Alison Pebworth: Cultural Apothecary

B6: The Robert W. Wilson Building

For more than a decade, Pebworth has been inspired by a 19th-century neurological disorder called Americanitis. With vague and capacious symptoms ranging from abnormal fatigue to premature baldness, a diagnosis of Americanitis essentially pathologized the anxiety and ennui that plagued many Americans in the wake of industrialization and urbanization. Pebworth’s Cultural Apothecary asks us to consider the root causes of the cultural ills that contribute to our anxiety today, and to work together towards tools for healing. Her installation at MASS MoCA offers an experimental space for embodied, in-person connection, curiosity, and exploration as an antidote to division, loneliness, and isolation.
Cultural Apothecary Tea Service
Friday, Saturday, Sunday 12–3pm

As Pebworth explains, “before we find a cure, we must know what ails us.” Members of the public can help actively shape the installation by filling out surveys that reflect on their own experiences and current concerns — whether in the installation, online, or at Pebworth’s storefront studio on Eagle Street in downtown North Adams.

For the past two years, during her extended residency at MASS MoCA, Pebworth has been living in North Adams and working to provoke curiosity and inspire collaboration with passersby out of a storefront studio in the city’s downtown. She has workshopped ideas with community members, resulting in pop-ups including a Kindness Dispensary (with Alethea Morrison), Spirit Drawing events with the local community at the North Adams Public Library, and rotating monthly open studio installations as part of the city’s “First Fridays” celebrations. During these events, she often offers botanical elixirs to the public, in the spirit of healing through community and nature.

A countertop is at the heart of Cultural Apothecary, which is surrounded by Pebworth’s paintings and sculptures, and welcomes visitors to sip reparative curatives and elixirs — some workshopped by other artists, herbalists and practitioners — and experience the restorative power of communing with strangers. A glowing sculptural heart hanging high above offers poetic encouragement to visitors to examine what they carry in their own hearts, and perhaps, lay what they carry down for a while.