Mass MOCA

The 16th annual Williamstown Film Festival was launched with a hilarious contest last night and runs through this sindey afternoon. The festival is special for both its local, grass roots feeling as well as a lively mix of Indy and big time Hollywood productions and stars.

Only 350 days until Fresh Grass 2015. For this year's festival every nook and cranny at the museum was filled with true to the bone bluegrass musicians playing what they are best at, their unique, yet, traditional version of bluegrass music mixed with Celtic, Cajun and whatever style of music that achieved their goal.

Through October 13 the new special exhition galleries of the Clark Art Instiute feature Make It New: Abstract Painting from the National Gallery of Art 1950-1975. This is part two of a dialogue with Clark curator David Breslin who worked with Harry Cooper of the National Gallery. We discussed how this changes art history and the impact of the exhibition on showing modern art in the Berkshires.

Completing a $145 million renovation and expansion the Clark Art Institute repoened this summer. The occasion was launched with a stunning range of special exhibitions. During a recent opening of Magna Carta we asked the museum's fast moving director, Michael Conforti, for an overview of the season and when we might expect to see Treasures from the Prado?

See Bela Fleck and Emmylou Harris at the Fresh Grass Festival on September 19-21st at Mass MoCA. The line-up for the festival features The Duhks on opening night at 10:30pm. Gates open at 5:30pm with Michael Daves & Tony Trischka opening the show at 7pm, followed by Aoife O’Donovan at 8pm. Featured guests, the Carolina Chocolate Drops follow at 9:05pm, followed by The Duhks, a Canadian band whose music ranges from their northern roots to southern gospel and cajun zydeco.

Twelve days after breaking news the New York Times has reported on $25.4 million in Commonwealth funding for the $50 million renovation of the final phase of build out for Mass MoCA. While damning the museum with faint praise the Times drags up an eight year old controversy of a botched installation by Christoph Buchel. The reporter probed far and wide for on and off the record smears of the museum and its critical reputation.

With Governor Deval Patrick's signing of H.3933, an omnibus capital infrastructure bill which included $25,420,000 for MASS MoCA's Phase III development, the museum announces that it has begun work on the third phase of its multi-decade effort to renovate its 26-building, 600,000 square foot, 16-acre factory campus, an internationally recognized, mixed-use destination arts institution in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. A representative from the Governor's press office confirmed the news, saying, "Governor Patrick is very, very supportive of the project and is excited to work with MASS MoCA to finance the expansion."

In 2003-2004 Ann Hamilton installed a paper based work Corpus in the vast building five of Mass MoCA. It was a relatvely early project in the space. This article is reposted from Maverick Arts Magazine.

With just four rehearsal sessions in less than a week installatin artist, Ann Hamilton, returned to Mass MoCA to create a piece for some thirty individuals "Paper Sounding" as a part of the annual Bang on a Can festival. The spontaneous and lively work was co directed by Mark Stewart and David Cossin. The performance was our introducton to an area of the vast Building Six which the museum hopes soon to develop. We spoke with Hamilton about the significance of paper in her practice.

The artist Jim Hodges came to New York in the 1980s at a time when AIDS was decimating the arts community. Like others of his generation his work responded to a sense of devastation and loss. A retrospecitve of his eclectic conceptual work is on view at Boston's ICA until September 1.

From 1974 to 1994 the German/ American artist Otto Piene was the director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT. With a farm in Groton he continued to commute to his studio in Dusseldorf. He died this week, at 85, while working on a major museum exhibition and sky art event in Berlin. While celebrated internationally, there will be an exhibition of Group ZERO this seaon at the Guggenheim, he was snubbed by the Boston art world and media.

As a part of its expansion and renovation, taking advantage of appropriately scaled new special exhibition space, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Insitute is progressing beyond its tradition roots by showcasing modern and contemporary art. Currently there is Raw Color: The Circles of David Smith. In August the museum will feature Make It New master works of American modernism from the National Gallery.

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Since it opened in 1955 with a superb permanent collection the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute has long been regarded among America's finest regional museums. With a $145 expansion and renovation designed by Tadao Ando the Clark is now a whole lot more fabulous. Combined with nearby Mass MoCA, Williams College, and the Wlliamstown Theatre Festival the Northern Berkshires are an even better first class arts desitinaton.

