Mass MoCA Shines on the Eve of Its Big Birthday

This 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.

About the Author

Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

This 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.