In February 2025, Alison Pebworth’s Cultural Apothecary will begin the first phase of its physical manifestation at MASS MoCA. For more than a decade, Pebworth has been inspired by a 19th-century neurological disorder called Americanitis. With vague and capacious symptoms ranging from abnormal fatigue to premature baldness, a diagnosis of Americanitis essentially pathologized the anxiety and ennui that plagued many Americans in the wake of industrialization and urbanization. Pebworth’s Cultural Apothecary asks us to consider the root causes of the cultural ills that contribute to our anxiety today, and to work together towards tools for healing. Her installation at MASS MoCA will offer an experimental space for embodied, in-person connection, curiosity, and exploration as an antidote to division, loneliness, and isolation.

As Pebworth explains, “before we find a cure, we must know what ails us.” Members of the public can help actively shape the installation by filling out surveys that reflect on their own experiences and current concerns — whether in the installation, online, or at Pebworth’s storefront studio on Eagle Street in downtown North Adams.

For the past year, during her extended residency at MASS MoCA, Pebworth has been living in North Adams and working to provoke curiosity and inspire collaboration with passersby out of a storefront studio in the city’s downtown. She has workshopped ideas with community members, resulting in pop-ups including a Kindness Dispensary (with Alethea Morrison), Spirit Drawing events with the local community at the North Adams Public Library, and rotating monthly open studio installations as part of the city’s “First Fridays” celebrations. During these events, she often offers botanical elixirs to the public, in the spirit of healing through community and nature.

The bar top at the heart of Cultural Apothecary at MASS MoCA, surrounded by Pebworth’s paintings and sculptures, will welcome visitors to sip reparative drafts and experience the restorative power of communing with strangers. Drawing on data gathered in the exhibition and on personal experiences, artists, herbalists, and practitioners will be invited to workshop, create, or present speculative curatives and elixirs. These contributions will be added to the Cultural Apothecary’s shelves over the course of the exhibition’s run. A glowing, pulsing sculptural heart hanging high above offers poetic encouragement to visitors to examine what they carry in their own hearts, and perhaps to lay it down for a while.

Artist Bio
Alison Pebworth’s work focuses on long-range projects that combine painting, installation, and social interaction. Pebworth is the recipient of awards from The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, The Center for Cultural Innovation, The McEvoy Foundation, and GEN ART. A 2021 MacDowell Fellow, other selected residencies include The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (NE), Recology SF (CA), Ucross Foundation (WY), Monson Arts (ME), Cannonball (FL), and Space (Victoria BC) and The Wurlitzer Foundation (NM.) She has exhibited and toured her work to over thirty venues across North America that include The Oakland Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The DeYoung Museum; The New Children’s Museum, San Diego; Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit; The Salt Lake Art Center, Utah; and Vivo Media Arts Centre, Vancouver, BC. She is currently in a year-long Research and Development Residency here at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA).

Alison Pebworth, Americanitis: Enduring 19th C and Early 21st C Causes, 2014 and Americanitis: Early 21st C Word Cloud Cures, 2014
Both acrylic on canvas
Courtesy of the artist