

If floor reinforcement is required to support a 15-ton Louise Bourgeois sculpture, well, this can-do museum is in the business of figuring out such logistics. Every 10 months or so, fresh art takes up residence in the museum’s enormous halls. One of the most distinctive things about Mass MoCA is that it owns no permanent collection. Mass MoCA Photo Credit : Kim Knox Beckius Navigating Mass MoCA’s Exhibits Expansion into Building 6 in 2017 doubled the museum’s size, ensuring there is no bigger destination on the continent for total immersion in the dynamic creations of contemporary artists. The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art - known simply now as Mass MoCA - opened in 1999. It took years of political and financial maneuvering, but from the moment North Adams mayor John Barrett III had the lightbulb idea that these funky brick buildings might somehow form a new type of art venue, a groundswell of support made the complex’s transformation inevitable.
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Five miles down the road, Williams College Museum of Art director Thomas Krens also had a dilemma: How to support contemporary artists whose works were too humongous to be exhibited within the confines of a traditional art museum? That’s one-third of this small city’s downtown. A 16-acre manufacturing complex’s 26 buildings - all but one built before the 20th century on a site where manufacturing had thrived since colonial times - suddenly became ghost factories when Sprague Electric Company closed in 1985. How did the largest contemporary-art museum in North America wind up in North Adams, Massachusetts? The short story is: It ingeniously solved two problems.

Guide to Mass MoCA in North Adams, MA Mass MoCA Photo Credit : Kim Knox Beckius Mass MoCA History (It’s also an epic place to snap selfies.) It’s an engaging, expansive, and evolving experience that will remind you there are still-to-be-discovered creative abilities lurking inside our minds. Why visit an art museum when millions of stunning images and decades of entertainment are at your fingertips? Well, Mass MoCA is no ordinary art repository.

MASS MoCA, along with the Clark Art Institute and the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA), forms a trio of significant art museums in the northern Berkshires.It’s a modern conundrum: Cellphones designed to go everywhere have made going anywhere almost optional. Starting in 2010, MASS MoCA has become the home for the Solid Sound Music Festival. The festival, started in 2001, includes concerts in galleries for three weeks during the summer. It is the home of the Bang on a Can Summer Institute, where composers and performers from around the world come to create new music. In addition to housing galleries and performing arts spaces, it also rents space to commercial tenants. It has expanded since, including the 2008 expansion of Building 7 and the May 2017 addition of roughly 130,000 square feet when Building 6 was opened. MASS MoCA originally opened with 19 galleries and 100,000 sq ft (9,300 m ) of exhibition space in 1999. Built by the Arnold Print Works, which operated on the site from 1860 to 1942, the complex was used by the Sprague Electric company before its conversion. It is one of the largest centers for contemporary visual art and performing arts in the United States. The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art ( MASS MoCA ) is a museum in a converted Arnold Print Works factory building complex located in North Adams, Massachusetts.
