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MASS MoCA

Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art

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36 hours at MASS MoCA
and in the Berkshires

  • More great ways to plan your visit
  • berkshires.org
  • destination williamstown.org
Joseph Thompson is the Founding Director of MASS MoCA

If I had the chance for a long weekend in the Berkshires, I’d time the trip to align with one of our signature festivals or performing arts events, which tend to activate the museum and all of its courtyards with great energy (and every gallery, theater, and nook and cranny, too).

But if you prefer a quieter visit, here’s a three-day plan:

Day 1

Visit MASS MoCA in the morning, then our neighbords at the the Clark in the afternoon. Spend the morning awash in the 30,000 SF Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective, then move outdoors and see the magnificent Anselm Kiefer installation (a Hall Art Foundation project) and the adjacent Franz West, and explore the rest of this historic mill complex from the outside. You’ll enjoy seeing how the site’s first tenant, Arnold Print Works, placed buildings cheek-by-jowl, aligning building foundations tight to the curving banks of the north and south branches of the Hoosic River. After lunch at Lickety Split, visit the Clark: don’t forget to walk up Stone Hill, where the view is fabulous (and there’s more art up there, including a grove of contorted trees transplanted from the first generation of Natalie Jeremijenko’s Tree Logic, which marks MASS MoCA’s front door—see if you can find them). In the summer, check out MASS MoCA’s roster of music, dance, and theater, or catch the play at the Williamstown Theatre Festival.

Day 2

Field Trip! I suggest an early start at Hancock Shaker Village, which boasts one of the most exquisite buildings in America, in the form of a round barn. If you have kids, they will love the heirloom livestock. Since you’re halfway there already, do the full Berkshires and drive to Stockbridge to visit the Norman Rockwell Museum. We like to think of ourselves as natural antidotes: Norman Rockwell’s sharply observed and sometimes surprisingly trenchant realism, countering the more conceptually inclined art at MASS MoCA. A lunch at Jack’s Hot Dog Stand, on Eagle Street in North Adams, would keep you in a 1950s Norman Rockwell frame of mind.

In the afternoon back at MASS MoCA, enjoy our temporary exhibitions in Buildings 4 and 5. The exhibition in our signature space, the football-field-sized Building 5, will stick in your mind forever, I promise. 130,000 square feet of new art recently opened up in Building 6, including landmark installations by James Turrell, new (virtual reality) work by Laurie Anderson, and a soundproofed room full of Gunnar Schonbeck’s oversized, handmade instruments. Pick them up and give them a play: there’s no experience required.

On most Saturdays, we have great performing arts and film in our Club B10 or our mega-scaled “black box,” the Hunter Center. Buy your tickets for the evening show before dinner at on campus or at one of the many excellent restaurants along Marshall and Main Streets. (A lot of our musicians and artists like to hang out at The Mohawk Tavern late at night, perhaps stopping by Bright Ideas Brewing on the way, for a locally made craft beer.) Or if you’re on a date, it’s hard to beat pizza on the banks of the Green River, behind Hot Tomatoes in Williamstown.

Day 3

Bike or hike up Mount Greylock—the state’s tallest mountain—the entrance for which is through the Heritage State Park complex, about a block south of MASS MoCA on Route 8. The 6-mile climb is considered the best and most challenging bike ride in Massachusetts…but there is also a beautiful system of hiking and mountain biking trails. Other outdoor adventures include Zoar Outdoor—a white-water rafting operation off of Route 2—or, in the winter months, Berkshire East and Jiminy Peak ski mountains, both about 20 minutes from MASS MoCA. Berkshire East is small, old-school, and less expensive, while Jiminy Peak runs a modern fleet of high-speed quad lifts, with full-bore services. Pittsfield State Forest has excellent fat-bike trails.

Back indoors on the arts and culture beat, you won’t want to miss the jewel-like Williams College Museum of Art in the heart of the Williams College campus. And for those who really want to make a deep dive, the Chapin Rare Book Library at Williams College is exquisite and is one of the very few places on earth that has on view the four founding documents of the United States, which always takes my breath away.

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It is with gratitude and humility that we acknowledge that the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) rests on the ancestral homelands of the Muhheaconneok or Mohican people (People of the Waters That Are Never Still) and the Wabanaki peoples. Despite tremendous hardship in being forcibly relocated from these lands by Dutch, English, and US colonizers, today the Muhheaconneok or Mohican community resides in Wisconsin and is known as the Stockbridge-Munsee Community The Wabanaki Confederacy, also known as The People of the Dawnland, include the Mi’kmaq, Maliseet, Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, and Abenaki Nations, who are indigenous to the lands with the English placenames Maine, Vermont, northwestern Massachusetts, and parts of Canada, and continue to reside in these areas. We pay honor and respect to these ancestors past and present as we commit to building a more inclusive and equitable space for all. More information can be found here.

MASS MoCA

1040 MASS MoCA WAY
North Adams, MA 01247

413.662.2111

info@massmoca.org

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Mohawk Trail Region MCC Barr Foundation Massachusetts Office of Travel & Tourism New England Foundation for the Arts National Endowment for the Arts
May 30 - June 1 2023
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MASS MoCA will close at 5pm on Thursday, June 1, for a staff event.