“It’s really exciting to see a lot of the promise of that project being realized,” Michael Govan told me the other day. I was telling him that, tomorrow, the Massachusetts Museum of Contempory Art plans to announce six new partnerships with artists and artists’ foundations that will fill 90,000 square feet. That’s a huge chunk of the new space being renovated in the expansion that I wrote about in August for The New York Times.
Mass MoCA’s new partners are big names: James Turrell, Laurie Anderson, Jenny Holzer, plus the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the Easton Foundation of Louise Bourgeois, and Bang on Can, which is handling the late instrument maker Gunnar Schonbeck. And Govan, now director of the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, was there at the creation of Mass MoCA, along with Tom Krens, who usually gets credit for the idea, and Joe Thompson, its first and only director.
I write much more about tomorrow’s news in an article posted a short time ago on the website of the Times, headlined Vast Space and Art to Fill It: Mass MoCA Partners With Major Contemporary Artists. It will be in tomorrow’s paper.
With these partnership, Thompson has taken Mass MoCA a turn away from its early years–when it curated its own exhibits and usually commissioned or helped create new artworks on site. But these partnerships, which are not common and may be unique, or close to unique, seem a sound way for Mass MoCA to expand at low cost.
For its first two partnerships, with Yale Art Gallery and the Hall Art Foundation–for exhibitions of art by Sol LeWitt and Anselm Kiefer, respectively–Mass MoCA incurred little added costs, mostly things like security. The YAG and the Hall picked up the other costs.
Mass MoCA is cost-sharing on three of the new deals–with Rauschenberg, Easton and Bang on a Can. Turrell will donate one or two works–they are site-specific. But Mass MoCA plans to raise money for the Holzer and Anderson installations, and most of Turrell, too.
The slight danger here for Mass MoCA in displaying such masters is that it loses its identify as an “art factory,” as the headline on my summer article put it so well. It will still curate its own exhibitions–in fact, that aprt of the museum is gaining space too.
“It was always posed as an alternative place, not trying to be a regular museum,” Govan said. On the other hand, he added. “Mass MoCA was always supposed to be flexible and to be changing with the times, and it is.â€