Mass MoCA Summer Schedule
Wilco and Rosanne Cash to Katharina Grosse
By: Ariel Petrova - Apr 18, 2011
Saturday, May 28, 8:00 PM|
Rosanne Cash Live in Concert
One of America's pre-eminent singers and songwriters and the daughter of the legendary Johnny Cash kicks off the summer season in style. Over the past thirty years Cash has recorded twelve albums and has had eleven #1 singles, navigating her own path between country and rock, roots and pop. Her songs are finely wrought vignettes, both highly personal and universally appealing. As the Napa Valley Register said "Judging by her Uptown concert-and indeed Rosanne Cash's entire career-it's evident that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree."
Saturday, June 11, 2:00 PM
Dan Zanes and Elizabeth Mitchell Live in Concert
Two of the most beloved artists working in kids' music today team up for this very special project. Zanes is a Grammy winner whose rollicking and inclusive approach to traditional songs from around the world Rolling Stone has called "wry, rootsy, real American folk music." Mitchell, the first new children's music artist signed to Smithsonian Folkways Recordings in the 21st century, sings sweet, perfect renditions of Woody Guthrie classics and other old-timey gems, along with the occasional Bob Marley and Velvet Underground cover. They join forces here for a stripped down acoustic set that will appeal to music lovers of all ages.
Friday, June 24 - Sunday, June 26
Solid Sound: A Music and Arts Festival Curated by Wilco
Back for the second year the Solid Sound 2011 lineup includes Wilco (Friday & Saturday), the Levon Helm Band, Thurston Moore, Syl Johnson & the Sweet Divines, Here We Go Magic, Dave Douglas & Brass Ecstasy, Pillow Wand (Nels Cline/Thurston Moore duo), The Handsome Family, Liam Finn, Sic Alps, JC Brooks & the Uptown Sound, Sarah Lee Guthrie & Johnny Irion, Glenn Kotche, Pronto, the Autumn Defense, Comedy Cabaret curated by John Hodgman featuring Wyatt Cenac, Eugene Mirman & Morgan Murphy, plus the return of the Story Pirates and more still to be announced. Check solidsoundfestival.com for updates
Saturday, July 2, 8:00 PM
Hip-Hop Dance Party with ReadNex Poetry Squad
As part of Lift Ev'ry Voice, a new Berkshire county-wide festival celebrating African-American culture and heritage, The ReadNex Poetry Squad, an emcee collective that runs a youth center and is active in the Newburgh, New York school system, presents a poetry and hip-hop workshop during the day and throws a dance party after the sun goes down. Check liftevryvoice.com for more information about the festival.
Saturday, July 9, 9:00 PM
Film with Live Music
Charlie Chaplin's The Kid with a live score by Marc Ribot
Marc Ribot, called "one of the most individual of guitarists and a master of introverted ironies" by The Village Voice, turns his attention to one of Chaplin's greatest films. Ribot's haunting solo guitar score makes this classic contemporary, taking its story of a single father struggling to raise his son during the Depression and making it relevant to today's economic and social conditions. Poignant, funny, and mesmerizing, the work is a unique conversation between artistic geniuses of the past and present.
Bang on a Can Festival - July 13 - 30
10th Anniversary! For 10 years the Bang on a Can Summer Festival at MASS MoCA has hosted hundreds of amazing, multi-talented musicians from places as far away as Malaysia, Brazil, and Uzbekistan. July's 3-week long birthday party features live music every day: daily gallery recitals, free community performances, kids events, and two major concerts.
Saturday, July 16, 11:00 AM
Kids Can Too!
A fun session with the faculty and fellows of Bang on a Can, Kids Can Too! is an innovative performance-presentation for all ages. Not just for the younger set - everyone participates!
Saturday, July 16, 2:00 PM
Artist Talk with Katharina Grosse
An intimate conversation with this artist about her work and process especially her massive installation in Building 5 titled One Floor Up More Highly
Saturday, June 16, 8:00 PM
Buke and Gass Alt Cabaret
This Brooklyn-based duo mixes wild, propulsive musical experimentation with customized homemade gear -- heavy-duty amps, a kick-drum with noisemakers, a "toe-bourine," and the modified baritone ukulele and guitar-bass hybrid that inspired their name -- to make a huge, joyful, prog-rock-infused sound. Their album Riposte landed on NPR Music's list of50 Favorite Albums of 2010, and they're easily one of the most original and unpredictable live bands you will ever see.
