North Adams — Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, or MASS MoCA as it is universally known, has put the once-blighted town of North Adams on the international art circuit. Come the summer of 2017, it will also be largest contemporary art museum in the world.
The man in charge of MASS MoCA is Joseph C. Thompson, who has not merely been the museum’s one and only director, he has been at the heart of the project since it was no more than a dream back in the mid-1980s. “They threw me the keys and said ‘good luck!’ ” he recalls with a wry smile.
Thompson was on the staff at Williams College Museum of Art when it became obvious that there were suddenly whole categories of contemporary art – mammoth-scale installations, performance art, work built on site or requiring structural alteration to the building – that it was impossible to stage in a formal museum setting. “We found ourselves having to say ‘no’ more than we would have liked to,” Thompson recalls, and when the Williams team began casting around for more appropriate spaces, the mayor of nearby North Adams drew their attention to the 26 mill buildings recently vacated by Sprague Electric. Sprague’s departure from North Adams was like the explosion of an “economic neutron bomb,” Thompson explains. At the peak of its operations it employed almost one quarter of the town’s population.
Thus began the MASS MoCA development. It has endured two major economic downturns and a whole series of shifts in political mood and cultural fashion. It was also the beginning of the regeneration of North Adams, which post-Sprague was described by one state official as looking like “a town built on the wrong side of a bowling alley.”
The current (Phase III) expansion is the most ambitious yet. It will add a further 90,000 square feet of exhibition space, taking the total to more than 250,000 square feet. Even more impressive are the arrangements put in place to fill all this acreage. MASS MoCA has never been a collecting institution. Unlike pretty much any other museum you have set foot in, it does not own any art. However, Thompson and his team have agreed a range of 15- to 25-year loans and collaborations that will see a cadre of recent and contemporary A-List artists engaged in ways that will be the envy of institutions the world over.
Celebrity performance artist and pop musician Laurie Anderson admits that “my jaw dropped” when Thompson explained the possibilities that the new MASS MoCA offered. She has responded with appropriately grand ambition and will establish her own radio station, plus production studios and what she calls a “living archive.”
The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation will cooperate with the museum on a series of exhibitions and long term installations and the great Louise Bourgeois will be represented by a series of monumental carved marble sculptures, several of which have never been seen in public before.
There are also plans afoot for liaisons with the pioneering language artist Jenny Holzer and the world-renowned new music consortium Bang on a Can, but perhaps most exciting of all will be the installation of nine of James Turrell’s spectacular and disorienting light environments. Turrell is not only one of the most celebrated of contemporary artists, he is also one of the most guarded in controlling the dissemination of his work. It is a genuine measure of MASS MoCA’s stature that it will house the world’s largest long-term installation of Turrell’s work, including one example from every stage of his career.
The financial foundation of this new expansion is the $25.4 million that the Commonwealth of Massachussets committed last year. It is supplemented by $35 million the museum has set itself the target of raising in its ongoing “Confluence Campaign.” The campaign is well on target and so far they have collected “a little more than $13.5 million,” Thompson told us.
How does an institution like MASS MoCA justify this sort of spending to people who are not won over by the artistic arguments? Thompson has the economic facts at his fingertips: since the museum opened
North Adams’ unemployment rate has gone from 7 times the State average to 1.2 times; store front occupancy has improved by 300 percent; and MASS MoCA’s contribution to Berkshires tourism is enormous. The new expansion will see an increase of something like $11 million in annual economic activity, and $1 million in tax revenues.
It is a remarkable success story, and one admired or coveted by museums all over the country. “I don’t know of any other contemporary museum that’s got the chutzpah, the space, and the go-for-broke attitude they’ve shown,” reflects Jock Reynolds, director of the Yale University Art Gallery. Joe Thompson puts it more modestly. “Yeah. There’s always something going on,” he says.
