North Adams — The folks at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) have announced their programs for the next few months and, as we have come to expect, it is a genuinely exciting package.
The enormous exhibition of site-specific pioneer Richard Nonas that opens February 13 is a major event. Nonas was trained as a social anthropologist, and although he uses a vocabulary of forms and materials similar to those of the minimalists Carl Andre and Richard Serra, he is fundamentally concerned with the emotional resonances that his works set up with the places in which they are shown and the people who occupy them. Obviously, the vast spaces of MASS MoCA, with their echoes of past industrial uses, are perfect for Nonas’s often equally vast installations, and as well as presenting a survey of his fifty-year career, this show features a major new site-specific installation.
At the opposite extreme of contemporary art making we find the spectacular work of Alex Da Corte. His first museum survey exhibition, Free Roses, opens March 26, and as MASS MoCA Curator of Visual Arts Susan Cross puts it, it will provide “a fantastic counterpoint” to the Nonas show. It is entirely in keeping with Da Corte’s contradiction-strewn work that while he often takes his inspiration from Rimbaud – and particularly his 1837 prose poem A Season in Hell – he finds his materials in the supermarket and his imagery at every level of contemporary culture. He has a particular fondness for the gaudy and Cross promises a show that will be “part strip-club, part suburban living room”.
Site-specific dimensions
Travesia Cuatro, Guadalajara, Mexico
Courtesy of the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York
The third one-person show of the upcoming season is Beetle in the Leaves, which opens April 16 and features the fascinating interdisciplinarian Sarah Crowner in her first U.S. museum solo show. Though Crowner’s work is overwhelmingly abstract it is anything but purist. She finds her sources in the history of abstraction itself, in both the fine and applied arts, and creates paintings by stitching together sections of raw and painted canvas. Clearly, they have as much to do with collage or quilting as with painting, and they sit at the heart of a body of work that includes ceramics, tile floors, sculptures, and theater curtains. For her show here Crowner will install a new large-scale painting made of terra cotta tiles repurposed from a floor piece that she made in Mexico. It is a tantalizing prospect.
Equally intriguing is the group exhibition that has been curated by Nina Wexelblatt, a second-year student in the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art, and which also opens April 16. The Space Between comprises seven installations of sound sculpture and site-specific work that invite us “pay attention differently,” as Wexelblatt puts it. It includes a piece that Amalia Pica makes by Scotch-taping confetti to the floor, and Agustine Woodgate’s Hopscotch, which extends out on to the sidewalks of downtown North Adams. That should cause a stir.
MASS MoCA has a vast array of performing arts events coming up as well – including what director Joseph Thompson calls “a ton of great music” – but for those whose principal interest lies in the visual arts, one particular event is of particular interest. Aging Magician is a work-in-progress that sits at the nexus of opera and performance art. It is a phantasmagorical collaboration between theater-maker Rinde Eckert, composer Paola Prestini, director Julian Crouch, and instrument-maker Mark Stewart. It has been produced by Beth Morrison and features the Brooklyn Youth Choir. It will be performed only once here on February 27, and it promises to be one of the unmissable events of 2016.
