Our fabulous Education Intern Kate wrote a great blog about our July Gallery Quest. Take a look at what we created last month and then follow the link at the bottom of this blog to reserve your spot on the next Quest!

Last month, we hosted the first Gallery Quest of our Summer 2010 season. Gallery Quest is an opportunity for our younger patrons to engage with current exhibitions by creating their own artworks within the galleries. In lieu of the many mediums currently employed in our exhibition spaces, the theme for this event was “The Artist’s Toolbox,” thus emphasizing the different materials all of us can use in order to create art.

As it turns out, art-making in the galleries was a perfect way for us to kick the gloom brought on by the blustery weather and we had quite the turn out. We began our quest looking at Petah Coyne’s sculpture Untitled # 638, Whirlwind and questioned what materials we normally use in art: crayons, pastels, markers, paint. Our astute questers determined that Coyne in fact uses black sand as one of the materials in her pieces, and demonstrated their mastery of the medium in the creation of their very own black sand drawings:

But we quickly learned that Coyne also incorporates many other materials in her sculptures, including silk flowers dipped in colored wax. On the next step of our quest, we went on to look at another sculpture titled Scarlett to check out how to make our own types of flowers. Layering different colors of tissue paper together, we created a bouquet of beautiful tissue flowers:

Next, we headed into Material World: Sculpture to Environment to look at Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen Nguyen’s White Stag. Here we investigated how the artists twisted and turned paper in order to create an old growth forest. We each hand twisted and rolled white paper and taped it to cardboard to create our own miniature trees:

Our last gallery stop on the quest was a visit to the Sol LeWitt Retrospective to explore the artist’s use of two-dimensional colors and forms to realize wall drawings. Here, the questers thought about depth and dimension and how the use of color and shapes could make the walls look three-dimensional:

The quest ended outside of Kidspace where we combined what we learned looking at the LeWitt wall drawings to create ultra psychadelic three-dimensional felt shakers. We layered different colors of wool felt material around plastic toy eggs in order to create fun shakers that make music. The questers came up with completely original designs by picking their favorite wool colors and combining them in order to create unique color patterns, just like how Sol LeWitt’s color combinations could create different hues:

Our next gallery quest will be held on Saturday, August 28, at 1 PM, when we explore various environments created in the MASS MoCA galleries. We hope to see you and your little art lovers there.

Then we recommend you visit our galleries any day but  August 14 and 15.

There are definitely still tickets available for Wilco’s Solid Sound Festival on August 14 and 15,  but if you are only interested in seeing the art on display, we recommend you choose a different day for your visit if possible.  Tickets to the festival include admission to the galleries. We anticipate 5000+ people in the galleries over the festival weekend.

We are open regular hours, 10 AM – 6 PM, on both Friday, August 13, and Monday August 16.

If you can only visit on August 14 or 15 please  arrive as early as you can (the galleries are open at 10 AM.) There are satellite parking lots on Route 2 and Route 8 with  shuttle service to the museum entrance. You can download a parking/ shuttle bus map and schedule from our web site.

Although Solid Sound is our biggest draw of the summer we have events every weekend.  Upcoming highlights include:

• This Saturday, August 7 — Uncle Rock at 11:30 AM
• Also THIS Saturday, August 7 –  Alt Cabaret (hopefully outside under the stars)  with Clare and the Reasons at 8 PM.
• Saturday, August 21 –  A Night of African Film and Music by Nomadic Wax featuring the documentary Democracy in Dakar about the influence of hip hop on Senegalese politices followed by sets from Group Saloum, Boston’s hottest Afropop band and African Underground, a pan-African rap collective.

Remember, our galleries are always open until 7:30 on nights when we have performances. You can combine a visit to the galleries with dinner and a live performance.

Or, embrace the Solid Sound Festival and buy a festival pass which will get you into the galleries and give you the chance to hear non-stop great music all weekend long.

Its Wilco’s only East coast appearance this summer.

5000+ fans can’t be wrong.

We are embarking on a fun project with Cabinet, a two-part exhibition where we are inviting you to make an “exchange” with Sol LeWitt.  Though most artists exchange with others at some point, Sol seemed fully committed to it as an artistic code of conduct, a way of life.  His exchanges were not limited to well-known artists — Sol consistently traded works with admirers whom he did not know but who had nevertheless sent their work to him, as well as amateur artists with whom he interacted in his daily life.

For Sol, the act of exchange seemed to be not only a personal gesture, but also an integral part of his conceptual practice. In addition to encouraging the circulation of artworks through a gift economy that challenged the art world’s dominant economic model, Sol’s exchanges with strangers have the same qualities of generosity, and risk, that characterized his work in general. This kind of exchange was designed to stage an encounter between two minds, outside the familiar confines of friendship.

If we consider the process of exchange as another of Sol LeWitt’s instructional pieces, then the rational (or irrational) thing to do is to continue to exchange work and ideas, if only symbolically, with him.

We invite you to exchange with LeWitt by submitting work for consideration for a two-part exhibition (one part at MASS MoCA, one part at Cabinet offices in Brooklyn).  Details on what to submit and how are on our website.

Inspired by Luisa Caldwell’s use of fruit stickers in You Art What You Eat in Kidspace, this excellent food blogger, Dinner: A Love Story,  came up with a cool idea for a way to get kids to eat more fruit.  Though we find those little stickers super  annoying, this idea almost makes us wish they came on kale and cauliflower too.

She also gives a shout out to Rural Intelligence, a blog we recommend too!

Some of my favorite photos in our Flickr Group are those of patrons looking at and contemplating the art. These pics help remind me that I come to work everyday for the love of art and to share that with other people!

Please note all photos shown in Flickr Finds blogs retain the copyright of the original photographer. To learn more about the photographer and the licensing of their images, click on the photographer’s name to visit their Flickr profile or webpage.

Mysteryship

justinhiggins

Zerohandel

Operation Iggy

Nikole Bouchard

Jesse Santana

Sasquatch Madness

Cheers,
Brittany

P.S. If you would like to see your photos featured here next month make sure you add them to our Flickr Group for consideration. I’m also looking for themes for future Flickr Finds.  If you would like to see photos based on a specific color, exhibition, idea, etc… let me know!