Workers curator Susan Cross provides this introduction to an interview that our intern Kathryn Amato did with Mary Lum.

Continuing our artist spotlight series, we are focusing on  the work of North Adams-based Mary Lum, who is featured in the current exhibition The Workers. A 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, Lum earned her M.F.A. at Rochester Institute of Technology. Represented by Joseph Carroll and Sons, Boston and Fredereicke Taylor, New York. she has exhibited both nationally and internationally. Lum has been faculty  at Bennington College since 2005.

Invited to create a new piece for The Workers Lum was inspired both by the history of the former manufacturing site and her own interest in labor, a theme which the artist has explored in a number of previous works.  Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor features an assemblage of hand-torn paper bag fragments which the artist has been collecting for nearly two decades. Each of the pieces – torn from a multitude of bag bottoms — is stamped  with the name of the individual who made the bag or oversaw its production and quality on the assembly line.   A detail easy to miss, each name reminds us of the human element behind industrialized production and the objects we use on a daily basis.

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Director Joe Thompson offers this information about our film this weekend at the airport, The Great Waldo Pepper projected on a hangar door.  Bring your own chair.

Among the subtler losses to civic life stemming from 9/11 is the great fortification of small local airports.  The movement from aerodrome – a magical field of flight, located at the edge of town – to airfield, to airport, to the post 9/11 fenced and gated abstractions of today is not lovely.

It’s more than the difference between, say, the romance of a remote dirt road, a blue highway, and Interstate 90, because even in a world of 4-lane superhighways it’s still easy to experience what it feels like to travel by road off the beaten track.  But it’s almost impossible to find spots to actually be inside aviation today, which has nothing to do with the horrors of commercial flight.  Katama Airfield, a wedge of grassy sand just off the beach on Martha’s Vineyard, is one such place: my son and I spent a pleasant afternoon there on a bench a couple of years ago sitting next to David Letterman and his family, watching small planes take off and land, trying to talk over the beautiful throaty rumble of a Waco bi-plane’s big radial.

Situated at the base of Mt. Greylock, North Adams Harriman West has one of the most beautiful airports in the United States.  Before the days of fence and gates there were almost always small clusters of people gathered there on languid summer weekend days, watching gliders and their tow planes in search of upslope wind.  The Taconic Ridge sunsets are spectacular from the airport.  It’s one of the great hidden gems of our region.  So, for a few hours on August 5^th, MASS MoCA has teamed up with the City of North Adams and its Airport Commission to invite the public back inside the gates.  Beginning at 7pm, there will be music, a balsa glider contest (with free gliders given to the first 100 kids), and good, well-priced food and drink, including beer and wine… but not for pilots who plan to leave that evening (I should add, in case the FAA is listening) since pilots must abide by the “8 hours from bottle to throttle� rule.

At about 8:30pm, we’ll be screening cartoons and a movie on a huge hangar door, with BYOC (bring your own chair) seating on the tarmac.  If you fly in, admission to the movie is free for you and your passengers.  Or for those of us who live nearby, pack as many friends and family as you can get into a car (or any vehicle!) for just 14 bucks.

We had a lot of fun picking the movie: Airplane! was far and away the staff’s choice, but in the end I’m a sucker for air-to-air photography, and the great flying sequences of Redford’s slightly goofy Great Waldo Pepper won out: there are scenes that look like they could have been shot right at Harriman West, and if we catch a nice night, it should be spectacular.

Which great aviation film should we show next year (assuming we try this again)?

Now on view through Sunday, July 31, at Bureau for Open Culture at MASS MoCA, On Symptoms of Cultural Industry is a work of performance, video, installation, photography and a book. It examines the changing economic and social life in North Adams, a city whose economic base has shifted over the course of recent history from making textiles and electrical components to making art and culture. The work was produced by Bureau for Open Culture as a collaboration among Timothy Nazzaro, Rachel Sherk, Nate Padavick, Cassandra Troyan and James Voorhies. The majority of its content was inspired by life in North Adams and original research and conversations with individuals and their families who worked at Sprague Electric Company, some for more than 50 years. The industrial complex that MASS MoCA inhabits today was once operated by Sprague Electric, which employed over 4,000 people in a city of only 18,000 residents.

On Sunday, July 17, the opening night performance There Is Only Light (We Do Not Know What To Do With Other Worlds)by Cassandra Troyan consisted of a recitation of a script that was composed from the conversations with former Sprague employees including Michael Hutchinson, Ruth Bernardi, Chuck and Joan Tompkins, Dee Garnish and the late Paul Garnish. The conversations were conducted and recorded over the course of the past several months. Troyan excerpted parts of these talks, transcribed the excerpts and combined them with excerpts from transcripts of oversight hearings on job services for dislocated workers in the Berkshires that took place in the late 1970s. These texts were combined with a journal-like register of deaths in the early 1800s in Massachusetts.

