Museum director Joe Thompson blogs about the latest goings-on at MASS MoCA.

I love mud season because it kicks off MASS MoCA’s most intense season of making art. It’s our sugaring season. Our performing arts stages are booked solid with residencies, and the galleries are abuzz with visiting artists.

I caught Gisele Amantea in the act of converting our Hunter foyer into what may end up feeling a little bit like a Canadian bordello (which is to say polite, and rather chic), riffing wildly on a Louis Sullivan decorative motif from the tomb of the wife of one of the architect’s greatest Chicago patrons, Ellis Wainwright.

But Gisele (seen here in the middle, with black shirt) is also riffing on the “MASSâ€� in MASS MoCA — her finger poking gently in our ribs for our penchant for large-scale work — by elaborating the delicate fleur-de-lis designs into man-eating dimension: every part of the design that is now white will soon be flocked into light-sucking blackness, and extended for the full 90’ length of the space.

This is the powerful first contribution by a Canadian artist to our upcoming Oh, Canada show, opening this Memorial Day.

On a more precipitous timeline is Making Room, the Space Between Two and Three Dimensions, which just opened Saturday.

Claire Harvey was in town this past week for Making Room, doing an extraordinary series of tiny paintings on small pieces of glass and acetate, which are then projected on the walls and other provisional surfaces using old-fashioned overhead projectors, like your teacher used to do in fifth grade.  It’s startling how much modeling and complex space she can generate in renderings that in some cases are only ¾� high, but which gain extraordinary presence when projected and enlarged to a height of 5’ tall.

Continuing the theme of utilizing obsolete techniques with new media technology and inventive presentation,  Chloë Østmo was also in North Adams this past week, fastidiously suspending over 200 photographs on a grid of cotton thread. The amazing effect is that of a single image. Here is a shot showing Chloë’s process midway through installation.

This is going to be a sleeper of an exhibition, full of engaging art, rich narratives, and interesting cross-references: a true show. It is superbly selected by Caitlin Condell and Ali Nemerov, both now students in the Williams College-Clark Art Graduate Program in the History of Art, and MASS MoCA graduate interns. The eleventh in our series of exhibitions organized by up-and-coming curators, and realized with the support of the Clark (and, in this case, the helpful guidance of MASS MoCA curator Susan Cross), the exhibition is a fascinating bookend to the previous iteration of this series, Memery, which celebrated the internet’s capacity to propel strange bits of otherwise forgettable popular culture deep into our collective memories through sheer repetition and the power of web-buzz.  Making Room, on the other hand, focuses on work that celebrates and rewards careful looking through creation of complex visual spaces and thoughtful forms that feel, at times with a wisp of nostalgia, like an antidote to online frenzy.

Curator Denise Markonish blogs about her recent trip to Ohio.

Who knew there were so many connections between Columbus, OH, Portland, ME and North Adams, MA? This was proven to me last week when I went to Columbus on the invitation of the graduate painting department at Ohio State University. All roads in this weird atlas lead to Sean Foley… visitors to MASS MoCA may remember Sean’s installation Ruse that was up in our Hunter Hallway for the last year (sadly just taken down). Sean and I go way back… we met in 2001 when he was teaching at the Maine College of Art. He has since moved to Ohio and lured a good number of Mainers out there with him (including Patrick O’Rorke and Sage Lewis who were both Sean’s students in Maine and now are at OSU). Other than Sean’s connection to me and MASS MoCA, I also got to see Katie Bullock who assisted Sean on his installation and Ann Hamilton, who lives in Columbus, teaches at OSU and exhibited here at MASS MoCA in 2004. And last but not least, for those of you who remember The Bureau for Open Culture who resided at MASS MoCA last summer, well they started in Columbus as well!

I arrived in Columbus on February 8^th, and was almost immediately taken to Jeni’s Ice Cream, a Columbus institution with flavors like salty caramel, wild berry lavender and lime cardamom! I then got to hang out with Sean and his wife Cindy (who is the head of education at the Columbus Museum of Art) and their two awesome kids Emmett and Adie.

On Thursday I started the day doing a studio visit with artist MJ Bole. MJ has done many hilarious installations on sanitation systems and toilet history, and is currently working on a project for Columbus’s bicentennial celebration. MJ is looking at depictions of Christopher Columbus used to market the city over the years as well as delving into the history of the city as a test market for products (see more about his history here). After some studio visits with the graduate students in painting, MJ took Sean, Katie, Emmett and me to the State of Ohio Asylum for the Insane Cemetery, an off-the-beaten-path cemetery from the late 1800s in which prisoners are buried (they also carved the grave stones).

