When it came to obtaining additional funding for opening the museum, Bill Weld, the conservative governor of Massachusetts at the time, stopped by-and, much to everyone’s surprise, approved of what he saw, mainly on the basis that it was by a Talking Heads member who could sing “Air” on command. In 1996, David Byrne, frontman of the Talking Heads, staged a wacky installation that involved, in part, a sound element with lewd rap lyrics voiced by pleasant-sounding elderly women. Courtesy Kino LorberĪs construction came to a close in the mid-’90s, the first presentations began to be mounted in the not-yet-fully-opened space. “It’s not about the space, it’s just about space,” he says in Museum Town, which carefully plots all the adversity that he and founding director Joe Thompson faced along the way.Ī Franz West sculpture on the grounds of MASS MoCA in Museum Town. Officials had other plans in mind, including one to build a prison, but Krens persisted with his vision. What if there was an institution big enough to host them? Having visited the 1985 edition of the Art Cologne fair, where dealers trotted out monumental works and placed them inside a factory setting, Krens imagined he could do something similar. He’d been thinking of works by Minimalist and Land artists that museums had generally shied away from collecting in depth because of their size. In 1986, he was director at the nearby Williams College Museum of Art when he came up with the idea of converting a newly closed Sprague Electric factory into an art museum. The person who came up with the idea for MASS MoCA, Thomas Krens, worked tirelessly to realize the museum, however. (“People in North Adams are not ready for this,” a volunteer at MASS MoCA recalls thinking at the time.) Befuddled art critics looked on in wonderment as the people facilitating the $37 million renovation of a former mill complex. Locals viewed the museum as an art-world outpost intended to woo the elite, effectively bringing with it art no one in town would understood along with a wave of gentrification. Massachusetts politicians worried that such a project would grow too big, too costly, and too hifalutin. Fire and Ice: Marc Swanson at Mass MoCA and Thomas Cole National Historic SiteĪs Museum Town goes to show, nothing about MASS MoCA guaranteed that it would be a success when plans for it were first announced in 1986.
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