MASS MoCA presents Close to You, a group exhibition that gathers the work of artists who probe the capacity of the visual arts to conjure feelings of closeness — both to others and to ourselves. On view from Saturday, April 3, through January 2022, in the Michael & Agnese Meehan Gallery, the exhibition features the work of Laura Aguilar, Chloë Bass, Maren Hassinger, Eamon Ore-Giron, Clifford Prince King, and Kang Seung Lee.
MASS MoCA and James Turrell announce that a new Skyspace – titled C.A.V.U. – will open on the museum’s campus on May 29, 2021. C.A.V.U. will augment one of the world’s most comprehensive experiences of installations by the artist while realizing a vision the artist had when visiting the museum’s campus in 1987. The installation will join a long-term exhibition of Turrell works at MASS MoCA, which includes one work from each of the six decades of the artist’s career. MASS MoCA will also present a focused exhibition of Turrell’s ceramics —Lapsed Quaker Ware— from May 29, 2021 to October 30, 2022.
Turrell’s Skyspaces are apertures in the ceilings of rooms or buildings that frame the sky as a canvas with infinite depth. Seemingly bringing the sky closer to the viewer, Skyspaces function as naked-eye observatories of the sky which encourage a focused contemplation of light and space. Turrell created his first Skyspace in 1974, and today over 80 exist in public and private collections worldwide. C.A.V.U. will be the artist’s largest free-standing Skyspace piece to date — 40 feet in diameter and 40 feet high.
The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) presents Glenn Kaino: In The Light of a Shadow from April 4, 2021 through September 4, 2022. Curated by Denise Markonish, the show will take over MASS MoCA’s signature Building 5 galleries, with a series of immersive installations inspired by the connection between protest movements across the globe.
SHAUN LEONARDO: THE BREATH OF EMPTY SPACE TO OPEN AT MASS MOCA ON AUGUST 26
The Exhibition, which Reframes the Visual Narrative of Systemic Violence Against Black Men in the United States, will also travel to the Bronx Museum
North Adams, Massachusetts – August 24, 2020 – The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) has announced that it will present the exhibition Shaun Leonardo: The Breath of Empty Space from August 26 through December 22, 2020. Through his work, the Brooklyn-based artist addresses how the mediated images of systemic oppression and violence against Black and Brown young men and boys in the United States have shaped our fear, empathy, and perception. This exhibition originated at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Baltimore, and was curated by John Chaich. It was organized for MASS MoCA by Laura Thompson, MASS MoCA’s Director of Education and Curator of Kidspace, and will travel to the Bronx Museum of the Arts, where it will be organized by Jasmine Wahi, from January 20 through May 2021.
Through a series of intimate drawings based on images widely disseminated in the press and popular media and accessed from his own recollection of these tragedies, Leonardo applies the additive nature of drawing — a rigorous visual editing — to explore the reductive nature of memory, powerfully addressing how time and the endless cycling of images in the media affect what we remember, and what we forget. The artist employs material strategies of blurring, removing, die-cut, and mirrored tint to draw attention to information and reframe content.
Leonardo and MASS MoCA have a longstanding relationship. Leonardo is scheduled to be a featured artist in the Defining Moments exhibition in Kidspace in 2021, and at that time will also organize a social practice project titled You Walk… for a dedicated interactive community space within the museum. In 2018, a number of the works in The Breath of Empty Space were shown at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA) Gallery 51, when Thompson, who is also a professor at MCLA, had her class involved in the organization of the exhibition entitled Witness which included Leonardo’s work. In 2016, at MASS MoCA, Leonardo conducted an artist residency with teens in conjunction with the exhibition Nick Cave: Until, which focused on race and policing.
The Breath of Empty Space extends the exploration of race and masculinity—and the power structures that form and uphold them—that is at the core of Leonardo’s practice. Created between 2014 and 2019, this series asks viewers to confront uncomfortable images in order to bear witness to and recall the names, bodies, and lives of those depicted from Rodney King and the “Central Park Five” to Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Stephon Clark, and beyond.
“For these drawings I take some of the most widely disseminated images of police violence, both recent and historical, and make choices that I think will slow down our looking,” Leonardo said. “I wish to literally create space in these images, so that we can sit with them differently, even in the hurt. I am intentionally removing or isolating details in order to point to the absence of lives lost and to critical information that would otherwise go overlooked. Ultimately, I want to turn people’s looking into bearing witness.”
The works in this exhibition offer but a few instances of violence. Just months after its debut at MICA in January 2020, the United States has witnessed the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Ejilah McClain, Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, and many more. In this environment of systemic violence against Black and Brown bodies, Leonardo continues to encourage us to engage in complex dialogues around race, representation, and the power of art with the belief that art, and thoughtful conversation about it, can inspire change.
The Breath of Empty Space was first shown at MICA in 2019, and was intended to travel to MoCA Cleveland earlier this year, but the exhibition was cancelled before it was scheduled to open, and before the artist was able to engage in meaningful discourse with the community. Leonardo considers community dialogue, and his own personal engagement with communities, to be at the very center of his work.
Programming relating to The Breath of Empty Space will include a virtual Social Justice Teen-Designed Curriculum in which teens and college students will work with Shaun to design a social justice curriculum this fall. Additional programs, organized in collaboration with the Bronx Museum and Williams College Museum of Art, will include artists talks and panel discussions about topics such as racism as a public health issue.