Saturday, July 23
Tribute to John Adams
Talk 2:30 PM, Recital 4: 30 PM, Concert 8:00 PM
The New Yorker says "John Adams...may be the most vital and eloquent composer in America" and his opera, Nixon in China, premiered at the Met this spring to rave reviews. Bang on a Can devotes a full day to saluting this important and exciting American composer starting with a talk titled John Adams: Music & Mastery at 2:30 with Bang on a Can co-founder/composer David Lang followed by a gallery recital at 4:30 and an evening concert in the Hunter Center at 8 PM including Adams' "pocket concerto" Gnarly Buttons, the electro-acoustic large ensemble work Scratchband, and more.
Saturday, July 30, 4-10 PM
Bang on a Can Marathon
The perennially popular pinnacle of the Bang on a Can Festival, the Marathon features six exciting hours of sounds from the edge, mixing innovative music written last week with rare and ear-expanding performances of classic experimental music. Come and go as you please, or stay right through! Check for program highlights at massmoca.org.
Friday, August 5 8:30 PM
Walk-in/Fly-in Film: The Great Waldo Pepper
Enjoy a classic flying film, starring Robert Redford and Susan Sarandon, on a super-sized screen, as MASS MoCA converts the door of an airplane hangar at the North Adams airport off Route 2 behind Stop & Shop to a massive movie screen for one night only. Come early to see vintage planes and automobiles, enjoy a cookout and summer beverages, play with balsa wood gliders and enjoy the view. Snoopy & the Red Baron cartoons for kids and music in the hangar start the night when the doors open at 7:00; the feature starts around 8:30. Rain date: Sunday, August 7.
Saturday August 6, 8:30 PM
Film with Live Music
The Complete Metropolis with Alloy Orchestra
Alloy Orchestra returns to perform its original live score to the newly restored version of Fritz Lang's magnum opus, which includes 25 minutes of additional footage. This version of Metropolis, just 4 minutes shorter than the lost original 153-minute cut that premiered in Berlin in 1927, was discovered in 2008 in a library in Buenos Aires. The reconstruction and digitization of this archival print is one of the most significant restoration projects in cinema history. A.O. Scott of The New York Times calls the film "a masterpiece of visionary silent cinema...one of the strangest, most fascinating films ever made, a futuristic nightmare that is both sublime in its grandeur and remarkably intimate in its emotions. Just about every science fiction movie you can think of pays tribute to its influence, but to date none has matched its strangeness or its prophetic power."
Friday, August 19 - Sunday, August 21 3:00 and 5:00 PM each day
Zany Umbrella Circus & Oko Sokolo Company: Mirette's Circus
Pittsburgh's Zany Umbrella Circus, a delightful throwback dedicated to folk artistry of all kinds -- puppetry, circus, music, storytelling, street theatre and visual arts -- teams up with Germany's Oko Sokolo Company to present a dazzling work, inspired by the children's book Mirette on the Highwire. At a little inn in Paris in the 1920s, a young girl helps a daredevil wire-walker who has lost his edge to regain his confidence. The performance uses physical theater, masks, dance, and circus, with staging that gives a nod to a time when bohemian artists created theater in rehearsal halls illuminated by gaslight.
Friday, August 26, 8:00 PM
Work-in-progress: Music
Roomful of Teeth
This vocal ensemble led by Williams College's Brad Wells, continues its tradition of bringing singing styles from around the world to North Adams. Participants in this concert will include composer-in-residence Merrill Garbus, who has captivated the indie music world with her current project, tUnE-YarDs, which marries a coarse folk ingenuity with the bold pop sensibility of an R&B siren. Garbus will be joined by other guest composers in a night of wild sonic exploration.
Saturday, August 27, 8:00 PM
Work in Progress: Dance
John Jasperse
After a 2-week residency The Bessie Award-winning John Jasperse Company will present a work-in-progress showing of Canyon which will premiere in September at the Philly Fringe Festival. The Village Voice reviewed the company's most recent work saying: "Jasperse and his four terrific performers offer a witty and provocative web of dancing, acts, and images that test in bewitchingly eccentric ways our ability to distinguish between truth and lies and between real acts and simulated ones."
Sunday, September 4, 8:00 PM
Dance Party with I Love Vinyl
Founded by DJ/producer Scribe in the summer of 2009 with a dream team of resident DJs, I Love Vinyl has fast become one of NYC's hottest dance parties. Anything is fair game, but come ready to hear some soul, disco, dilla, boogie, hustle, hip-hop, old-school house, no wave, new jack swing, dance-floor jazz, Latin, funk, electro, and afrobeat.
