John McAlister our Director of Information Technology reports:

On Friday we went live with a new Sol LeWitt wall drawing segment on our website (in “Beta” format meaning the permanent web presence will come at a later time). We want to share the progress and give a sneak peak into the process of making these magnificent drawings.

There are two ways to see the wall drawings on the website—in a grid layout or via a floor plan of Building 7 (where the wall drawings are being created). The grid offers you a matrix of thumbnails so you can go directly into the detail of the drawing. The floor plan breaks out the three floors of Building 7 so you can see their physical placement throughout the retrospective. Remember there are a total of approximately 27,000 square feet that house the wall drawings or 9,000 square feet per floor! Once into the detail page look for a time lapse video capturing the making of certain wall drawings. Spectacular! (Note: not all the drawings are being captured but a good sample is underway.) Of course to find out more about this great endeavor please visit the About page.

I’d like to personally thank Jack Turner and Adam Grossman for their brilliant technological wizardry in putting together the website and the capturing/editing of the time lapse videos. Check them out at http://jackadam.net/.

Kudos gentlemen!

Every year our curatorial interns offer a series of spotlight talks on Thursdays and Saturdays at 3 PM in August and this year is no exception. Emma Perry and Kendall Grady are starting the talks this week.

Thursday, August 7 and Thursday August 14 at 3 PM Emma discusses Joseph Beuys’s Lightning with Stag in its Glare (Blitzschlag mit Lichtschein auf Hirsch). Saturday, August 9 and Saturday, August 16, at 3 PM Kendall explores Jane D. Marsching’s series Arctic Listening Post specifically at MASS MoCA, Rising North and Future North: Ecotarium Module.

On Thursday August 21 and Thursday, August 28 at 3 PM, Emma will talk about Patty Chang’s Shangri-La. On Saturday, August 23 and Saturday, August 30 at 3 PM, Kendall will spotlight Lana Lin’s, No Power to Push Up the Sky.

If you’re curious about our interns here’s some biographical information they supplied:

Kendall Grady writes: “I grew up in suburban Chicago eating non-sugar cereals in a house with a red door. In May 2008 I graduated from DePauw University with B.A.s in English Writing and German and a minor in Studio Art, which have allowed me to fill four years with such immediately relevant enterprises as deconstructing the Michael Vick news narrative, attending Love Parade (fifteen years too late) while studying at Tübingen Universität, and editing videos to accompany poetry I read nude in a grocery cart full of eggs. In all seriousness, however, thanks to the likes of Johan Huizinga and, most recently, MASS MoCA’s Badlands exhibit, I believe art-making is the catalyst for a collective future that rethinks gulfs between leisure and work, creativity and utilitarianism.

At MASS MoCA I play researcher, docent, evaluator of submissions, mailer of international UPS packages, and caretaker of biospheres, among other fringe jobs incurred by the curatorial department. In the past I have interned with The Poetry Project in Manhattan and Cinders Gallery, BOMB magazine, Soft Skull Press, and sculptor Marc Swanson in Brooklyn. MASS MoCA contributes to my hopeful trajectory toward museum and gallery work and/or independent and small press publishing.

Works of art I enjoy are: Rabbit by Gelatin, Perfect Lovers by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Pan by James Bidgood, andfurness by Cat Tyc. I enjoy other things, such as olives, bikes, New Wave film, No Wave music, and Bucuresti.”

Emma Perry reports: “Eugene (see below) may have graduated from Kenyon College before me (I’ll be a senior in the fall), but I’m from New Hampshire, and that’s really all that matters. We have beautiful old mountains studded with quartz, and the best eleven miles of seacoast you’ll find on the Atlantic. The winters are cold, but in a lovely snow shoeing and sledding and hot chocolate kind of way… I promise. We have no sales tax. You can buy fireworks. Our state motto is ‘Live free or die.’

I’m one of the Visual Arts interns this summer and I’m really enjoying my time here. As an intern, I’m responsible for researching and writing short descriptions and contextual explanations for some of the wall drawings in the Sol LeWitt retrospective that’s due to open in November. I also lead gallery tours and water all of the living plants that are on display in Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape. I’m sure this will prepare me well for my hopeful future life as an Art History professor and a New Hampshire homeowner.

