A blog from our awesome Membership Manager Rebecca:

Entering the double digits means you are officially an Adult—or at least it did to me when I turned 10. In fact I have never felt as old or as mature as I did that year, and I celebrated in style, with a “fancyâ€� birthday party. I sent my 10 closest friends invitations on scrolls—paper rolled up in recycled paper towel tubes and sent through the mail—and donned my favorite outfit, a turquoise dress that was several sizes too big for me, my Dorothy-inspired ruby red Read the rest of this entry »

An update on the Stearns Elementary 5th Grade Sol LeWitt Project from current Education Coordinator Alison:

I visited Stearns Elementary School last week to see what Mrs. Griffin and Mrs. Hollister’s fifth graders were churning out in response to their visit to MASS MoCA.  When I arrived, the filming that began in the MASS MoCA parking lot and continued in the galleries was still rolling. I was further impressed to see the professional, yet cool calm these young people showed while on film.

They were about to fully execute polygon wall drawings inspired by LeWitt, developed by their teachers, on their school’s hallway with permission from their school board (of course). On the first day back in the classroom, each student was given a set of directions, provided by Mrs. Griffin, not unlike the ones left behind by Sol LeWitt.

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Letters of support to legislators for our two shovel ready projects would be invaluable in helping secure this funding for North Adams and the Berkshires.

MASS MoCA’s projects under consideration are:

1.  Solar Center:  Expanding on our successful existing array of solar panels we have proposed increasing our capacity to turn the sun into electricity tenfold and creating a public showcase and educational training facility for large scale solar energy technologies.  Download a PDF to learn more.

2. Berkshire Art & Archive Center, a 30,000 sf, climate-controlled, high-security archive, art storage and digitalization facility that would be built on the existing 8,500-square-foot concrete foundation of the former Building 15, which was torn down in 2004.  The Center would not only provide storage and archive space for the museum, but also lease space to cultural institutions and collectors. More details.

You can help make this a reality by calling, writing, or emailing your legislators listed here

State & Federal Officials

The Honorable Deval Patrick
Executive Office
State House
Boston, MA 02133

The Honorable Timothy P. Murray
Lieutenant Governor
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We are delighted to host the first BeCreative Bar Camp with the good folks at Berkshire Creative on Friday, May 1 starting at 5:30 PM.

While there will be a cash bar available, the event is focused on creativity not drinking or gymnastics.

The name “BarCamp� is a playful allusion to the event’s origins, with reference to the hacker slang term, foobar which is a common placeholder name for something with an unknown value: BarCamp arose as a spin-off of Foo Camp, an annual invitation-only participant driven conference hosted by open source publishing luminary Tim O’Reilly.

Stay after Bar Camp for the Cuban Dance party in the Hunter Center. Tickets just $13.50 for Bar Camp participants.

Current Marketing Intern (and soon to be Education Coordinator) Cortney wrote the following blog about a special group she gave a tour to earlier this week:

On Monday we had a different kind of student tour in the Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing Retrospective.  Two fifth grade homeroom classes from Pittsfield’s Stearns Elementary School came for a tour of the galleries, and they brought a video camera with them!  The classes have been studying the mathematical properties of the LeWitt Wall Drawings, and later this week they will be putting up their own drawings inspired by LeWitt; right onto their school’s walls! The whole process—the tour and the execution of their drawings—is being videotaped for Pittsfield Public Access Television.

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