ABOUT SHAUN LEONARDO
Shaun Leonardo’s multidisciplinary work negotiates societal expectations of manhood, namely definitions surrounding black and brown masculinities, along with its notions of achievement, collective identity, and experience of failure. His performance practice, anchored by his work in Assembly – a diversion program for court-involved youth at the Brooklyn-based, non-profit Recess – is participatory and invested in a process of embodiment. Leonardo is a Brooklyn-based artist from Queens, New York City. He received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, is a recipient of support from Creative Capital, Guggenheim Social Practice, Art for Justice and A Blade of Grass, and was recently profiled in the New York Times. His work has been featured at The Guggenheim Museum, the High Line, and New Museum, with a recent solo exhibition at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). From fall 2018 through spring 2020, Leonardo enacted socially engaged projects at Pratt Institute as the School of Art, Visiting Fellow. elcleonardo.com
For more information: press@massmoca.org
For Immediate Release
15 November 2018
Contact: Jodi Joseph
Director of Communications
413.664.4481 x8113
jjoseph@massmoca.org
Kidspace opens Still I Rise
Featuring artists Gustave Blache III, E2 – Kleinveld & Julien, Genevieve Gaignard, Tim Okamura, and Deborah Roberts
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise
Maya Angelou’s 1978 verse, Still I Rise
NORTH ADAMS, MASSACHUSETTS — On June 15, 2019, MASS MoCA’s Kidspace gallery and art-making studio opens Still I Rise, with new works by Gustave Blache III, E2 – Kleinveld & Julien, Genevieve Gaignard, Tim Okamura, and Deborah Roberts. The exhibition explores female power, social privilege, and the representation of women in art history. Artworks and new commissions include Blache’s oil painting of the famed New Orleans chef, Leah Chase; E2 – Kleinveld & Julien’s perception-changing photographs reinterpreting classic portraiture; Gaignard’s photography and a site-specific installation that re-imagines a teenage girl’s bedroom; Okamura’s large-scale paintings depicting strong women and an interactive installation; and Roberts’ found-material collages of young girls. Still I Rise offers vivid counterpoints to the ways that women have been represented throughout history and inserting gender and race in unexpected ways and surprising contexts.
The free opening celebration takes place on Saturday, June 15, from 11am to 1pm. Meet the artists, make some art, and enjoy some refreshments. Admission to Kidspace is always free; the ArtBar is open on weekends and during school breaks.
About the artists
Gustave Blache III (b. San Bernardino, CA) is a figurative painter from New Orleans, Louisiana, who is currently based in Brooklyn, NY. He has gained international recognition for his artwork which ranges in format from life-sized portraits to intimate pocket-sized paintings. Blache is especially interested in documenting everyday laborers and highlighting the intimate nature of work itself. He is best known for his series of paintings on celebrated chef Leah Chase, who is known as the “Queen of Creole Cuisine.” This series was originally exhibited in 2012 at the New Orleans Museum of Art and featured images of Chase at the famous Dooky Chase’s Restaurant in New Orleans. Still I Rise will feature a small portrait of the 96 year-old chef.
Blache received his M.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He has exhibited at the New Orleans Museum of Art, Park Avenue Armory, and the New Orleans African American Museum. Blache’s work is found in the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture.
Genevieve Gaignard (b. Orange, Massachusetts) is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work focuses on photographic self-portraiture, sculpture, and installation to explore race, femininity, and class. The daughter of a black father and white mother, Gaignard has been navigating the space of biracial identity as long as she can remember. Was she white enough to be white? Black enough to be black? Through her work, she interrogates notions of “passing,” positioning her own body as the chief site of exploration. She uses lowbrow pop sensibilities to craft dynamic visual narratives that blend humor with pop culture in order to reveal the way that we represent ourselves and each other. For Still I Rise, Gaignard will design a site-specific installation referencing adolescent experiences of body imagery in a world of extreme and complex beauty standards. Several of her self-portrait photographs will also be on view.
Gaignard received her B.F.A. in Photography at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and her M.F.A. in Photography at Yale University. She has exhibited throughout the United States in venues including the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, the Houston Center for Photography, and The Studio Museum in Harlem.
Deborah Roberts (b. Austin, Texas) is an Austin, Texas-based artist who creates paper collage portraits often depicting young girls of color. She is interested in the way these young girls are symbols of both vulnerability and naïve strength. Even in the face of societal pressures and projected images, they remain unfixed in their identities as they find their way amidst the complicated narrative of African American identity. “Otherness” is central to Roberts’ work. She has a keen awareness of the way that ideals of race and beauty are portrayed in popular media and how these images have contributed towards the dismantling and marginalization of African American identity. The exhibition will feature Roberts’ collages combining found and manipulated images with hand-drawn and painted details to create multi-layered work, rife with double meanings and symbols.
Roberts received her M.F.A. from Syracuse University. She has exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem in New York, NY; the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts galleries in San Francisco, CA; the Center for African American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin; the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta, GA; The Drawing Center Viewing Program in New York, NY; and Luis De Jesus in Los Angeles, CA. She is a recipient of the Ginsburg-Klaus Award Fellowship, Presidential Point of Light Award, Syracuse University Graduate Fellow Award, and Best in Show M.F.A. at Syracuse University in 2014.
Tim Okamura (b. Edmonton, Canada) is a Brooklyn-based artist who paints realistic portraits of African American women that represent their resilience and strength. Through his method of painting — one that combines a realist approach to the figure by way of collage, spray paint, and mixed media — Okamura investigates identity, urban environment, metaphor, and cultural iconography. Urban life and hip-hop are both subjects and major influences in his work; he combines and samples art history with classical techniques of oil painting and spray-painted graffiti. He creates a visual language that acknowledges a traditional form of storytelling through portraiture, while also infusing contemporary motifs. For Still I Rise, Okamura for the first time will show two portraits of women as warriors, new work delving into his Japanese background and interest in samurai. Working with two New York City-based graffiti artists, he will also design an interactive space for the Kidspace gallery, where visitors will be invited to add their symbols or “tags” to portraits expressing ideas around leadership as represented in the body language and surroundings of the figures.
