As the winter months begin to take over our landscape I thought it would be nice to do a Flickr Finds featuring our upside down trees. Enjoy.

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.

From albany_tim

From Howlinhill

From paintingloftcom

From theophilus1918

From Eric Marc Crawford

From shop clementine

From br_5530

Even though this image is not of Tree Logic, I just couldn’t resist including this awesome shot of the tree turbine.

From Sundance Moods

The next Flickr Finds will feature photos of MASS MoCA signage. If you have a photo of the roof sign, the big yellow arrow, etc. upload it to the MASS MoCA Flickr Group now. Your picture could be featured here next month.

Cheers,

Brittany

Many MASS MoCA staff attended a fascinating talk by Robert Storr at the Clark Art Institute last week. Rebecca and Caitlin, two of our extraordinary interns summarize his main themes for you here:

“Explaining art to people means explaining the world to them, and there is no master voice,” said Robert Storr at the conclusion of his lecture, Dumbing down or Smartening up: How Museums Address Their Publics .

While contemporary art has largely dismissed teleological discourse and the idea of a master narrative in favor of a less reductive, more inclusive approach to exhibiting and curating, Storr pointed out that many museums fail to make their work legible and accessible to their publics. In response to the overly didactic and pedagogical layout of an exhibition which aims to depict the timeline of an artist,-ism, movement, or nation, Storr proposes that through the Read the rest of this entry »

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.

From recent MASS MoCA director-in-residence Nick Brooke:

Two weeks at Mass MoCA was intense, hallucinatory, and wonderful, both for me and my co-director Jenny Rohn. Never have we assembled so quickly 8 performers, tons of props (120 bricks, desks, chairs, and wheelbarrows filled with phone books), and enough speakers to fill Wembley Stadium. My music is a collage of hundreds of recorded samples, which I train singers to imitate. I create virtuosic musical scores (with yodeling, top-40 tunes, and whistling) and physical ’scores’ (bricklaying, carrying people in wheelbarrows, and all-out brawls). A Mass MoCA residency is a place where -well, where they’re open to this!

Amidst all the fight coaching, drilling, and speaker set-up, there was the calming, beatific presence of the Mass MoCA staff, who were super-helpful (one performer said: “how can people be so nice?”), and hip to anything we wanted to try. Our first week was spent woodshedding upstairs in a rehearsal room, or downstairs in the massive Hunter Center. And when the piece came together for the final night, with two pieces, Mass and Time and Motion Study, we got a warm, sold-out reception.

During the residency, we made connections locally (an original Sprague Electric employee, who worked on the assembly line, talked to us about the factory aesthetic of Time and Motion Study), and in the area (I was interviewed by two area newspapers that I delivered as a young paper boy!). As a local boy, a residency gave me the illicit pleasure of seeing how MoCA works behind the scenes. We got backstage tours, and after a long day of musical drilling, nothing served us better than lying on a giant bean bag, and watching Jenny Holzer’s kaleidoscopic projections.

From our wonderful Box Office intern Rebecca Roy:

The history of North Adams oozes from the walls of mass moca; layers of paint reveal past lives; brick cornices remind us of another time.  In a fittingly contemporary appropriation of space, MASS MoCA has become the setting for a dialogue with history, industry, and architecture.  From mill to factory to museum, MASS MoCA’s varied histories are reflected in the building itself as well as in its architectural and interior design. To many visitors, the most obvious of these fixtures is the box office desk.

Suspended from the ceiling by a spring at one end and balancing on the floor on a fulcrum at its midpoint, the box office desk is a unique reminder of MASS MoCA’s transformation from an industrial manufacturing mill to an art museum.  Designed and constructed by Mike Green, the desk is composed of fabricated steel from I beams, wooden columns, and the spring from an elevator shaft. Not only is the desk a functional sculpture and a document of MASS MoCA’s past, but it is a living, bouncing testament to change and resiliency.

As a visitor leans on the desk to ask a question or sign a receipt, they usually realize that the box office desk is more than a decoration or a work of art.  The desk actually oscillates,  becoming a responsive and animated third party in the ticket selling process.  Temporary loss of balance or disorientation may occur. However,  upon discovering that our desk does indeed bounce, many visitors say that the desk reminds them of the Archimedes quote, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it and I shall move the world.�  And even though our desk can’t literally move the world, maybe the art inside the galleries can.

Our MASS MoCA Flickr group has 116 members and 1, 147 photos in it. To showcase the fabulous pics that our visitors have been posting I thought I would occasionally pick a topic and share with you a few of my favorite Flickr photos. Since Projections will be closing on November 16, I will begin with Holzer based Flickr Finds.

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.

From Selfnonself

From jjriders

From emily shu

From mmpartee

From R Hennessy

From franola

From Sasquatch Madness

Cheers,

Brittany