This new product from an Australian designer just came across our desk.  Its called the Sky Planter and its by Patrick Morris. The website touts the Sky Planter’s ability to save water, floor space, and your plants, but we already knew the benefits of upside down plants here at MASS MoCA.  We’re checking our records to see if Mr. Morris has ever been a visitor….

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.

We’re proud to note that the exhibition catalogue for Spencer Finch: What Time Is It On The Sun? was recognized in PRINT Magazine’s Regional Design Annual 2008. If you don’t yet have a copy of the beautiful catalogue, designed by Tim Hossler, you can order one here or by emailing Hardware: The MASS MoCA Store.

There are just a few more days to save on merchandise at Hardware: The MASS MoCA Store.  Our new store manager Jodi Joseph has marked down many items by 40% including items for the young

and the young at heart Read the rest of this entry »

Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape surveys a contemporary approach the landscape, continuing a lineage from the Impressionists to Ansel Adams to the Earth Artists to today. For the exhibition’s catalogue (distributed by The MIT Press), curator Denise Markonish and I wanted to create a kind of field guide for the exhibition, a book that you could hold in your hand while walking through the show. You can purchase the book in Hardware: The MASS MoCA Store or on Amazon.

The catalogue is divided into four sections—The Historians, The Explorers, The Activists & The Pragmatists, and The Aestheticists—and features essays by Denise, Ginger Strand, Gregory Volk, and Tensie Whelan and a foreword from MASS MoCA Director Joseph Thompson.

But the best part is that Denise interviewed each artist for the catalogue. After the jump are a few personal favorites.

Read the rest of this entry »

Former MASS MoCA Design Director Tim Hossler has a great new project cooking at his new digs, the Wolfsonian in Miami Beach. For Thoughts on Democracy, Tim asked a host of amazing designers (Chip Kidd, James Victore, Winterhouse, Paula Scher, Wim Crouwel, to name a few) to riff on Norman Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms” posters, which were recently donated to the Wolfsonian by Leonard Lauder. (One of my favorites, from Crispin Porter + Bogusky, is above.)