MASS MoCA Programming
January Through May
By: MoCA - Nov 11, 2026
MASS MoCA announces its programming for January through May 2027, a season of new exhibitions, performances, and public gatherings that includes the openings of The Oath, Until we get to the core/Hasta llegar al meollo, and a survey of Algerian-French artist Kader Attia.
As snow settles over the Berkshire hills and the days grow short, MASS MoCA's galleries and stages glow a little warmer. Come in from the cold to wander quiet galleries, linger over an afternoon of free art-making in Kidspace, or lose yourself in live music and dance in the Hunter Center. And as winter softens into spring, the season turns toward new exhibitions and a gathering of some of today's most imaginative thinkers.
The season begins with free School Break Workshops in Kidspace (December 28–January 1) and the opening of The Oath (January 9), a vivid, color-saturated work from Annie-B Parson and Alla Kovgan featuring seventeen women and femmes moving as one to gather, bond, believe, fight, and promise. Nick Meyer: Good Bones opens January 18 in the new gallery in the Research and Development Store, followed by the first of two Community Free Days (January 30 & March 27).
In February, Perfume Genius and choreographer Kate Wallich present their new collaboration The Lesson (February 6), and Touki Delphine’s SUPERDRUM takes over the Hunter Center (February 15–19).
Spring brings the opening of Until we get to the core / Hasta llegar al meollo (March 20), an exhibition exploring projects that rebuild connection, curiosity, and care between people and the natural world, with a title borrowed from Laura Aguilar’s series of the same name. Save the date for On Wonder: A Public Exploration of Uncommon Creativity (April 2–4), along with the opening of Seba Calfuqueo’s first U.S. solo exhibition (April 3), and at the end of May the season culminates with the opening of Kader Attia.
Throughout the season, audiences can also experience jazz, poetry, and experimental performance, including the Vijay Iyer Quartet, Kafka’s Monkey, and a rare performance by Cecilia Vicuña and Ricardo Gallo; join exhibition Opening Celebrations and Member Appreciation Month in March; and visit the 15th Annual Teen Invitational, alongside opportunities to engage with artists through conversations, workshops, and family programming.
New ticketed events go on sale to MASS MoCA members beginning Wednesday, November 11, 2027, at 12pm EST. Tickets to the general public go on sale beginning Friday, November 13, 2027, at 12pm EST.
MASS MoCA is open six days a week, 10am–5pm, closed only on Tuesdays; timed entry reservations are encouraged for select exhibitions. For more information about upcoming programs, visit massmoca.org.
EXHIBITION OPENINGS
Annie-B Parson and Alla Kovgan: The Oath | On view beginning January 9, 2027
Since the beginning of time — in community, clan, congregation, and club — humans have developed systems, both utopian and dystopian, for moving together in unison in large groups. The Oath, a film based on Annie-B Parson’s stage choreography, explores humanity’s dance of vernacular and poetic group actions. Set in a vivid universe of color, the work spans time, from the primeval age and into the future, and features seventeen women and femmes moving as one for purpose and for pleasure, to gather, to bond, to intimidate, to believe, to fight, to promise, to dance.
Until we get to the core/Hasta llegar al meollo | Opening March 20, 2027
Curated by Michy Marxuach, Curatorial Exchange Initiative Fellow at MASS MoCA, this group exhibition brings together six long-term artistic investigations by artists whose practices extend from Borikén to Karokynká: Amara Abdal Figueroa, Jorge González Santos, Camila Marambio & Ariel Byía, Gala Porras-Kim, Ernesto Pujol, and Merián Soto. Addressing the fractured relationship between humans and the natural world, the exhibition treats materials not as symbols but as teachers: soil carries the memory of territories, peat serves as habitat, archive, and slow collaborator; and singing drums reverberate with the generosity of the land.
Opening Celebration: Until we get to the core / Hasta llegar al meollo | Saturday, March 20, 2027, 5:30pm
Members, curators, friends from the community, and the artists celebrate the opening of a group exhibition that brings together six long-term artistic investigations by artists whose practices extend from Borikén to Karokynká. Curated by Michy Marxuach, Curatorial Exchange Initiative Fellow at MASS MoCA, the exhibition addresses the fractured relationship between humans and the natural world.
Free for members; $20 non-members
- In Conversation: Artists of Until we get to the core/Hasta llegar al meollo | Saturday, March 20, 2027, 4pm
Join the artists for a conversation about how they transform memory, plants, and environment into artistic materials and reproduce the living systems we are all implicated in.
