Woke Addiction Makes For a Mixed Season at MASS MoCA

At the world’s largest contemporary art museum, too much dogma undercuts art’s limitless variety.

T his week I’m not venturing far, so I’ll write about the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, or MASS MoCA, a little east of my home in ye olde Vermont and the biggest contemporary art museum in the world. MASS MoCA’s a miracle. It started in the mid-1980s as the sad husk of a just-closed, 300,000-square-foot factory with two dozen 19th-century brick buildings on 24 acres in little North Adams in the rural, northwestern corner of Massachusetts. Sprague Electric Company, a capacitator and circuit pioneer and the region’s biggest employer, once filled it. In the early ’80s, its employees tried to unionize. The family-owned company said, Unionize, and we’re outta here. They unionized, and within months the factory closed, leaving thousands unemployed and Massachusetts’s smallest city in a Slough of Despond, surrounded by mountains signaling You’re Trapped.

But “climb every mountain, forge every stream.” MoCA was born, with Sprague Electric’s buildings slowly repurposed. The museum’s doors opened in 1999, and its 25th anniversary is in the rearview mirror. What’s happening now?

I’d call it the good, the bad, and the ugly, and a slice of Wacky Woke World in the sticks. It intones the now-old bromides — race explains everything, you’re either a victim or an oppressor, fascism is knockin’ on America’s front door — and thereby comforts the hoity-toity, of which there are many in Berkshire County. There are also at least a dozen exhibitions now on view. Remember, it’s the biggest contemporary art museum in the world.

I focused on the temporary shows. MoCA’s big season is summer, so things were quiet and a snowstorm was on the way. Off the inviting lobby is Vincent Valdez: Just a Dream . . . , the artist’s first museum survey. Valdez (b. 1977) is from San Antonio and went to Rhode Island School of Design — places I like — but I didn’t know his work. He aims to counter Gore Vidal’s belief that “we are the United States of Amnesia; we learn nothing because we remember nothing.” We are indeed people who worship youth, and most today are abysmally unread and dense when it comes to history, but better to be that than the Bourbons, who notoriously were said to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

It starts with grievances we’ve forgotten, such as the Zoot Suit Riots in 1943, a race riot powered by wartime rationing of wool. Black and Hispanic-Americans wore zoot suits and took it personally. Valdez’s painting, Kill the Pachuco Bastard!, from 2001, depicts the riot and does it well. Valdez was only 24. It’s a mêlée scene and a challenge to compose, but Valdez delivers. Then there was the Latino neighborhood demolished in the early 1960s to build Dodgers Stadium, depicted via an old car in the gallery, and a friend with PTSD from the Iraq debacle, shown through a video of a flag-draped casket. A gallery of very good — not great — charcoal drawings of boxers considers symbols of struggle, perseverance, and survival. It’s Rocky redux.

There’s a huge painting of a uniformed Oliver North taking an oath to tell the truth before he testified about the Iran-Contra Affair in 1987, which, as things go, is a blip in the annals of crimes against humanity, even in the annals of monkey business. There’s art about the KKK and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. A painting of a pig with “an uncannily human face modeled on America political forces such J. Edgar Hoover, Steve Bannon, and Robert McNamara” presents a worthy subject in Valdez’s riff on Animal Farm.

Valdez is by no means a bad artist, but my sense is that seeing more than a little of Valdez’s work makes his vision seem trite and rote. Twenty feet of a Ku Klux Klan charcoal drawing? The show is too big and seems like the rambles of a graduate student, a talented one but one who hasn’t found depth, cohesion, or wisdom. It’s human to forget and a bonus to repent and forgive. If we grind the axe over every zoot suit–type riot, we’d go crazy.

Valdez’s sequential group of lithographs from 2019 is inspired, though. Each one depicts the face of an American president, proceeding chronologically and starting in 1977, the year Valdez was born, so the hapless Carter is first. Each in succession sinks lower toward the bottom of the picture until, with Trump, all we see are sweeps of his hair. The last in the sequence is a blank, black field, prophetic on Valdez’s part, since, as we learned, there was no such thing as President Joe Biden.

Jeffrey Gibson, whose work in the American pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale I reviewed, has bright and sparkly pieces in his MoCA exhibition, Power Full Because We’re Different. Since he’s Cherokee and gay, his art also checks two big boxes: indigeneity, a word so new and contrived that my spellcheck wants me to mean “indigo,” and queerness, meaning “against heterosexual norms.” He’s a big-name artist, but his MoCA work is a variation of nearly everything he does, all in the name of touting “difference as a point of shimmering celebration.” It takes up a space the size of a football field. It’s Sesame Street stuff, decorative, safe, tame, and surely nothing that’ll cause a revolution. It’s an Olympic-size pool of rainbow-colored pablum. It’s corporate.

Zora J. Murff’s Race/Hustle — a collage, photography, and installation show — looks great in the museum’s austere industrial space. Now, this show is an ode to revolution, but a cagey one. It starts with a call to liberate ourselves from the soul-warping connivance of capitalism and culture. Not a bad message. A red-and-white neon light installation starts the show. It reads, “INSTEAD OF BINGE WATCHING NETFLIX OR SOME DISTRACTION FROM THE PAIN FACE IT.” I was intrigued. I’m all for biting the bullet. Americans seem to have forgotten how or why. But Netflix? I’d say TikTok, texting, and porn are worse distractions, but I don’t know the inveigled, impoverished mind.

