostly from news shows, where the hearing-impaired captions miss the mark. A view of an explosion in Crimea during the current war is captioned “lilting glockenspiel music,” for instance. There’s a paper tablecloth from a restaurant where Grigely and his companion communicated by writing notes to each other on the surface.  A purpose-built gallery shaped like the Tower of Babel in Pieter Bruegel’s 1563 painting is lined with Grigely’s archive of notes on pieces of paper that hearing friends have left for him over the years. It’s an insightful, instructive, and moving exhibition.

Elle Pérez’s Intimacies displays very beautiful photographs, subtly sexy even when, in Slip Curve, from 2021, two boulders touch, looking like prehistoric lovers, tenderly and eternally. Most are black-and-white, but Belt, in color and from 2020 depicts a torso of a man. We see his hands hoisting his trousers, or about to unbuckle his belt. Cueva depicts two photographs, each 60-by-48 inches, of the inside of a cave. It’s grave, spiritual, and spartan.

Mass MoCA, to its credit, does minimal labels, with each exhibition having a nicely designed pamphlet people can read and keep. “Intimacy intrigues me in its mysteries,” Pérez says. That’s banal. “The ties between my gender identity, kink, sexuality, pleasure, and pain are all interwoven.” That’s marketing lingo. Her work’s great. There’s no need to put herself in what’s becoming a tired, trite box.

An exhibition on student-loan debt by kelli rae adams — yes, no caps allowed — consists of ceramic pots made by the artist. In each one, she has put a pint of coins — worth about $40. Together, they represent what she says is the average student loan debt, $37,000, per borrower. And, she says, there are 44 million borrowers.

Of course, this debt is really a subsidy for bloated college and university bureaucracies that generate tuition rises vastly exceeding inflation. In a video, Massachusetts’s phoniest pol, and that’s saying a lot, calls for this debt to taxpayers to be erased, at a cost of $1.2 trillion. That phoniest pol would be Senator Elizabeth “Harvard Teepee Squaw” Warren.

At the end of the exhibition, adams promises to give each pot, and there are 900, to people who’ve registered for a raffle. Don’t know what’s happening to the coins. Visitors are invited to toss spare change in one of the pots.

Putting aside the political issue, and I’ll quote Massachusetts’s most sincere pol, Calvin Coolidge, in noting that “they hired the money, didn’t they,” this is cul-de-sac art. It’s got one meaning, no room for elasticity, nuance, mood, or multiple interpretations. It’s the only truly bad art I saw. North Adams has a Salvation Army community center across the road from Mass MoCA. Give the cash to them. Doubt they’ll take the pots. And ditch the video of No Pay Back Wampum Warren.

Gamaliel Rodríguez’s wall mural, La Travesía, covers about 60 feet in the spacious hall leading to Mass MoCA’s performing-arts theater. Using acrylic, colored pencil, and ballpoint pen, Rodríguez depicts a vast, verdant valley and mountain landscape in the middle of which is a rambling factory complex that I thought, initially, suggested Mass MoCA.

As a work of art, it’s a spectacle and very beautiful. Rodríguez says it’s meant to evoke factory complexes in Puerto Rico built by American companies starting in the 1940s. Companies took federal tax incentives to build and launch the factories but then abandoned them when the subsidies expired. I know very little about the Puerto Rican economy but, as a critique of this practice, La Travesía doesn’t work. It’s too cryptic. I’m all for artist intent but, without an extensive label, it’s impossible to coax this from what it is, standing on its own — a luscious picture that rivets the viewer.

Mass MoCA has always been a place for visual as well as performing arts, as is all of Berkshire County. The Berkshires were always well known for the Clark, the college museum at Williams, and the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield. Far-western Massachusetts also has theaters and dance companies galore as well as house museums such as Edith Wharton’s splendid house and Chesterwood, which was the home of the sculptor Daniel Chester French (1850–1931). MoCA’s founders, from the start, knew they had enough space for the performing arts, and, as a practical matter, knew that the Berkshires already had a built-in base of donors committed to the performing arts. Thus, a vibrant contemporary-music venue was born.

I looked at MoCA’s 2023 performance schedule. The number of concerts that the place hosts — mostly featuring young, cutting-edge musicians — is astonishing. There’s a thriving stand-up comedy program as well. I’ve never heard of any of the performers, but I’m a dinosaur, though not yet one transformed into a Cadillac. Still, this performance facet of Mass MoCA creates lots of the positive energy for which the museum, nearing its 25th anniversary, is already famous. It keeps the museum hopping in the winter, too, when, in this part of the world, there’s not much incentive to stray far from the wood stove.

Kristy Edmunds, the new director, was the director of UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance and, before that, was the artistic director for the Melbourne International Arts Festival and a dean at the University of Melbourne. She was the founding director of the contemporary art museum in Portland, Ore., and the first artistic director of the exceptional performance program at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan. All of this is most impressive.

I loved my visit. There’s also great art on view by the 20th-century and contemporary artists Louise Bourgeois, James Turrell, Spencer Finch, Anselm Kiefer, and Jarvis Rockwell, and, yes, Jarvis is Norman’s son and a fantastic artist. I’m looking forward to writing about the place next summer as it celebrates its birthday. People in the Berkshires and in bordering Vermont, where I live, are passionate about Mass MoCA. They might not understand or like all the art but come to experience its range and magic and leave feeling current and more alive.