Tickets: $10; members receive 10% discount
Seba Calfuqueo | On view beginning April 3, 2027
In her first major solo exhibition in an American museum, Mapuche artist Seba Calfuqueo creates works that challenge the rigid binaries of Western colonial modernity that have historically regulated bodies, identities, and territories. Grounded in her Indigenous Mapuche identity and cosmovision, her practice invites viewers to inhabit liquid states of being, where non-binary bodies, nature, language, and memory all flow and conflate. Through video, performance, and sculpture, Calfuqueo points to the colonial and state-driven extractive systems in her native Chile, asking how we truly hold space for fluidity. In a world where living outside imposed boundaries can be a threat to life itself, she envisions empowered ways of existing, healing, surviving, and becoming liquid.
Kader Attia | On view beginning Saturday, May 29, 2027
Over nearly three decades, Algerian-French artist Kader Attia has created works that powerfully illuminate the ruinous impacts of colonialism and the dominance of western ideologies across the globe. Attia recasts everyday objects, from sugar cubes to consumer packaging to birdcages, as tangible expressions of geopolitical conditions and their human consequences. In his newest works, he considers how contemporary manifestations of colonization and capitalism affect us all, in the forms of the global climate crisis and the crisis of the digital age. A focused survey, the MASS MoCA presentation brings together works spanning twenty years and includes sculpture, installation, video, and photography.
- Opening Celebration: Kader Attia | Saturday, May 29, 2027, 5:30pm
Join fellow museum members, MASS MoCA curators, friends from the community, and the artist to celebrate the opening.
Tickets: Free for members with registration by May 28; $20 non-members
Opening Celebration: New Exhibitions in Building 6 | Saturday, February 6, 2027, 5:30pm
Members, curators, and friends gather to celebrate three new exhibitions in The Robert W. Wilson Building (Building 6): The Oath, Machine Dazzle: Changes, and Slumpie 69, along with new works by Laurie Anderson.
Free for members; $20 non-members
PERFORMING ARTS
Gibney Company: Another Look | Saturday, January 30, 2027, 7pm
Co-presented with Jacob’s Pillow
Choreographer Lucinda Childs and composer Philip Glass reunite in a full-length work for Gibney Company set to Another Look at Harmony, Part 4, a major Glass score never before choreographed at this scale. Conceived in celebration of Glass' 90th birthday, the work brings two defining figures of American minimalism together with a company known for its strong and versatile dancers.
Tickets: $49 Advance, $59 Week of, $79 Preferred
Perfume Genius & Kate Wallich: The Lesson | Saturday, February 6, 2027, 7pm
Perfume Genius (Mike Hadreas) and choreographer Kate Wallich return to the stage with a new collaboration. Combining Perfume Genius' experimental pop with Wallich's distinctive choreographic lens, The Lesson is a raw, live music and dance performance inspired by Elfriede Jelinek's notorious novel The Piano Teacher and Michael Haneke's film adaptation. The work moves through repression, longing, authority, and submission in unstable scenes where roles shift and the unsaid becomes manically physical. Following their acclaimed 2019 collaboration The Sun Still Burns Here, Hadreas reunites with Wallich alongside his husband and musical partner, Alan Wyffels, and longtime collaborator Tate Justus. The Lesson is a work-in-progress performance, ahead of its world premiere at REDCAT in Los Angeles on February 18, 2027.
Tickets: $36 Advance, $46 Week of, $56 Preferred, $20 Student
Touki Delphine: SUPERDRUM | February 15–19, 2027
Amsterdam-based collective Touki Delphine, and artists of Firebird (2024) fill the Hunter Center with SUPERDRUM, an installation of more than one hundred second-hand drums donated by the public or sourced through online marketplaces, thrift stores, and attics. No two drums are the same; each carries its own history in its shape, dents, discoloration, and old band logos. Paired with new music written for the possibilities and limitations of this machine and a mesmerizing play of light, SUPERDRUM is described as sounding like Steve Reich interrupted by a swarm of bees. During this artist-in-residence viewing, visitors are welcome to walk through the Hunter Center during museum hours to experience the installation up close. Performance activations will be announced in December.
SUPERDRUM USA is co-commissioned by PS21 Center for Contemporary Performance and MASS MoCA.