On a sultry summer evening Beck charmed some 5,000 fans crammed into Joe Thompson Field on the campus of Mass MoCA. While Wilco's Solid Sound weekend festival is taking a break this season, on a Tuesday night in June, Beck put up Wilco numbers. It strongly indicates that MoCA is in the rock concert business as a viable alternative to Tanglewood with far more imaginative programming.

Una Giornata Particolare was a 1977 Italian movie which earned two Academy Award nominations. It has been adapted for the stage as Working on a Special Day in a performance acted and directed by the Mexican couple of Ana Graham and Antonio Vega. The charming and absorbing one act play inventively explores the boundaries between illusion and theatrical reality.

The Austrian artist Franz West (16 February 1947- 25 July 2012). is being featured this summer in the Northern Berkshires. There is a display of several large scale, puffy, pink phallic sculptures at Mass MoCA and a tandem exhibition of works on paper and smaller scale sculptures at Williams College Museum of Art. The artist was widely included in global biennials and museum exhibitions including a retrospective at the Baltimore Museum of Art. We consider West in the milieu of post war artists in Vienna including its outrageous Actionists.

After extensive renovation and expansion the Clark Art Institute reopens this summer. Much is being made of how its Tadeo Ando designed low lying horizontal line and large reflecting pool embrace nature and the background rolling mountain range. The paradigm for architecture set into natural surroundings, however, is the Moshe Safdie design for Crystal Bridges in Bentonville, Arkansas. It is nestled into a ravine with a series of pontoon "bridges." The museum which opened on 11/11/11 has some 500,000 annual visitors for its controversial collection of American art.

Nashville is rightly known as The Music City. Since 2001, with the opening of the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in a former art deco post office the city is also a regional destination for world class art exhibitions. Meeting with museum staff we discussed how a non collecting institution, a kunsthalle, manages to leverage major loans and traveling exhibitions. Primarily this is done by original scholarly work and publications as well as building relationships with partnering museums.

Visitors passing along Route 2 and the Mohawk Trail on their way to Mass MoCA and nearby Clark Art Institute and Williams College Museum of Art can pause and refresh with a taste of locally created work in the 7th Annual Berkshire Salon. (May 9 to June 1)

Natchez, Mississippi, per capita, was one of America's wealthiest communities prior to the Civil War. Plantation owners competed in erecting magnificent mansions in the neo classical, Greek Revival style. In commissioning Philadelphia architect Samuel Sloan's grand octagonal design Dr. Haller Nutt's Longwood strove to be unique. When war broke out in 1861 construction was abruptly halted. For generations the family occupied the first floor of the unfinished home. It is the astonishing highlight of a tour of mansions and encounter with their grim legacy of slavery.

This summer, The Mount is pleased to announce a full schedule of lectures, readings, performances, music and more. The Mount will be open daily starting May 3rd through October 31st.

Amid his residency developing The Russian Doctor, director and choreographer Andrew Dawson presents an otherworldly family affair on Saturday, May 3, at 11:30am, in MASS MoCA's Club B-10. Space Panorama is a hypnotic solo recreation of the Apollo 11 moon landing - using only Dawson's hands!

After three years with eleven museums on three continents the treasures of the Clark Art Institute are back home safe and sound. They will be seen this summer when the museum reopens after extensive renovation and expansion on July 4. This grand tour of major museums will reap benefits as the Clark requests loans for major exhibitions. Other major museums, however, including the Museum of Fine Arts and the Guggenheim, have loaned works to their satellites and commercial exhibition promoters for cold cash.

This week representatives of the Clark Art Institute, Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown Theatre Festival and Mass MoCA met with the media to promote plans for a spectacular Northern Berkshires season. The Clark reopens following extensive expansion and renovation. Mass MoCA offers the first full season of its Anselm Kiefer building. Jenny Gersten has planned a blockbuster program for WTF. WCMA plans special events like a Think and Drink series. In high season it may be hard to book a hotel or dine at the best restaurants.