Feelin’ Myself, from 2022, is a framed set of six shopping bags, two rows of three each, in different colors, printed in bold letters with “THE GREATEST NIGGA IN THE UNIVERSE.” It’s an example of what Murff (b. 1987) calls the black excellence complex. Businesses sell us bags to carry and proclaim a simulacrum of achievement and healthy self-esteem, but it’s fake and a capitalist trick. Bully Pulpit, from 2025, is a pulpit-like platform from which Murff will read the entirety of Blood in My Eye, a book advocating armed rebellion; it’s by George Jackson, a San Quentin inmate ultimately killed in a prison riot.

Imperialism, white supremacy, the serial murders of black children in Atlanta in the late 1970s, and black vigilantism all have moments. Is all of this a spoof of atrocity propaganda, itself a distraction and a misdirection? I don’t know. It certainly distracts me and puts me in a skeptical frame of mind. I watched Through the Water, a gruesome video of a black man, the video artist Jay Simple, who underwent waterboarding and filmed it. Murff integrates the video in an installation called Metaspectacle, with photographs of murdered civil rights leaders and images of Jesus, black gloves like the famous ones from the O.J. Simpson trial, salt and pepper shakers infused with race stereotypes, and other objects. We’re told the video evokes the beleaguerment that black men feel at the proliferation of violence against them, though weren’t al-Qaeda terrorists waterboarded? How does the spectacle make us feel? At that point, my mind wanders. I struggle against Murff’s manipulation. The whole enterprise is over-the-top, neo-Gothic stuff.

I went neo-Gothic, too. Waterboarding? “What a great way to get children to drink their milk,” I thought.

It’s not all like this. I liked Alison Pebworth’s bright and seriously cheerful Cultural Apothecary, a group of installations filling a small gallery lit by MoCA’s Industrial Revolution–size windows. It considers “Americanitis,” a condition recognized by the psychologist William James, Henry James’s brother. Americanitis meant too much work, too little rest, too much drive, noise, false urgency, isolation, and worry about money, a package pointing to tantrums, high blood pressure, baldness, ulcers, palpitations, fits, and depression. The list is long, and the condition persists.

Cultural Apothecary suggests cures, starting with reparative Golden Root tea made from local herbs and served in horn-shaped pottery vessels that Pebworth designed. Sipping at a commodious soda-fountain counter and seats she also designed, we’re meant to reflect and to commune with strangers. She also painted a pond-lily-shaped chart to help us clarify our emotions.

At the counter, we get a little red wooden ball along with our tea. I was hoping it was a bonbon. On a nearby wall is her Heart Tally, a whimsical, painted voting machine; we’re meant to drop the ball in the slot labeled with our core emotion. We’re also asked to write what Pebworth calls a “buried dream” on red paper shaped like a droplet. Every week, she adds the droplets to a heart-shaped paper sculpture dropping from the ceiling to the floor. I voted for “gratitude” as my core emotion, possibly putting the cart before the horse, since I wrote “to be a multimillionaire” on my red dream droplet. I added “multi” to “millionaire” as an afterthought — a million bucks doesn’t go far these days.

It’s crunchy, but also fun and attractive. Everyone will have a different take, which is a sign of good art. In headline news, the Mellon Foundation supported Pebworth’s artist residency at MoCA as she developed Cultural Apothecary. Finally, Mellon has paid for something worthwhile.

I thought Jimena Sarno’s Rhapsody, another behemoth of an exhibition, was soft-core primitivism. It looks at South American craft to help “imagine a future built on collectivism, reconfiguration, and repair,” a utopia of “solidarity and mutual care.” It sounds Trot, with those standing athwart — me — likely to be dropped in a big black cauldron of boiling water. That’s not among the works of art on view, I’ll note.

MoCA’s strategic plan, meant to carry it from 2024 to 2030, spouts the usual blather about “the compounding challenges of climate change,” a hoax and a racket, “a deeply divided democracy,” which has always been thus and supreme fodder for artists, “inconceivable wealth concentration,” not the museum’s problem, and “our national reckoning with systemic race inequality,” another racket.

Putting the false values aside, MoCA is focusing on nuts and bolts, a relief to see. It’s planning a capital campaign to pay for building upkeep. The campus is fantastic, the birth of Brutalism, of form follows function, at its best, but the brick factory buildings are from the 1860s into the 1890s, sitting between two branches of the Hoosic River. What a maintenance challenge. It needs to up its IT game, too, not only for day-to-day, modern management but for art-making. There’s talk about greening the campus, but if this has anything to do with carbon and the climate, well, it’s a big waste of money. My advice is to plant some trees and call it a day.

Mass MoCA is much loved, and it’s known to be both worthy and needy, unlike, say, nearby Williams College and the Clark Art Institute, both always raising money, even though they’re loaded. A flush donor base exists in Berkshire County. When MoCA goes cup in hand, it’ll do well. Since I’ve seen most of MoCA’s shows over the past 25 years, I know it’s a miracle and a treasure.