Friday was filled with studio visits – the students (in painting but also glass, sculpture and photography) are addressing ideas of perception, wonder and materiality. At a break before lunch I visited the Columbus Museum of Art and there I got to see Sean’s installation for the “Wonder Room,� part of the Museum’s new education center.

After lunch I headed over to the Wexner Center for the Arts, where I would give a lecture that afternoon. Check out this great lecture poster that Sage Lewis made for the event:

I visited the Tony Smith exhibition and was please to see Michael Snow’s video Solar Breath (Northern Caryatids) in their video room. This same piece will be in the upcoming Oh, Canada exhibition opening at MASS MoCA in May of 2012. After my talk it was off to dinner at Ann Hamilton and Michael Mercil’s studio, a potluck prepared by the graduate students. It was an elegant evening full of good food and great conversation!

My last day in Columbus began with breakfast with Wexner curator Bill Horrigan, and from there Katie and I went to the Museum of Biological Diversity’s open house. There we got to see all sorts of species native to Ohio and even got to hold some bugs.

This field trip tugged at the natural history nerd inside of me.

And finally before heading to the airport I did a studio visit with painter Laura Lisbon. We had a great conversation of about invisibility and the painterly tableau and then visited two shows, Bending the Mirror and Home, at the Columbus College of Art and Design. A perfect end to a trip filled with art, science, history, good food, terrific conversations and great friends.

Emily, our superstar performing arts intern, and Tim, whose 100-watt smile you see at Hardware everyday, talk about how they teamed up to bring a day full of dance to FREE Day, which took place on February 11, 2012.

REHEARSAL

We spent a few days during the weeks leading up to FREE Day using the rehearsal hall space, listening to 80s music and coming up with an arsenal of funky dance moves to put together in a sequence that would be both visually appealing and easy to pick up. We had a lot of fun goofing around in the studio and perfecting classic dance steps like the cabbage patch, the running man, and the Molly Ringwald. Check out our rehearsal video here.

DANCE CLASS

On FREE Day, we taught lots of different people—toddlers, college students, grandmas, ballerinas, and football players alike—the dance we created. We taught about 20 people in each of our classes throughout the day. We danced Michael Jackson’s P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing), because it was upbeat, light-hearted, and makes you want to move! We also asked the people who took our dance class to dance with us later in the afternoon, as part of a surprise flash mob in the galleries. Check out our dance class video here.

FLASH MOB

Our dancers milled about through The Workers: Precarity, Invisibility, Mobility exhibit, blending in with unsuspecting, art-viewing patrons. Suddenly, Michael Jackson music started playing through the galleries, and spontaneous dancing broke out! We definitely surprised a bunch of patrons who got caught in the middle of the flash mob. There was a lot of talent, but the best movers were by far were the 2 little nuggets (they must have only been 3 or 4 years old) decked out in pastels and mermaid gear from Kidspace who got their groove on right in the middle of the flash mob! Check out our flash mob video here.

PRE-SHOW DANCE INSTRUCTION                          

To end the night, we taught a dance class on the Hunter Center stage, immediately before Gordon Voidwell and his band played some rockin’ music for a psychedelic 80′s synth funk dance party. We wore headset microphones (affectionately called the Madonna mics in the performing arts department – check out the photo below, taken backstage!) to broadcast our voices to the crowd on the dance floor. Since we faced the crowd in the Hunter Center, dance instruction was trickier because we had to reverse all of our instructions so that the audience could mirror our movements.

It’s always exciting to see new art moving into the galleries here at MASS MoCA. The latest comes from Sanford Biggers, a New York-based artist whose exhibition “The Cartographer’s Conundrum” opened Saturday, February 4th in our football field-sized Building 5 gallery. This multidisciplinary new show takes inspiration from Sanford’s late cousin John Biggers, a Houston, TX based painter and muralist, as well as themes of Afrofuturism, which re-imagines the African diaspora through the lens of cosmology and technology. We had a chance to sit down and chat with Sanford about the new exhibit and his work in general.

Sanford Biggers, center, with Curator Denise Markonish and Director Joe Thompson at the opening on Saturday.

How would you define Afrofuturism for people who aren’t familiar with the concept?