Tickets: Free with museum admission
Piano QUI-Poem: Cecilia Vicuña and Ricardo Gallo | Saturday, February 20, 2027, 5:30pm
Poetry, piano, flutes, and synthesizer come together in a performance that will never happen the same way twice. Presented as part of Spatial Poems, this edition of QUI-Poem, which Vicuña and Gallo have performed together since 2016, responds in verse and sound to the room, the moment, and the artworks on view, in Spanish and English. A reception in the Research & Development Store follows, with signed copies of the duo's new album available for purchase. In the Hunter Center.
Tickets: $15; members receive 10% discount
Handle with Care: A Theater Performance in a Box | Friday and Saturday, February 26 & 27, 2027, 7pm
Belgian theater company Ontroerend Goed puts you in control of a performance that arrives in a box: no actors, no technicians. An audience member opens the box, and together the group shapes one fleeting, unrepeatable hour of reflection on time, transience, and togetherness. There are no wrong choices. In Club B10; intended for ages 14+.
Tickets: $29 General Admission, $20 Student
Vijay Iyer Quartet | Saturday, March 6, 2027, 8pm
Trailblazing pianist-composer Vijay Iyer leads an electrifying quartet featuring trumpeter Jason Palmer, bassist Linda May Han Oh, and drummer Jeremy Dutton. Combining acoustic instruments with Fender Rhodes and electronics, the quartet creates music that is fearless, unpredictable, and constantly unfolding. Iyer is a MacArthur Fellow and a three-time Grammy nominee.
Tickets: $20 Student, $39 Advance, $49 Week of, $69 Preferred
Claud: Me and the Live Music | Saturday, March 20, 2027, 8pm
Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter-producer Claud brings a night of playful, honest music to Club B10, proving not everything has to feel so heavy. Claud is a founding member of Shelly, the band they started with Clairo, Noa Getzug, and Josh Mehling, and has collaborated extensively with producer John Congleton and songwriter Dan Nigro.
Tickets: $32 Advance
Kafka's Monkey | Friday and Saturday, March 26 & 27, 2027, 7pm
Based on Franz Kafka's A Report to an Academy, this one-woman performance starring Isabel Shaida follows a protagonist who asserts she has evolved from ape to man in five short years in order to escape imprisonment. Set in 1917, yet speaking to current questions of body autonomy, it asks what we give up to survive and what freedom truly means. Directed by Naomi Shafer, with choreography by Alexandra Bodnarchuk and a script by playwright Colin Teevan. In Club B10.
Tickets: $20 Student, $29 Advance, $39 Week of
Small Isles | Saturday, April 10, 2027, 8pm
Guitarist Jim Fairchild founded Small Isles to create scores for films that exist only in his imagination. Joined by Mikael Jorgensen, Scott Hirsch, and Jeremy Turner, the band makes music for drifting, listening, remembering, and imagining, creating the conditions for a story to appear. In Club B10.
Tickets: $20 Student, $29 Advance, $39 Week of, $49 Preferred
Double Bill: Bill Frisell & Bill Morrison | Saturday, April 17, 2027, 7pm
For over thirty years, Bill Frisell's music and Bill Morrison's films have fed off each other. Now the longtime friends settle into a MASS MoCA residency to create a brand-new program for Frisell's string ensemble: Frisell, guitar; Jenny Scheinman, violin; Eyvind Kang, viola; and Hank Roberts, cello. Their collaborations include The Film of Her, The Mesmerist, The Great Flood, and Electricity. In the Hunter Center.
Tickets: $20 Student, $39 Advance, $49 Week of, $69 Preferred
Rude Mechs: Not Every Mountain | Friday and Saturday, April 30 & May 1, 2027, 7pm
A work-in-progress performance using string, cardboard, and magnets, Austin-based Rude Mechs invite us to watch the collective effort of making and unmaking a series of interlocking mountain ranges. Minutes, or perhaps centuries, unfold as mountains rise and fall, clouds dance, and a moon delicately hangs overhead in a joyous and poignant meditation on the fleetingness of time. Sightlines Magazine says it "mesmerizes — and summons joy." In the Hunter Center.
Tickets: $20 Student, $29 Advance, $39 Week of
Eszter Balint: I Hate Memory! | Saturday, May 8, 2027, 7pm
A work-in-progress performance. An anti-musical that co-stars the streets of New York and the late twentieth century, I Hate Memory! is Eszter Balint's reluctant memoir served on beds of song and dirt, with a punk aperitif and Jimmy Carter for dessert. Combining stories, scenes, and immersive projections, with Balint's band and music holding the center, the piece explores immigration, oppression and freedom, chaos and community, and the nature of memory. In Club B10.
