MASS MoCA director Joe Thompson offers this account of weekend festivities for the members of the Bang on a Can Summer Festival and the artists working on the LeWitt installation:

Our annual Bang on a Can picnic conjoined this year with the LeWitt crew…and the prediction of rain, alas…so we moved it to the Elks Lodge in North Adams, which is quite a venue. The decorative highlight are four mounted elk heads, each sporting 18 or 20 points on the antlers, to say nothing of the light bulbs. Under each head is one of the attributes of the ideal Elk Club member: Charity, Brotherly Love, Justice (and a bonus to whomever can remember the fourth). These are written out in blue neon, below each head. Yale University Art Gallery’s Jock Reynolds joked that he wished he had a set of those above his desk, on hidden switches. When a donor is in the room, click Charity. Some staff complaining about another colleague…time to light up Brotherly Love.

There’s nothing like being outside in the Berkshires on a nice night, but we gamed through the rain call. The LeWitters beat the BoaCan-ers to the Karaoke box, with a surreal rendition of Your Cheatin’ Heart accompanied by a squawking sax. But David Lang and Evan Ziporyn redeemed BoaC with some Bowie…Suffragette City, I think it was, in a sort of late-punk/Berlin cabaret rendition. It’s a good thing Pulitzer Prizes can’t be rescinded, or Lang’s might have been put in jeopardy by that.

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