I’m still trying to figure out the concept myself (laughs), but it’s been this ongoing dialogue for, I’d probably say the last 15 years, at least on a scholarly level. As an aesthetic dialogue I’d say it’s been going on 40 or 50 years. But one aspect of it is the notion of looking at the very complicated past of people in the African diaspora and understanding that in relation to where we are today—technologically, socially, culturally, economically, so on and so forth. When I say ‘we’ I mean the world. Everyone. And looking forward as well, sort of trying to figure out a way to re-investigate and re-claim the past through the use of science fiction. You know, if you think about Sun-Ra or Earth Wind and Fire or John Coltrane—a lot of their work was really dealing with very spritual and transcendent themes borrowed from science fiction and Eastern religions and African religions. And as they did that they sort of went through Western structures and a myriad of historical references to the U.S. to get to that place where we’re sort of looking past and looking beyond it. But also—this is a new thing I’m thinking—at least the way I’m using it, there’s almost a reference to comic books and comic book sci-fi, and the old album covers from P. Funk or Santana, and the kind of vision that was expressed in those album covers—High graphic, high illustration elements.

What’s it been like working at MASS MoCA? Has the size of the space influenced or changed your preconceived ideas for the exhibit?

Yeah, to answer the second question first, definitely. Coming here on a daily basis and having to deal with different issues of space or light or volume or presence—but I knew it was going to be a challenge like that. I mean, it’s not the kind of place where you can just bring something already made and plop in the middle and leave. You’ve got to work with the space and see what kinds of challenges arise.

Are you happy with how it’s turned out?

I am. The thing about it is, the way this is set up, different things happen during different weather conditions, so you’ll never see the same show twice. You know, the reflections, the shadows, the light, the pacing of all of that changes daily.

You said in an interview with Harvard that some of your ideas for your piece “Constellation (Stranger Fruit)” appeared to you in a dream. How much a part, if any, does your subconscious mind play in your work?

I don’t know, I think doing art is like its own form of therapy, so everybody’s got a little bit of their own personal stuff inside the work, even if it’s the most stark, minimal, conceptual work possible. Even that, somehow I think, has a unique relationship to that person. So I mean, the subconscious definitely steps into the work, but more so as visual cues. You know how you might have a song that you wake up with in the morning and it’s stuck in your head for a day or so? It’s a lot like that. I’ll have a dream that’s not really related to art at all, and I might turn a corner and see something, and that’s the one thing I remember when I wake up, or some version of it. But the more you think about it, the more it changes and morphs, but at least it’s a starting point.

Did any parts of this show come to you spontaneously?

The Plexiglas definitely, and I think the stage lights sort of happened because of doing performances, doing lectures, and having those lights looking back at you half the time.

Can you talk about your interest in sacred geometry and how that ties into what you do?

Yeah, I think I probably was first exposed to that subconsciously from the work of John Biggers, but more consciously when I went to college and we started to look at a lot of ideas that came from North African and Egyptian societies. And the notion of sacred geometry was really interesting to me—I remember hearing about how in certain cultures, it’s actually looked down upon to look at an image, a photographic image, or to try to depict a deity or god, or Allah. And the way you can actually sort of acknowledge that presence is through geometry and perfection of line and numbers. And the idea of the “Vitruvian Man”—of course that goes into Europe and is translated into all these different meanings over generations. So, that’s interesting to me, and also its implications in terms of the societies that upheld those  sacred geometries. This was something that [John] Biggers was  interested in, and he worked with a mathematician where he was teaching at Texas Southern University, and they both would just sit and have these long sessions about different things they’d learned about sacred geometry and how to apply that to his visual strategies.

Speaking of Leonardo’s “Vitruvian Man,” I read that you spent some time living in Florence, Italy. How long were you there and did that affect your aesthetic at all?

I was there for a year, studying. I lived there before I moved to Japan for three years. So, that was my first time living abroad and I studied Italian, photography, sculpture and painting while I was there.

Can you talk about your time in Japan a little bit?

Yeah, when I was living in Japan I became really interested in Buddhism. There was a temple a few blocks away from where I was living, and I would walk by it and then I gradually started to walk through it. First I was just intrigued by the sculptures and the statues, and then I got a little bit more into the ritual and learning more about where it came from, and then I started to go through different readings about Buddhism and so on. And seeing it in a living culture was also very influential. So some of the ideas definitely come into my work—that’s where the initial dance floor started from, because they were fashioned after mandalas. And I still apply a lot of those ideas: Wabi-sabi and the perfection of the imperfect, and using found objects because they have their inherent history, and their beauty is in their rusticity and used patina. So I mean in this installation, you can definitely see that with the pipe organs and different instruments.

How do you hope people will feel when they walk through this space?

I just hope they can take the time and see many different things unfold. There’s not one thing I want people to get from it. I actually would like them to have multiple discoveries.

By Cora Sugarman