Summer 2011 Calendar
In the Galleries
The Workers: Precarity, Invisibility, Mobility
May 28, 2011 through Spring 2011
We all know what Rosie the Riveter looked like and the ideas she stood for. Ford-era production line labor-and the rise of powerful unions-left indelible portraits of work in mid-20th-century America. Before that, Dickens created searing images of proto-industrial labor, and Millet recorded a vivid picture of agrarian labor in mid 19th-century Europe. But what does work look like in a global economy marked by outsourcing, widespread migration, and a state of labor that seems fractured, precarious, and almost invisible? With works from 25 artists, The Workers examines the way labor is represented today, while making more visible many of the issues affecting the working class. The timing, and the place, could not be more fitting: Once the site of a bustling factory - whose closure left nearly a third of the city's residents out of work - MASS MoCA is uniquely positioned to present this show. The historic plight of North Adams' workers mirrors that of many in the United States and abroad today who have lost a way of life to the perennial hunt for cheaper labor, even while the workers who replaced them have just begun to organize.
Nari Ward: Sub Mirage Lignum
Through Spring 2012
Nari Ward often juxtaposes ideas and materials from seemingly disparate worlds. For Sub Mirage Lignum, Ward was inspired by the tropics of Jamaica and MASS MoCA's industrial legacy. These two places hold special significance for Ward. Jamaica is his birthplace while MASS MoCA is the birthplace for this, his most recent body of work. In Ward's hands, these seemingly oppositional locations-each with its own iconic materials and histories-fuse together, creating new and beguiling images, part real, part mirage. Major support for this exhibition is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support from the Toby D.
Lewis Philanthropic Fund of Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
Memery: imitation, Memory, and internet culture
Through July 31, 2o11
Internet memes are elements of culture passed from one individual to another via the webWhile we think of online culture as a world of passing fads, it also provides a source for artists interested in enduring icons and lasting forms of expression. Memery looks at artists who use the Internet as a point of departure to explore the relationship between memes and memory. This exhibition is made possible by the Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute in support of MASS MoCA and the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art.
Sean Foley: Ruse
Through April 2012
Sean Foley's installation Rusefor the Hunter Center Mezzanine combines painting and objects protruding from the wall, all of which reference themes of the cartoon gothic, depression and camouflage. His work retains a sense of wonder and folly by countering darker themes with bursting colors and form. Supported in part by the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
Katharina Grosse: One Floor Up More Highly
Through October 2011
Katharina Grosse is known for her vibrantinstallations which combine painting, sculpture, and architecture in unexpected ways. Using a spray gun instead of a brush, Grosse paints directly on walls, floors, and unconventional supports such as soil and glacier-like shards, transforming her sites into three-dimensional landscapes of color. Major support for this exhibition is provided by the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne. Additional support from the Toby D. Lewis Philanthropic Fund of the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland, the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e.V., the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and anonymous donors.
Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective
Through 2033
Conceived and designed by Sol LeWitt before he passed away in 2007, this remarkable 3-floored, semi-permanent installation of 105 wall drawings represents 40 years of work by one of the most influential Conceptual artists of our time. A collaboration of MASS MoCA, Yale University Art Gallery, and the Williams College Museum of Art.
Michael Oatman: All Utopias Fell
Long-term seasonal exhibition
All Utopias Fell is a project in three interrelated parts: First, The Shining is a beautifully reflective, repurposed Airstream trailer with large parachutes and active solar panels that has crash-landed at MASS MoCA,. Visitors will be allowed to climb a staircase and enter into the craft where they will encounter the second part: The Library of the Sun. Hybridizing a domestic space, a laboratory and a library, where the occupant will 'be right back', only it is 30 years later. Videos relating to the sun and its mythology flicker to life on the cockpit's instrumentation panels. Once inside the craft, visitors will also be able to view the third part: Codex Solis, a massive field of solar panels mirrors interspersed suggesting an absent text.
Federico Diaz: Geometric Death Frequency-141
Through April 2012
Federico Diaz merges art and new imaging, data analysis, and manufacturing technologies in work that is known for its beauty as well as its spatial and interactive qualities. Geometric Death Frequency-141 is a large
sculpture fabricated from precisely cut and assembled polyethylene and aluminium spheres and formed from a pixilated abstraction of a wave crashing into the museum rendered in 3D.
KIDSPACE
ColorForms II: The Basic Utensils
Through September 5, 2011
Featuring works by artists Soyeon Cho and Lisa Hoke both of whose hallmark is making beautiful, complex and colorful installations out of inexpensive everyday materials, primarily plastic food utensils, boxes, paper cups and plates, and cardboard containers. Cho uses found objects to create sculptures that often reference nature such as flowers and bird aviaries. Hoke uses massive quantities of disposable packaging and disposable products to form bold, ambitious, abstract patterned sculptures and three-dimensional collages and assemblages.