Results tagged “MASS MoCA” from Real Clear Arts

MASS MoCA is 10 years old this summer, and in the past two weeks, WBUR has had two excellent reports on the museum and its economic and cultural impact on North Adams, its home.

A few numbers from the reports: with 150,000 sq. ft. of gallery space in a 400,000 sq. ft. complex, the museum draws 110,000 visitors annually. It pumps $14 million a year into local hotels, restaurants and shops. The state put $35 million into the project, and this year, according to director Joe Thompson, MASS MoCA moved out of the red and is finally making money. (WBUR doesn't mention it, but as I recall from past reports, it's real estate revenues that MASS MoCA taps to make money.)  

Not everything works, and MASS MoCA has seen many bumps over the past years, but still -- for a town deserted by its manufacturing companies, it's not a bad deal.

Nonetheless, according to WBUR (its reports are here and here), the wisdom of relying on MASS MoCA is apparently fueling a political debate in North Adams among its mayoral candidates. 

While at MASS MoCA last Saturday, I stopped in at the new Kidspace, a nine-year-old collaboration with the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and the Williams College Museum of Art that moved to new premises in late March. On view is CRIBS by Matthew Bua, an installation that features a crib crammed with detritus, found paintings, vacation slides, gloves, and 50 guitars rescued from the streets of New York, and other junk. 

But there were no kids in Kidspace when I was there -- just two adult attendants. Working against Kidspace, perhaps, was the warm, sunny day. And it was lunchtime.

Still I was curious about the Kidspace experience, so in the last few days I've been querying MASS MoCA, which said my visit occurred at a typically downtime for museums in the Berkshires. From end-June through the summer, MASS MoCA says, Kidspace will be "incredibly busy" with public hours every day and art classes three days a week.

Just what I wanted to hear to start a new, irregular feature on Real Clear Arts called Five Questions. Laura Thompson, the Director of Exhibitions and Education for Kidspace, stepped up to the plate this time.  

What is artist Matthew Bua trying to convey to the kids?

Matt is trying to convey that 1. collections don't have to be hidden away or made precious; they can be used to tell a story about a person or place, or can be incorporated into artwork; 2. he is of the "use it or lose it" mindset, which means he believes collection materials and recyclables should be used for artistic endeavors; and 3. architecture can be produced by anyone and should have more unique individual characteristics.

Aside from organized school programs, does this Kidspace effort get many walk-in visitors and by what age group?

In our previous space on the third floor, we would get about 13,000 annual walk-in visitors who participated in our public hours and art classes. We work with about 1,100 school children annually, both in Kidspace and in their own classrooms (often with artists-in-residence). Since moving Kidspace to the 2nd floor, adjacent [to Sol] LeWitt['s installation], we've seen about a 40% increase in walk-in traffic, so we project next year's number will be about 18,000 visits during public hours.

The public age ranges from birth to senior citizens, but mostly I would say families with children ages 3 to 16.

For a museum in a city of 15,000 with a population base of only about 100,000 in the Berkshires, our public visitation is very strong.

My apologies to Guy Ben-Ner, the Israeli video artist who has represented Israel at the Venice Biennale and whose 2000 video, Moby Dick, was recently acquired by the Museum of  Modern Art. He has a show at MASS MoCA, but when I was there on Saturday, I fled -- not because of his work, but because some young man was in the galleries bleating into his cell phone. Guards are few at MASS MoCA, and no one stopped him from chatting away during the video.

But this is not just a plea to museums to enforce the no-cell-phones ban, though it is that, too.

Rather, the situation started me thinking about art and focus. My one-time colleague at The New York Times, the retired music critic Bernard Holland, used to stir up dozens of reader letters at the mere mention of a cough in the audience. This happened not once or twice, but -- as I found when I just searched his work at the Times -- in 14 articles he wrote over the years touching on the problem. Everyone agreed that coughers should not be tolerated.

A cough is often involuntary. What would Carnegie Hall denizens say about the gallery-goers who nowadays think nothing of pulling out their cells while others are trying to look at art?

In a world in which we are all multi-tasking and suffering from many demands on our attention, looking at art remains different. So should consuming other forms of art.