Art Review: MASS MoCA — The Good, the Bad, and the Woke

This 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?

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Brian T. Allen

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

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This 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?