Okamura earned a B.F.A. with Distinction at the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary, Canada before moving to New York City to attend the School of Visual Arts in 1991. After graduating with an M.F.A. in Illustration as Visual Journalism, Okamura moved to Brooklyn, NY, where he continues to live and work. Okamura — a recipient of the 2004 Fellowship in Painting from the New York Foundation for the Arts — has exhibited extensively in galleries throughout the world, including the U.S., Canada, Italy, Japan, Ecuador, and Turkey, and has been selected nine times to appear in the prestigious BP Portrait Award Exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London, England. In 2015, Okamura received a letter of commendation from the Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden. He was honored in 2016 to have a piece hanging in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Okamura’s art is in the permanent collections of the Davis Museum at Wellesley College; the Alberta Foundation for the Arts; the Toronto Congress Center; the Hotel Arts in Calgary, Canada; and Standard Chartered Bank in London, England. Celebrity collectors include Uma Thurman, musicians John Mellencamp and Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson (The Roots), and director Ben Younger, as well as actors Bryan Greenberg, Vanessa Marcil, Annabella Sciorra, and Ethan Hawke.
The artist duo Elizabeth Kleinveld (b. New Orleans, LA) and Epaul Julien (b. New Orleans, LA) offer reinterpretations of “canonical” paintings, altered to include historically underrepresented people. Under their name E2 – Kleinveld & Julien (Elizabeth and Epaul), they take photographic versions of paintings from Western art history, beginning with the Flemish Primitives and spanning 600 years onward. Through reenactments that include diverse representations of race, gender, and sexual orientation, E2 – Kleinveld & Julien has remade works by such artists as van Eyck, Raphael, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and more. Still I Rise will include two historic paintings that have been redone to feature women and people of color: Marcus Gheeraerts’ Portrait of ElizabethI (c. 1592) and Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851).
Julien is a self-taught artist residing in New Orleans. His work (photography and mixed media) has been exhibited at the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA), the Louisiana State Museum, Ogden Museum of Art, the Darkroom, Stella Jones Gallery in New Orleans, LA, DiverseWorks, in Houston, TX, Arps & Co. gallery in Amsterdam, De Galerie Den Haag in the Hague, and the MIA Milan Image Art Fair in Milan, Italy. His Katrina series has been catalogued in the New Orleans Museum of Art’s Katrina Exposed (2006).
Kleinveld is a self-taught artist residing in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Her work has been exhibited in the United States Senate, New Orleans Museum of Art, the Colorado Fine Arts Center, Galerie de Prinsenkelder in Amsterdam and the Expansionist ART Empire in Leiden, Netherlands among others. In 2010, the University of New Orleans Press published the book Before (During) After: Louisiana Photographers’ Visual Reactions to Hurricane Katrina, a companion for the international traveling exhibition for which Kleinveld is the project’s director. E2 – Kleinveld & Julien has exhibited internationally in institutions such as the Royal Academy of Arts in London, England, Photoville in Brooklyn, NY, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag in The Hague, Palazzo Fortuny in Venice, Italy, Museo di Castelvecchio in Verona, Italy, Galerie SIRIUS in Tokyo, Japan, New Orleans Museum of Art and Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, LA. Their work appears in numerous public and private collections, including the Benetton Collection in Treviso, Italy, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, TX, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto in Trento, Italy, Hilliard University Art Museum in Lafayette, LA, and The Marks Collection in Houston, TX.
Artist Residencies
Spring 2020 marks the 20th anniversary of MASS MoCA’s partnership with the North Adams schools. Through the Kidspace gallery and associated programming, the partnership provides 100% subsidized educational opportunities to a growing number of students and teachers in the region, currently reaching 10 partner schools.
A significant aspect of the partnership program is to involve the entire student body of each partner school in annual programs that focus on a specific theme particularly relevant to children, explored in the Kidspace exhibition. Partnership schools also attend Art Assembly schooltime performances. Additionally, students participate in artist residency programs with Kidspace exhibiting artists, which help students to expand their perspectives and learn to understand each other through listening and building upon shared experiences.
The goals of our artist residencies include providing students with an opportunity to explore their own individual creativity while also learning that their individuality can be expressed in a collaborative environment. This intersection of individual and group work will allow students the chance to not only get in touch with their own ideas but to understand the ideas of those around them, and how an individual functions in a larger group. These experiences help students better approach larger problems in a creative and thoughtful way.
Genevieve Gaignard will be participating in an artist residency on November 18-22, 2019. She will work with 4th graders to create self-portraits using found objects. Tim Okamura will be participating in an artist residency on November 4-8, 2019 (dates tentative). He will also work with 4th graders to introduce them to painting portraits. Both artists will be invited to give artist talks and to work with local college students.
Sponsorship
Principal support for Still I Rise is provided by Samantha and Daniel Becker.
Core education funding is provided by the W.L.S. Spencer Foundation.
Education at MASS MoCA is made possible in part by John B. DeRosa; The Feigenbaum Foundation; George and Valerie Kennedy; MountainOne; National Endowment for the Arts; Xtina and James R. Parks; the Ruth E. Proud Charitable Trust; John F. and Judith B. Remondi; The Milton and Dorothy Sarnoff Raymond Foundation; and Holly Swett.
Additional support is provided by anonymous (2); James Attwood and Leslie Williams; Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation from the following funds: The Cooper Meadow Fund, The Gateway Fund, and The William J. and Margery S. Barrett Fund; Guido’s Fresh Marketplace; Charles H. Hall Foundation; the Arthur I. and Susan Maier Fund, Inc.; Mass Cultural Council; and Bessie Pappas Charitable Foundation.
The Milton and Dorothy Sarnoff Raymond Foundation gives in memory of Sandy and Lynn Laitman.