I’ve also found time to work on my senior thesis this summer. The library at the Clark Art Institute is excellent, and I’ve amassed quite a significant pile of books on Conceptual Art in Central and South America. So if you’re in the Berkshires, and you need a book on Francis Alÿs, Gabriel Orozco, Rivane Neuenschwander or Eugenio Dittborn, I’m sorry, I have them all in a pile on my desk. Try again in the fall when I go back to school.”

Our third intern in the curatorial department is Eugene Rutigliano aka “The Great Chainsaw of Being.” He writes: “I have spent most of my conscious life in New Jersey. Higher education occasioned my stint in beautiful Gambier, Ohio, where I got a degree in Art History from Kenyon College. That and turning 22 last May are some of the many things I did before Emma (see above). I otherwise ran a radio station on campus that was well-liked by some and often pretty operational. Now I’m an intern with MASS MoCA’s registrar, Dante Birch. The position involves maintaining the gallery lighting, surveying other buildings in the complex for renovations, keeping track of all incoming and outgoing artwork, and tending to the projectors for Jenny Holzer’s installation in building 5. If you come to the museum, you’ll probably see me on top of a ladder or struggling not to hit myself with one of those really long tape measures.”

If Eastern Standard sparked your interest in art in China our curator Susan Cross recommends these recent Times pieces about art in China, one from today on woman artists in China and one from Sunday on Beijing hutongs.

Many children who come to Kidspace may have aspirations of picture coloring and that will keep them content. Their parents may be looking for an oasis where the kids will be occupied for a few minutes and they can move on to the “real art�. As an intern here for the summer I found so much more than coloring pictures and parents resting while their children ran circles around them…I found an actual children’s contemporary art gallery.

In all honesty, the first lesson I learned here was that we do not make crafts. We make and exhibit real art at Kidspace. Kids come to the gallery to learn about art and to make a project that reflects what they have learned. When I say art, I mean challenging art that makes them think and is relative to their life. Interpretations, the current show at Kidspace, is made out of over 40,000 spools of thread hung upside down throughout the gallery. The images are reproductions of classics like the Mona Lisa, The Last Supper and American Gothic. As an art student I thought it was pretty clever. As an education intern, I didn’t know how we were going to talk to kids about this work. I mean at first I thought, what is a 5-year-old going to get out of this exhibit?

With these questions swimming in my head, I began preparing for my first official Kidspace tour. We broke down the work by asking kids questions such as what is a pixel and why does the art have “crystal balls� propped up in front of them? (hint, they are not to swing around on). After the kids thoughtfully examined the work that we showed them, they dug into making their own pixelated images. The things that they came up with were fantastic. Not only did some of the pixel drawings have a story behind them, but some were upside down like the artist’s work, some were a copy of the Mona Lisa. Kids were starting to pick up and run with the theme of Interpretations: they were interpreting art in their own unique way.

As my time here at Kidspace wraps up, I’ll be giving a tour to a group of middle school students. Once we are done discussing American Gothic and The Girl with a Pearl Earring, I will get to watch them create inspired images. Maybe after that I’ll be more inspired in my own art. Trust me; I won’t be working on any crafts.

-Erin Dougherty, Kidspace Summer 2008 Intern
Graduate Student, Arts Education, College of St. Catherine, St. Paul, MN

One of our awesome interns worked with Vaughn Bell to create this quiz to help you determine if you are ready to adopt your own pocket biosphere or not. After you take the quiz, share your results by uploading them to your own website. Don’t forget to challenge your friends to take the quiz as well. If you like this one let us know and we will keep them coming!

Also check out this great interview Vaughn did over on Shuffleboil’s blog.

Cheers,

Brittany

Miss Rockaway Armada’s installation Being Here is Better than Wishing We’d Stayed is overflowing with notes from our patrons.

I’ll be posting one on the blog occasionally. For some reason this note really struck my fancy today.

Cheers,

Brittany