Tickets: $20 Student, $29 Advance, $39 Week of, $59 Preferred
Billy Childs: Kindred | Saturday, May 22, 2027, 7pm
Grammy Award-winning composer and jazz pianist Billy Childs, with writer and librettist Sarah LaBrie, adapts Octavia Butler's best-selling novel Kindred into an opera. Dana time-travels between 1970s Los Angeles and the pre-Civil War South, where she meets her ancestors, and each visit to the past grows longer and more complicated. The score is rooted in the historical traditions of opera while representing Black American music. In the Hunter Center; commissioned by Apollo New Works In Process Series.
Tickets: $20 Student, $29 Advance, $39 Week of, $59 Preferred
COMMUNITY CONNECTIONS AND PUBLIC PROGRAMS
Community Free Day | Saturday, January 30, and Saturday, March 27, 2027, 10am–5pm
Free for all who walk through our doors, MASS MoCA's biannual community celebration is an invitation to explore every corner of the museum's campus. A full list of each day's events will be announced in December and February, respectively. MountainOne is the lead community sponsor.
Free and open to all
Artist Workshop: Fresco Building with Daniela Rivera | Thursday, February 11, 2027, 5:30pm
Join the artist of Hacia Cuando (To When), Daniela Rivera, for a process-oriented workshop on fresco-making in Kidspace. Each participant receives materials and instructions to create an individual, small-scale fresco on a wood panel, studying traditional techniques and exploring contemporary adaptations of this ancient process. All levels are welcome.
Tickets: $50 General Admission, $40 Student; members receive 10% discount (does not include museum admission)
Open Studios at MASS MoCA | Thursday, February 25, 2027, 5pm
Get to know the current artists-in-residence at The Studios at MASS MoCA over snacks and conversation. The event takes place in Building 13 and Building 34.
Free and open to all
SAVE THE DATE: On Wonder: A Public Exploration of Uncommon Creativity | April 2–4, 2027
This three-day exploration of creativity as a public good brings together past and current MacArthur Fellows working across the arts, sciences, technology, literature, public policy, economics, mathematics, and the humanities. Through thoughtfully curated public conversations, performances, presentations, shared meals, and informal exchange, Fellows explore the motivations, methods, and challenges behind their work while discovering unexpected connections across disciplines. By giving audiences access to some of today's most rigorous and imaginative thinkers, and giving Fellows the opportunity to inspire one another, the program generates connection, curiosity, and public optimism. Tickets go on sale in January 2027, and a full schedule of presenters will be announced soon. Supported in part by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Slow Art Day | Saturday, April 3, 2027, 10am–5pm
Celebrate International Slow Art Day and connect more deeply to what you see in MASS MoCA's galleries. Enjoy a slow-looking tour at noon or 2pm, a chilled-out way for visitors of all ages to spend real time with the art.
Free with museum admission
Gallery Activation: The Gardener of Memory | Sundays beginning April 11, 2027, 1pm
In The Gardener of Memory, Ernesto Pujol steps away from the archive and into the soil. He does not preserve memory; he keeps vigil with it. Across seven performances, he writes "seed memories" on a blackboard in English and Spanish, languages shaped by Puerto Rico's histories of migration and dispersal, accumulating and releasing them through acts of inscription, drawing, and erasure. Writing becomes planting; erasing becomes pruning. Part of Until we get to the core / Hasta llegar al meollo, the performances take place in the gallery at 1pm on April 11, May 16, July 18, August 22, September 19, October 17, and November 21.
Free with museum admission
Artist Workshop: The Gardener of Memory | Mondays beginning April 12, 2027, 2pm
Ernesto Pujol leads a series of guided mindful conversations at the North Adams Public Library that invite participants to reflect on memory as a living landscape: something cultivated, tended, neglected, transformed, and shared. Sessions take place at 2pm on April 12, May 17, July 19, August 23, September 20, October 18, and November 22.
Free with RSVP; registration is required
15th Annual Teen Invitational Opening Reception | Thursday, April 15, 2027, 6pm
The 15th Annual Teen Invitational, a week-long exhibition featuring over 400 works of visual art by students and teachers from high schools across the northern Berkshires, opens with a free reception from 6 to 8pm. The exhibition is on view through Sunday, April 25.