Image Credits:
Deborah Roberts, Folding the Black into the red, 2017
Mixed Media Collage on Paper
30” X 22”
Collection of Michael and Jeanne Klein
Images
High-resolution images are available through this link: bit.ly/2HKael3
Evergreen images of MASS MoCA’s campus and programs: bit.ly/2EAhIa2
About Kidspace
Kidspace is a child-centered art gallery and hands-on studio presenting exhibitions and educational experiences in collaboration with leading artists. The program focuses on contemporary social issues and expanding notions of art and art materials. Artists are selected for the educational and artistic merit of their work and their ability to connect to children (and adults). Exhibitions have featured renowned artists from around the world including Long-Bin Chen, Devorah Sperber, Portia Munson, Lisa Hoke, Willie Birch, Gajin Fujita, Tim Rollins and K.O.S., Roger Shimomura, Ran Hwang, Nick Veasey, and Nick Cave.
About MASS MoCA
MASS MoCA is one of the world’s liveliest (and largest) centers for making, displaying, and enjoying today’s most important art, music, dance, theater, film, and video. MASS MoCA nearly doubled its gallery space in spring 2017, with artist partnerships that include Laurie Anderson, the Louise Bourgeois Trust, Jenny Holzer, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and James Turrell.
Gallery admission is $20 for adults, $18 for veterans and seniors, $12 for students, $8 for children 6 to 16, and free for children 5 and under. Members are admitted free year-round. The Hall Art Foundation’s Anselm Kiefer exhibition is seasonal and currently on view. For additional information, call 413.662.2111 x1 or visit massmoca.org.
Hours
MASS MoCA is open from 11am to 5pm, closed Tuesdays, through June 14. From June 15 through October 14, MASS MoCA’s galleries will be open seven days a week, from 10am to 6pm, and open late some nights.
Untitled, 2017
Deborah Roberts
Mixed media on paper
30 x 22 inches
Photo Credit: Philip Rogers
For Immediate Release
20 February 2019
Contact: Jodi Joseph
Director of Communications
413.664.4481 x8113
jjoseph@massmoca.org
Annie Lennox: ‘Now I Let You Go…’
Singer-songwriter’s most personal museum exhibition to date
May 25 benefit concert planned to launch exhibition
NORTH ADAMS, MASSACHUSETTS — Across and within a massive earthen mound wending through two galleries, renowned performer and social activist Annie Lennox will create a site-specific installation comprised of hundreds of artifacts culled from her personal collection of memorabilia, found objects, and personal effects amassed throughout her lifetime. Annie Lennox: ‘Now I Let You Go…’ will be on view beginning Saturday, May 25. The exhibition will open with a reception from 5:30 to 7:00pm, preceded by a special charity event at 4:00pm to benefit The Annie Lennox Foundation’s philanthropic work and MASS MoCA’s Fund for New Music, in support of emerging and mid-career musicians. Tickets for the special benefit, “An Afternoon of Conversation and Song with Annie Lennox” are on sale at www.massmoca.org/annie-lennox.
Writing about the exhibition, ‘Now I Let You Go…’, Lennox explains,
We interact with an infinity of objects from birth to the grave.
Over time our ‘belongings’ become more steeped and resonant with memory and nostalgia.
In many ways, personal objects express aspects of who we are – our identity: our values: our statements and choices.
The passages of time through which we exist become defined by the objects with which we interact.
The artefacts contained within the earthen mound — partially buried — partially excavated — have all played a part in my life.
I have had a special connection to each item presented — a connection that has been hard to relinquish.
In time, we will all disappear from this earth.
This is our destiny.
What will we leave behind? Who will remember us — and for how long?
The mound is a glorious metaphor for the ultimate conclusion of all material manifestations.
We cling — consciously or unconsciously to ‘things’ that are endowed with emotional significance — keeping memories alive, while the uncomfortable awareness of the inevitable moment of departure is held at bay.
“Annie’s ferocious talent as a songwriter, her dynamic stage presence, and her passionate call to social activism make her work cut an exceptionally wide swathe across global culture. We know and admire Annie Lennox’s work in the public sphere, and there will be sections of this show in which that iconic persona reverberates — sometimes metaphorically, sometimes sonically, sometimes stylistically, and sometimes with just a trace of irony. But juxtaposed against her public face, as we examine this excavation of remarkably personal objects, we will come to better understand some of the underlying and more private forces that motivate her work in song, and her passionately argued campaigns for justice, global health, and social equity across gender and race,” notes MASS MoCA Director Joseph Thompson.
The exhibition — part material diary, part art installation, and utterly human — is accompanied by a printed “field guide” in which Lennox annotates many of the objects on display, identifying the objects and adding recollections, personal stories, and provenance.
Performance
In connection with the exhibition, Lennox will discuss her work and perform songs in a performance at MASS MoCA, with proceeds to benefit The Annie Lennox Foundation and MASS MoCA’s Fund for New Music.
For information about tickets to the benefit performance, An Afternoon of Conversation and Song with Annie Lennox on May 25, visit massmoca.org/annie-lennox. Tickets are on sale Wednesday, February 20.
About Annie Lennox
Celebrated as one of the greatest singer-songwriters of our time, Dr. Lennox was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 2011 for her work towards the eradication of AIDS and poverty in Africa. She is a Royal Academician, a respected social activist and philanthropist, and the first female Chancellor of Glasgow Caledonian University, of her native Scotland.
Annie is also founder of The Circle – a not-for-profit organisation that works to support and empower some of the most marginalised women and girls around the globe.
Her work in the visual arts has included an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, The House of Annie Lennox, which travelled to Manchester, Aberdeen, and The National Portrait Gallery of Edinburgh.
Named as one of the 100 Greatest Singers of All Time by Rolling Stone Magazine, Annie Lennox’s musical career now spans over four decades. Her collaboration with partner Dave Stewart formed ‘Eurythmics’ in the early ’80s.
