Saturday, April 12, 2008, 3:00 pm
MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA
Free

The crew of The Miss Rockaway Armada’s MASS MoCA installation team including performers Long Gone Gabe, the bands Dark Dark Dark, Fall Harbor, and members of Apocalypse Radio (Atlanta), will perform an afternoon’s worth of mysterious music filled with banjos, accordions, brass and strings.

The Miss Rockaway Armada is a collective of artists, musicians, and adventurers-of-all-stripes who spent the summers of 2006 and 2007 journeying down the Mississippi River on a fleet of “junk-rafts.” Hailing from all parts of the country and all walks of life, the Miss Rockaway Armada is united by the desire to create: to demonstrate different ways of living and moving that are friendlier to the environment and to each other and to indulge the urge to make something out of nothing. With this spirit and energy, The Miss Rockaway Armada comes to MASS MoCA for their first project in collaboration with a museum. Being Here is Better Than Wishing We’d Stayed, a site-specific, interactive installation in the Hunter Center Mezzanine, will open to the public on Saturday, April 19, 2008 and will remain on view through March 1, 2009.

Inspired by Johnny Appleseed, traveling medicine shows, nomadic jewel box theater, a long tradition of river raft-builders, and Mark Twain, members of the The Miss Rockaway Armada embarked on a seemingly impossible journey. The crew set out to meet new people and exchange ideas, art, and inspiration. The collective was motivated in part by a desire to reclaim and reinvent the age-old longing to roam this vast, mysterious country. In their words. “We still live in a country that fights wars so it can consume more. We are taking the urge to flee and heading for the center.” During their two summer journey down the Mississippi river the group would dock their rafts in towns along the way, hosting musical performances and vaudeville variety-theater in the evenings, along with artistic workshops, skill-shares and story-recording during the day. Although their journey down the Mississippi has ended the group still organizes performances to share their art forms and their stories.

The Miss Rockaway Armada is a group of approximately 30 performers, artists, travelers, organizers and dreamers including members of the Toyshop Collective, Visual Resistance, The Amateurs, The Floating Neutrinos, The Infernal Noise Brigade, The Madagascar Institute, Cyclecide, and the Rude Mechanical Orchestra. The group describes themselves as “a small group of people with extensive experience making big, insane projects.”

Organized by Jennifer Sichel, an intern from the Williams College-Clark Art Institute Graduate Program in the History of Art, the exhibition is part of the continuing series of MASS MoCA exhibitions presented in collaboration with the Clark Art Institute in support of MASS MoCA and the Williams College/ Clark Graduate Program in the History of Art. The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute has been placing interns from its graduate program in the curatorial department at MASS MoCA since well before MASS MoCA opened its doors.

MASS MoCA’s galleries are open from 11 – 5, closed Tuesdays. Admission is $12.50 for adults, $9 for students, $5 for children 6 -16 and free for children 5 and under. Members are admitted free at all times. More information on MASS MoCA and the exhibition is available at www.massmoca.org or by calling 413. 662. 2111.

MASS MoCA, the largest center for contemporary visual and performing arts in the United States, is located off Marshall Street in North Adams on a 13-acre campus of renovated 19th-century factory buildings.

Photo by Tod Seelie