Free with RSVP; registration is required
FOR KIDS AND FAMILIES
School Break Kidspace Workshops | December 28, 2026–January 1, 2027; February 15–19, 2027; April 19–23, 2027
MASS MoCA Museum Educators lead a series of free workshops for all ages during each school break. Held in Kidspace, each workshop focuses on a different art medium and process, and participants leave with a project to take home. The ArtBar is also open for drop-in art-making throughout the day. Workshops take place at 11am and 1pm in December and February, and at 11am in April. Workshop details and RSVP links will be available in November, January, and March, respectively. RSVP is encouraged but not required; some workshops may be capped, and RSVPs will be honored before walk-ups. All children must be accompanied by an adult in Kidspace.
Free; $5 suggested donation
Family Storytime | Saturdays: January 16, January 30, February 20, March 20, March 27, April 17, and May 15, 2027, 10:30am
Families with children up to 6 years old join MASS MoCA Museum Educators in Kidspace for a storytime and related exploration in the galleries. Each storytime features a different children's book about contemporary art, creativity, and/or the themes of the exhibitions on display, followed by a brief gallery walk-through and discussion of the art. January 30 and March 27 are Community Free Days. Caregivers should stay with their children at all times, and older siblings are welcome.
Free; $5 suggested donation
BOOK TALKS
Taylor Mac and Matt Ray: On the Queer Songbook | Thursday, January 21, 2027, 6pm
Renegade theater artists Taylor Mac, Matt Ray, and Machine Dazzle's four-hour rock opera, Bark of Millions, is an electrifying collision of performance, live music, and drag spectacle celebrating queerness. That same spirit enlivens Mac and Ray's new book, Bark of Millions: Queer Songs for the Living Library of the Deviant Theme, written for theater obsessives, musicians, and performers to expand the repertoire of songs celebrating queer lives. Two fully illustrated hardcover books, one of lyrics and essays and one of lead sheets for 50 of the show's songs, document a canon of music celebrating this inherently queer and joyful world. Mac and Ray discuss their genre-defining work in Club B10.
General Admission: $10; Free Admission w/ Book Purchase: $60
Graphic Novel Book Club: Ex Utero with Charles Forsman | Saturday, February 20, 2027, 5pm
Blankets meets Pet Sematary in the long-awaited comeback from the author of The End of the Fxxxing World and I Am Not Okay With This, a crossover horror story set in the early '90s in which a desperate suburban teen brings his mother back from the dead. Forsman joins writer and educator Timothy Callahan in the Research & Development Store to discuss the book, the latest selection of the museum's quarterly Graphic Novel Book Club.
General Admission: $5; Free Admission w/ Book Purchase: $29.95
In Conversation: Jeffrey Gibson, Denise Markonish & Evan Garza | Saturday, March 13, 2027, 5pm
Artist Jeffrey Gibson celebrates the publication of the monograph Jeffrey Gibson: POWER FULL BECAUSE WE'RE DIFFERENT, a companion to his MASS MoCA-commissioned installation of the same name that takes root in a 1988 Leigh Bowery performance and the 1990 reintroduction of the term Two-Spirit. Gibson, the first Indigenous artist to represent the United States in a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale, joins Denise Markonish and Evan Garza in Club B10. A reception and book signing follow in the Research & Development Store.
General Admission: $10; Free Admission w/ Book Purchase: $45
MEMBER PERKS
Not yet a member? Join today to attend these events and enjoy free museum admission, ticketing discounts, invitations, and more year-round. MASS MoCA members are also invited to the opening celebrations listed above.
Curator Tour: Machine Dazzle: Changes | Saturday, February 13, 2027, 10am
MASS MoCA members are invited to join curator Susan Cross for a members-only tour of Machine Dazzle: Changes: The Costume Design for Taylor Mac's A 24-Decade History of Popular Music. Space is limited, and RSVP is required.
Free for members with registration
Curator Tour: Until we get to the core / Hasta llegar al meollo | Saturday, April 17, 2027, 10am
MASS MoCA members are invited to join curator Evan Garza for a members-only tour of the exhibition, where soil, peat, and singing drums act not as symbols but as teachers. Space is limited, and RSVP is required: register by logging into your account, emailing members@massmoca.org, or calling the Box Office.
Free for members with registration
Member Appreciation Month | March 2027
Become a MASS MoCA member in March and enjoy more than a year of free exhibition access, ticket discounts, and more. Members who renew in March receive 14 months of membership for the price of 12, double the discount (20% off) when shopping online at the MASS MoCA Gift Shop and Research & Development Store, discounts at The Porches Inn and Guido's Fresh Marketplace, and a chance to win a weekly member giveaway.