Lennox has also enjoyed a widely celebrated solo career – selling over 83 million albums worldwide, her songwriting and performances have garnered numerous musical accolades, including: 8 BRIT Awards (including Lifetime Achievement), 4 Ivor Novello Awards, 3 MTV Awards, 4 Grammy Awards with 10 Grammy nominations, 26 ASCAP Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and an Academy Award. She is the first woman to receive a British Academy of Songwriters Fellowship.
In 1986 Lennox became an associate of The Royal Academy of Music, which was then followed by a Fellowship in 1997 and an Honorary Doctorate in 2017. She has been recognized with doctorates and fellowships from The Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Edinburgh College of Art, the Open University of Scotland, Essex University, Williams College, USA, and Berklee College of Music, USA.
In 2016 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from The Musicians’ Company.
Sponsorship
This program is supported in part by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and The Porches Inn at MASS MoCA.
Images
High-resolution images are available through this link: http://bit.ly/2MUOE1R
Images of MASS MoCA’s campus and programs: http://bit.ly/1GcfozD.
About MASS MoCA
MASS MoCA is one of the world’s liveliest (and largest) centers for making, displaying, and enjoying today’s most important art, music, dance, theater, film, and video. MASS MoCA’s 250,000 sq. ft. of gallery space showcases a changing roster of temporary exhibitions and long-term partnerships with Laurie Anderson, the Louise Bourgeois Trust, Jenny Holzer, Anselm Kiefer with the Hall Art Foundation, Sol LeWitt, and James Turrell.
Hours and Admission
MASS MoCA is open from 11am to 5pm, every day except Tuesdays, through June 14. MASS MoCA is open on Tuesdays during school breaks.
From June 15 through October 14, MASS MoCA’s galleries will be open seven days a week, from 10am to 6pm, and open late some nights.
Gallery admission is $20 for adults, $18 for veterans and seniors, $12 for students, $8 for children 6 to 16, and free for children 5 and under. Members are admitted free year-round. Some installations are seasonal.
massmoca.org Annielennox.com
#massmoca #annielennox
Photo: Tali Lennox
Download the Annie Lennox: Now I Let You Go… press release here.
For Immediate Release
26 December 2018
Contact: Jodi Joseph
Director of Communications
413.664.4481 x8113
jjoseph@massmoca.org
Tom Slaughter: Icon Alphabet
Artist’s joyful imagery to fill MASS MoCA’s Hunter Theater Mezzanine Gallery
NORTH ADAMS, MASSACHUSETTS — Covering an interior wall visible to visitors approaching MASS MoCA’s postindustrial museum lobby (as well as to those in its galleries), Tom Slaughter’s joyful imagery unfurls across a 140 ft. stretch in the first-ever exhibition designed by his daughters Hannah and Nell Jocelyn and son-in-law Jim Mezei. The expansive Icon Alphabet, on view beginning January 12, celebrates Slaughter’s lifetime creating bright, playful imagery drawn from his paintings, prints, wallpaper, and billboards. This is the first exhibition focusing on Slaughter’s bold personal visual vocabulary since his death in 2014.
Tom Slaughter’s drawings, paintings, and cut-paper illustrations present objects and scenes from the artist’s life in New York and coastal Long Island. For Slaughter, the very familiarity of these images made them ideal subjects: “Icons…. these are my alphabet. I draw them over and over until they are part of my language. Sunglasses, bikes, hats, boats, buildings… they are all just part of an excuse to make images.” Icon Alphabet will combine Slaughter’s work as an artist and illustrator across media — “I paint, draw, cut paper, use a computer, and even an iPhone — it’s all the same hand.”
Slaughter’s images are quintessentially modern, their subjects rendered with deft vividness and graphic punch. The simplicity of Slaughter’s forms and the artist’s use of primary colors suggest ties to Henri Matisse’s cut-outs, or Alexander Calder’s mobiles. He once quipped: “I use primary colors, mostly because I never did take a painting class. The colors worked well enough for Calder and Lichtenstein.” Calder saw his abstract mobiles as “sketches” for “a system of the Universe, or part thereof,” and believed that “Secondary colors and intermediate shades serve only to confuse and muddle the distinctness and clarity.” This clarity likewise characterizes a modernist approach to architecture and design, which rejected excessive ornamentation in favor of a unified, streamlined whole. Slaughter’s own work pares down each “icon” to its most essential characteristics, making the visual language of modernist design accessible to young people and adults alike through his prints, posters, children’s book illustrations, and even wallpaper designs.
The artist’s exhibition at MASS MoCA runs concurrently with an installation of Tom Slaughter’s works at The Artist Book Foundation, (also located on the downtown North Adams, Massachusetts museum campus). The Artist Book Foundation will publish the first-ever monograph of the artist’s work in spring 2019.
About the artist
Acclaimed for his playful prints, paintings, and designs, Tom Slaughter (1955 – 2014) illustrated 11 children’s books including Boat Works and Do You Know Which Ones will Grow? which was named a 2011 Notable American Library Association book of the year. He worked as a printmaker in collaboration with Durham Press for 25 years. His editions are included in the collections of MoMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art. His work has been the subject of over 30 solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Vancouver, Germany, and Japan.
Sponsorship:
Major exhibition support is provided by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Barr Foundation, and the Mass Cultural Council.
Images
High-resolution images are available through this link: http://bit.ly/2BKL7L4
About MASS MoCA
MASS MoCA is one of the world’s liveliest (and largest) centers for making, displaying, and enjoying today’s most important art, music, dance, theater, film, and video. MASS MoCA’s 250,000 sq. ft. of gallery space show cases a changing roster of temporary exhibitions as well as long term installations in collaboration with Laurie Anderson, the Louise Bourgeois Trust, Jenny Holzer, Anselm Kiefer with the Hall Art Foundation, Sol LeWitt, and James Turrell.