Comprehensively, the performance gave a portrait of labor in Western Massachusetts, from the personal words of lived experiences to the official hearings held to determine what to do about rising unemployment and loss of industry.

Prior to Troyan’s performance, members of the audience were approached unexpectedly by her and asked to read part of the script, to take on the character of each of the Sprague employees. Many members of the North Adams community, including artists, friends and neighbors, agreed to read the script. As the performance ensued, Troyan stood at the front of the room speaking the part of the narrator, but not in the sense that she was leading, or that in some way her text was more privileged than the others. Rather, she seemed to take on a historical voice, or that she was actually the voice of these lived histories of oversight hearings, labor crisis and archival death notices.

The current installation in Bureau for Open Culture includes a video projection of Troyan’s performance, recorded against the brick wall on which the video is now projected, appearing to fade into and out of the materiality of the wall. The installation brings to mind the conflation of the two different kinds of labor, both immaterial and material, that now and once took place inside the factory spaces. The voices of Troyan and the readers of the script can be heard throughout the space.

The recorded performance is about 20 minutes long, the average length of a coffee break at Sprague Electric. A vendor with a coffee cart used to make his way through the vast spaces at Sprague. As the cart stopped in each room, work would pause momentarily while workers gathered for a few minutes to talk and drink coffee. The cart would continue into different parts of the factory and work would continue.

The installation includes photographs by Timothy Nazzaro, images of Sprague employees who participated in the project as well as photographs of life in North Adams, from the perspective of an artist residing here today. The text “Unknown Pleasures� by James Voorhies is part of the installation and also printed in the publication.

Nate Padavick designed the publication for On Symptoms of Cultural Industry. It includes the text by James Voorhies, photographs by Timothy Nazzaro and the script written by Cassandra Troyan. The publication is available free.

The 10th annual Bang On A Can summer festival 2011 is in full swing. Here are some images from the daily recitals which take place inside our galleries (aside from Sunday) at 1:30 and 4:30! Admission to the museum allows you into the shows for free. Bang on a can will also be having a tribute to composer John Adams this Saturday, as well as a six hour marathon next Saturday the 30th, which will be their last day at MASS MoCA. Come and check them out!

So if you haven’t been yet… Bang On A Can is here at MASS MoCA preforming recitals inside the galleries twice a day until July 30th! Come check it out.

As members of Bang on a Can start up their daily recitals in our galleries, we would like to draw attention to a special performance  taking place today. Todd Reynolds, composer, conductor, arranger and violinist, as well as a seasoned member of Bang on a Can, is dedicating today’s recital in honor of the late Steven Bodner who left this community suddenly and at way too young an age in January. Since his arrival in 2000, Steve was a vital part of the Berkshires as a Williams College music department professor, musician, conductor and director of the Symphonic Winds ensemble. He was a dear friend to MASS MoCA, a tireless promoter of music, and a true inspiration to students. We miss him terribly and are  pleased that Todd Reynolds is honoring him this afternoon with the violin, in our gallery of Joseph Beuys and Jörg Immendorff’s artworks. Please join us for this emotional tribute,  Thursday, July 14 at 4:30.

Nominated for the Jazz Journalist Association’s Guitarist of this year, Marc Ribot, American guitarist and composer, has developed a career which defines the concept of independent musicians. Born in Newark, New Jersey, Marc Ribot moved just across the Hudson River that little town New York City in 1978 during his mid 20s. After playing in a few bands, such as John Lurie’s jazz assembly The Lounge Lizards during the 80s, Ribot began working alongside of some impressive folks, such as Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, and a familiar face to MASS MoCA, Nels Cline (Member of the band Wilco, the curators of our Solid Sound Music Festival) Working with international artists, Ribot has toured globally, put out 19 albums, and explored multiple areas of music, from avant-guard Jazz to Cuban sounds.

With having said all of that, proving his accomplishments on paper (or rather on a web log) actually doesn’t matter. The music speaks for itself. Ribot’s 2010 “Silent films� album is unique, ambient at times, powerful at others, and holds a sense of charm. Paired with the Charlie Chaplin classic, The Kid, Ribot’s media collaboration allows for a special connection of music and film, and certainly a very big nod to the historic progression of both genres.

On Saturday, July 9^th, at 9:00 MASS MoCA will be showing The Kid, with Marc Ribot performing his film score live in our outdoor Courtyard C, and we can’t think of a better way to spend a warm summer evening.

Photo credit: Ziga Koritnik