My wife and I went to North Adams, Massachusetts yesterday, and today we went to the Museum of Contemporary Art within that somewhat fair city. The museum is in an old factory building, and they’ve made good use of the space, as it allows for some fairly large installations. Most of the rooms are cavernous. Happily, so long as you don’t use a flash, picture taking is allowed, and there was ample light, albeit from sometimes harshly glaring fluorescents.
One of the exhibits, by Sanford Biggers, is called The Cartographer’s Conundrum. Precisely what that means, given the exhibit, is unclear to me, but who knows, maybe if we’d taken the tour all would have been made clear. The exhibit is in a huge room, which you enter from the rear. The whole room is depicted below. The foreground is littered with musical instruments surrounded by shards of broken mirrors.
The far end contains what looks like a strange church. There are pews ascending into the sky, and, where the altar should be, an elevated organ with organ pipes around it seeming to shoot off to the sides.
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I just take pictures, I don’t explain ’em. Inexplicable but interesting.
More to our tastes was the exhibition of wall drawings by Sol LeWitt. These consist of giant works mounted on walls. The space was perfect for exhibiting them, and although they were as incomprehensible in one way as the Conundrum, they were more appealing. Looking at them was just a total pleasure. Here are several, picked more or less at random.
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This one can’t be captured adequately. When you view it the lines in the figures appear to move.
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North Adams is trying to reinvent itself, and the Arts are a large part of that reinvention. The downtown area is crammed with galleries, and there is an artists collective of sorts in another old factory building. Well worth a trip if you are anywhere close to the area. You’ll have to hurry if you want to catch the LeWitt exhibition, as it will only be there until 2033.
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