Gallery admission is $20 for adults, $18 for veterans and seniors, $12 for students, $8 for children 6 to 16, and free for children 5 and under. Members are admitted free year-round. The Hall Art Foundation’s Anselm Kiefer exhibition is seasonal and is currently closed for the season. For additional information: 413.662.2111 x1 or visit massmoca.org.
Hours
MASS MoCA is open from 11am to 5pm, closed Tuesdays through the end of June. From the end of June through August, MASS MoCA’s galleries are open seven days a week — from 10am to 6pm Sundays through Wednesdays and from 10am to 7pm Thursdays through Saturdays.
Download the Tom Slaughter: Icon Alphabet press release here.
For Immediate Release
15 November 2018
Contact: Jodi Joseph
Director of Communications
413.664.4481 x8113
jjoseph@massmoca.org
Rafa Esparza: staring at the sun
Artist to work with community as he covers the gallery with handmade adobe bricks and paintings
NORTH ADAMS, MASSACHUSETTS — Rafa Esparza first used the labor-intensive process of hand-making adobe bricks in 2014. Extending the skill he learned from his father — who made adobe bricks in Mexico to sell and to build his first home — Los Angeles-based Esparza hand-made approximately 1,400 adobe bricks to cover the surface of Michael Parker’s sculpture, The Unfinished. Through this project the artist examined his relationship to land, the Los Angeles River, and his family with whom he collaborated. staring at the sun is a solo exhibition in which Esparza will continue this investigation by creating a new space out of adobe, while also returning to his practice as a painter. Opening January 19, 2019, the exhibition confronts the architecture of the museum, “browning” its typical white walls.
Traditionally made by hand with dirt and other organic material such as clay, horse dung, hay, and water, adobe is among the earliest of human building materials. Due to their remarkable strength, sundried structures were extremely durable and functioned as some of the earliest architectural foundations for indigenous communities across the Americas. Adobe construction is still prevalent across the Southwest, a source of both strong and readily available building materials and income for the skilled laborers who use it.
Esparza explores adobe as both material and politics, creating what he has termed “brown architecture:” “My interest in browning the white cube — by building with adobe bricks, making brown bodies present — is a response to entering traditional art spaces and not seeing myself reflected. This has been the case not just physically, in terms of the whiteness of those spaces, but also in terms of the histories of art they uphold” (“Rafa Esparza,” ArtForum, November 21, 2017).
Within art institutions, Esparza creates adobe spaces that also function as platforms for collaboration for many constituencies and communities, including queer brown artists.
Best known as a performance artist, Esparza began his career in visual arts as a painter, yet was unable to relate to the “old master” paintings and drawings that he studied as an undergraduate. He turned instead to performance, making art with his body among the landscapes of Los Angeles. staring at the sun allows Esparza to design a brown space and to simultaneously engage, create images, and build narratives intrinsic to his use of land — brown matter — as context, surface, and content. This exhibition will include a series of new paintings on the surface of adobe, which will include portraiture, landscape, and abstraction. Adobe will cover the pristine white walls of one of MASS MoCA’s few “white cube” gallery spaces, serving as a threshold into an earthly dwelling. Entering the gallery, visitors will be immersed in dirt. Notes Esparza, “I want to overwhelm you with earth.”
Related Programming
Esparza started a residency at MASS MoCA on November 12. Additionally, in collaboration with MASS MoCA staff, the North Adams community, and Williams College students, he will be holding adobe-making workshops in MASS MoCA’s Building 8 in preparation for the exhibition:
- Tuesdays, November 27, December 4, and December 11 from 10am to 1pm
- Thursdays, November 29, December 6, and December 13 from 3pm to 6pm
The show will open with an in-gallery performance by the artist on January 19, 2019.
About the Artist
Rafa Esparza is a multidisciplinary artist who was born, raised, and currently lives in Los Angeles. Woven into Esparza’s bodies of work are his interests in history, personal narratives, and kinship. He is inspired by his own relationship to colonization and the disrupted genealogies that it produces. Using live performance as his main form of inquiry, Esparza employs site-specificity, materiality, memory, and what he calls (non)documentation as primary tools to investigate and expose ideologies, power structures, and binary forms of identity that establish narratives, history, and social environments. Esparza’s recent projects have evolved through experimental collaborative projects grounded in laboring with land vis-à-vis adobe brick-making, a skill learned from his father, Ramón Esparza. In so doing, the artist intends to divert institutional resources to invited Brown and Queer cultural producers to realize large-scale collective projects. In the process, he gathers people together to build networks of support outside of traditional art spaces. He is especially committed to working in the local geographies that are the Southwest, including Mexico and Latin America.
Esparza is a recipient of an Emerging Artist 2014 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Arts, a 2014 Art Matters grantee, and a 2015 recipient of a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. He has performed in a variety of spaces, both public and private, throughout Los Angeles, including Elysian Park, the Los Angeles River, AIDS Project Los Angeles, Highways Performance Space, REDCAT, Human Resources, Vincent Price Art Museum, LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), and the J. Paul Getty Museum. Esparza has also shown throughout the United States in art institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and Ballroom Marfa, and internationally at Oficina de Procesos, Mexicali, and El Museo del Chopo in CDMX. Esparza was part of the 2018 spring cohort at the renowned Artpace artist-in-residence program in San Antonio, Texas, and recently led a guerrilla processional performance with over 25 artists through the historic fashion thoroughfare market The Santee Alley as part of his project, de la Calle (of the Street), in collaboration with the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Sponsorship
staring at the sun is made possible by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in support of MASS MoCA and the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art. The exhibition is curated by Marco Antonio Flores, a graduate student studying American and Latin American modern and contemporary art at the Williams College Graduate Program.
Images
High-resolution images are available through this link: bit.ly/EsparzaMM
About MASS MoCA
MASS MoCA is one of the world’s liveliest (and largest) centers for making, displaying, and enjoying today’s most important art, music, dance, theater, film, and video. MASS MoCA’s 250,000 sq. ft. of gallery space includes partnerships with Laurie Anderson, the Louise Bourgeois Trust, Jenny Holzer, Anselm Kiefer with the Hall Art Foundation, Sol LeWitt, and James Turrell.
Gallery admission is $20 for adults, $18 for veterans and seniors, $12 for students, $8 for children 6 to 16, and free for children 5 and under. Members are admitted free year-round. The Hall Art Foundation’s Anselm Kiefer exhibition is seasonal and currently closed. For additional information: 413.662.2111 x1 or visit massmoca.org.
Hours
MASS MoCA is open from 11am to 5pm, from September 4 through late June, closed Tuesdays, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. From late June through Labor Day, MASS MoCA’s galleries are open seven days a week — from 10am to 6pm Sundays through Wednesdays and from 10am to 7pm Thursdays through Saturdays.
About ArtCountry
ArtCountry is nestled in the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts and at the foot of the Green Mountains of southern Vermont, with art and music all year round from four incredible museums — MASS MoCA, The Clark Art Institute, Williams College Museum of Art, and Bennington Museum — and the unparalleled Williamstown Theatre Festival, all less than three hours from New York and Boston.
For Immediate Release
16 October 2018
Contact: Jodi Joseph
Director of Communications
413.664.4481 x8113
jjoseph@massmoca.org
Jarvis Rockwell: Us
At MASS MoCA, on view November 2018
NORTH ADAMS, MASSACHUSETTS — Artist Jarvis Rockwell’s massive 2002 installation Maya introduced MASS MoCA visitors to Rockwell, whose detailed wall-drawing continues to delight museum-goers and concert audiences just outside of the museum’s Club B-10. Rockwell returns to MASS MoCA with a new large-scale installation, Us, on view beginning November 10. In Us, figures from Rockwell’s massive collection of toys and figurines interact and organize themselves on glass panels, soaring over visitors’ heads in the historic light well of the newly renovated B6: Robert W. Wilson Building. A Members Opening Reception celebrating the work will be held on Saturday, November 10, at 4pm.
Rockwell began assembling his ever-expanding collection of toys and figurines in 1979. Numbering in the hundreds of thousands, his toys run the gamut from classic action figures to Japanese monsters, bobble-head dolls of politicians and artists, Yodas, Betty Boops, Troll dolls, Pez dispensers, Tin Tins, toy soldiers, and endless amounts of plastic furniture (“for the occasional elderly toy to sit on”). In his thoughtful arrangements, groups of figures gather as though in conversation with one another, approaching and drifting apart in a bewildering array of organic interactions. In his 1985 exhibition Toys at the New Museum, NY, eight identical figures wearing suits and panama hats anxiously adjusted their ties in unison, a coiffed doll with bright blue eyeshadow enthusiastically greeted an approaching Viking, and James Brown relaxed, feet up, on a blue ottoman.
As the exhibition’s title suggests, for Rockwell these figures stand in as avatars for ourselves — “alternatives to us whom we can interact with” — which act out the fantasies, beliefs, and values that shape our understanding of the world. In his own words, “We build what we are, what we think, and what we live.” Rockwell uses the term Maya, adopted from Hindu Sanskrit, to understand the way we attach illusions to the visible world. On a notecard that he carries in his wallet, Rockwell defines the term in relation to his practice as:
“The power of a god or demon to transform a concept into an element of the sensible world; the transitory manifold appearance of the sensible world, which obscures the undifferentiated spiritual reality from which it originates; the illusory appearance of the sensible world.”
The stepped structure of Us also points to Rockwell’s fascination with the spiritual realm. Spanning the length of the light well, ten glass planks hang from the ceiling in an ascending, curving line. The upward motion of the floating glass shelves conjures a feeling of ascension, and perhaps even reincarnation. As Rockwell sees it, “[The toys] are going on to glory.” Imbued with a physical and spiritual depth, Rockwell’s figures evoke a multiplicity of narratives that are at once whimsical and distressing, capturing the complexities and outlandishness of our own existence.
Rockwell approaches each installation of toys organically, responding to both the site and the needs of the various toys. Though most of the figures “socialize” in groups, the artist explains, “There’s always the lonely person that doesn’t talk well with other people, and he’ll be walking by himself.” By listening seriously to the stories that toys have to tell, Rockwell is able to create worlds that feel at once monumental and microscopic in scope, playing out both the quotidian and epic dramas of our lives.
About the Artist
For almost forty years, Jarvis Rockwell (b. 1932, New Rochelle, NY) has built his always-growing collection of toys and figures. The son of Norman and Mary Barstow Rockwell, Jarvis Rockwell began his artistic career drawing portraits of his neighbors and friends and taking classes at New York’s Art Students League and the National Academy of Design. Following his service in the Korean War, Rockwell attended the Boston Museum School and Los Angeles County Art Institute. Since its beginning in 1979, Rockwell’s collection of toys has grown to include hundreds of thousands of pieces which range from classic action figures to carved wooden animals, mythical monsters, Happy Meal prizes, Troll dolls, Looney Tunes characters, and figurines of politicians, celebrities, and artists. After a decade of collecting, Rockwell began to create scenes that explore the relationships between figures and the narratives that these interactions produce. Rockwell’s work has been included in exhibitions at MASS MoCA; the New Museum, New York, NY; Scottsdale Public Art, Scottsdale, AZ; Batman Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Images Gallery, Stockbridge, MA; Berkshire Museum, Pittsfield, MA; DownStreet Art, North Adams, MA; and the Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, MA. He lives and works in North Adams.
Sponsoship
Major exhibition support is provided by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Barr Foundation, and the Mass Cultural Council.
Images
High-resolution images are available through this link: bit.ly/RockwellMM
About MASS MoCA
MASS MoCA is one of the world’s liveliest (and largest) centers for making, displaying, and enjoying today’s most important art, music, dance, theater, film, and video. MASS MoCA’s 250,000 sq. ft. of gallery space includes partnerships with Laurie Anderson, the Louise Bourgeois Trust, Jenny Holzer, Anselm Kiefer with the Hall Art Foundation, Sol LeWitt, and James Turrell.
Gallery admission is $20 for adults, $18 for veterans and seniors, $12 for students, $8 for children 6 to 16, and free for children 5 and under. Members are admitted free year-round. The Hall Art Foundation’s Anselm Kiefer exhibition is seasonal and currently on view. For additional information: 413.662.2111 x1 or visit massmoca.org.
Hours
MASS MoCA is open from 11am to 5pm, closed Tuesdays, through late June. From late June through Labor Day 2019, MASS MoCA’s galleries will be open seven days a week — from 10am to 6pm Sundays through Wednesdays and from 10am to 7pm Thursdays through Saturdays.
About ArtCountry
ArtCountry is nestled in the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts and at the foot of the Green Mountains of southern Vermont, with art and music all year round from four incredible museums — MASS MoCA, The Clark Art Institute, Williams College Museum of Art, and Bennington Museum — and the unparalleled Williamstown Theatre Festival, all less than three hours from New York and Boston.
For Immediate Release
17 July 2018
Contact: Jodi Joseph
Director of Communications
413.664.4481 x8113
jjoseph@massmoca.org
Transition
Decade of Decision, 1989-1999
Sprague Electric >> MASS MoCA
MASS MoCA will host a temporary exhibition of the photographs, found objects, and archival materials gathered from its Marshall Street mill complex by local artist, firefighter, and community volunteer Christopher Gillooly. The exhibition will be installed in a yet-to-be renovated space adjacent to the historic guardhouse (soon to be home of A-oK Berkshire Barbeque), open to public view during regular MASS MoCA hours from July 21 through December 2.
The years between the departure of Sprague Electric Company from Marshall Street and the eventual opening of MASS MoCA were full of optimistic promises and daunting challenges, both for the North Adams community and for the planners and volunteers working on the nascent museum concept.
After winning a keystone state grant in 1988, a major recession and changes in state political leadership stalled funding for nearly 8 years, forcing museum advocates to turn to private support while they re-calibrated the core idea, developing a multi-year, phased approach that would eventually incorporate an ambitious performing arts program, a roster of changing exhibitions and newly commissioned works (instead of a fixed, permanent display of Minimal Art), and a robust commercial real estate initiative. During that time of fund-raising and re-conceptualization, many of the abandoned buildings slowly fell into disrepair, even as the small museum staff staged galas, concerts, and “pop up” exhibitions to illustrate the site’s dramatic potential.
“Reviewing Chris’ photographs was startling to me,” said Joseph Thompson, MASS MoCA’s founding director, “capturing both the stark reality of a seemingly interminable birthing process, but also the beautiful textures, light, darkness… and sheer drama of the place, and the process. There was a time when if anything needed to be lifted, moved, staged, cleaned, repaired, or Scotch-taped together to make some event or the other happen, Gillooly and fellow volunteer Carroll Sugg were the guys we turned to. It’s a joy to show a small glimpse of his time and work here during what was MASS MoCA’s experimental incubation phase.”
Gillooly documented these interim years, both through his own photographs taken on the fly as he undertook volunteer work across the campus, and through the salvaging of historic documents, archival materials, and objects gathered from the 16-acre, 28-building factory complex, some of which he re-cast as found-art sculpture. A small selection of Gillooly’s photographs and archival materials is presented in a still un-renovated space that intentionally recalls the feeling and condition of the factory campus prior to its conversion to a center for contemporary visual and performing arts in 1999.
On July 28, a 3:30 pm reception with the artist will celebrate the exhibition (and also mark the kick off of the Bang on a Can Marathon performance, presenting a series of new music performances from 4pm to 10pm on July 28.)
“This exhibition is as much a testament to the former Sprague employees and the North Adams community that came together in support of MASS MoCA as it is an ode to the bricks and mortar, industrial artifacts, and collective memories that make these mill buildings so hauntingly raw and beautiful.” Christopher Gillooly
About MASS MoCA
MASS MoCA is one of the world’s liveliest (and largest) centers for making, displaying, and enjoying today’s most important art, music, dance, theater, film, and video. MASS MoCA’s 250,000 sq. ft. of gallery space includes partnerships with Laurie Anderson, the Louise Bourgeois Trust, Jenny Holzer, Anselm Kiefer with the Hall Art Foundation, Sol LeWitt, and James Turrell.
Gallery admission is $20 for adults, $18 for veterans and seniors, $12 for students, $8 for children 6 to 16, and free for children 5 and under. Members are admitted free year-round. The Hall Art Foundation’s Anselm Kiefer exhibition is seasonal and is currently on view. For additional information: 413.662.2111 x1 or visit massmoca.org.
Hours
From June 23 through September 3, MASS MoCA’s galleries are open seven days a week — from 10am to 6pm Sundays through Wednesdays and from 10am to 7pm Thursdays through Saturdays. MASS MoCA is open from 11am to 5pm, closed Tuesdays through June 22.
About ArtCountry
ArtCountry is nestled in the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts and at the foot of the Green Mountains of southern Vermont with art and music all year round from four incredible museums — MASS MoCA, The Clark Art Institute, Williams College Museum of Art, and Bennington Museum — and the unparalleled Williamstown Theatre Festival, all less than three hours from New York and Boston.