Museum Gallery Hours
MASS MoCA Installations Open During Solid Sound (6/28-6/30)
Fri 11a–7p | Sat 11a–7p | Sun 10–5p
Make time to explore MASS MoCA’s galleries while you’re at Solid Sound. Here’s a look at the exhibits on show during the 2024 festival
Like Magic, Building 4.2
In times of uncertainty, people often turn towards technologies of magic for solace and strength. These technologies are not the props used for stage magic (rabbits in hats, scarves hidden up sleeves) but rather are tools (devices, talismans, rituals, incantations) created by humans to help them survive and thrive in a chaotic world. The exhibition Like Magic brings together artists who employ technologies of magic to resist systems that attempt to surveil and control people’s lives and stories, often because of their race, ability, sexuality, gender identity, indigeneity, or immigration status.
Eluding Capture: Three Artists from Central Asia, Building 4.3
Eluding Capture features the work of Saodat Ismailova, Alexander Ugay, and Gulnur Mukazhanova, three artists who explore the conditions of belonging in Central Asia through photography, textile, film, and video. Typically defined as modern-day Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan, Central Asia has been ruled by Indigenous Khanates, the Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union at different points in time. The region’s rich philosophical, literary, and artistic traditions provide the basis for contemporary interventions that attend to its history and speculate on its future.
Elle Pérez: Intimacies
Pérez has become known for photographs that capture with a unique sense of ease the intimacy between friends, lovers, bodies, and nature—as well as the intimate relationship between photographer and subject. Pérez works with the Muay Thai, queer, and artist communities that are part of their daily life. Though their photographs are often mistaken for documentary images, Pérez collaborates with their subjects, using the deep trust that exists to produce images that exude openness and vulnerability.
Joseph Grigely: In What Way Wham? (White Noise and Other Works, 1996-2023), Building 4
Grigely explores the visual representation of speech and sound in the form of installations, sculptures, photographs, films, and books. Grigely’s exhibition asks us to think deeply about human communication, about the formal and informal qualities of language, and about what happens when language is rendered inaudible.
to see oneself at a distance, Building 4
to see oneself at a distance proposes a kind of looking against the grain that focuses on revolutionary moments throughout the 20th century while complicating their over-romanticization. To see these histories at a distance is to reckon with their complexities, afterlifes, and the varying scales of their implications (from the individual to the global). The four artists in the exhibition employ rigorous archival research to create artworks that explore decolonization not as an event horizon, but as a series of gestures, ruptures, and fragments that might ripple across time and space.
The Plastic Bag Store, Building 1
The Plastic Bag Store is an immersive, multimedia experience by Brooklyn-based artist Robin Frohardt that uses humor, craft, and a critical lens to question our culture of consumption and convenience — specifically, the enduring effects of single-use plastics. The shelves are stocked with thousands of original, hand-sculpted items — produce and meat, dry goods and toiletries, cakes and sushi rolls — all made from discarded, single-use plastics in an endless cacophony of packaging.
Cardboard Cinema: Robin Frohardt’s Handmade Worlds, Kidspace
Known for her rich aesthetic and highly detailed constructions, Robin Frohardt is a theater and film director whose work uses recognizable materials, often trash, to create richly detailed worlds that consider the relationship between capitalism and the resulting environmental catastrophe. The tactile quality of cardboard, the low-fi animation effects, rich sound, and dynamic lighting combine to create a cinematic expression that defies the humbleness of the material.
Musicians on Musicians: Curated by Wilco, B6
Since 2019, MASS MoCA has curated selections from a private collection of music photography. This year we handed over the selection process to the members of Wilco, who have chosen 35 images featuring performers such as Johnny Cash, The Clash, James Taylor and Carole King, Patti Smith and Tom Verlaine, Leonard Bernstein, Kurt Cobain, Stevie Wonder, The Supremes, The Band, and many more.
Laurie Anderson, B6.3
In MASS MoCA’s B6: The Robert W. Wilson Building, Anderson invites viewers to explore a multi-functional constellation of galleries and installations including a working studio, audio archive, exhibition venue, and a virtual reality environment for experiences she co-created with Hsin-Chien Huang. Taken together, the exhibition highlights both Anderson’s creative process and some of her most unforgettable works.
Anselm Kiefer, Building 15
The long-term exhibition—realized in collaboration with the Hall Art Foundation—includes Étroits sont les Vaisseaux (Narrow are the Vessels)(2002), an 82-foot long, undulating wave-like sculpture made of cast concrete, exposed rebar, and lead; The Women of the Revolution (Les Femmes de la Revolution) (1992), comprised of more than twenty lead beds with photographs and wall text; Velimir Chlebnikov (2004), a steel pavilion containing 30 paintings dealing with nautical warfare and inspired by the quixotic theories of the Russian mathematical experimentalist Velimir Chlebnikov; and a new, large-format photograph on lead created by the artist for the installation at MASS MoCA.
Jason Moran: Black Stars: Writing in the Dark, Building 6
Visual artist, composer, and musician Jason Moran has said of his artworks, “these pieces emerge from my performance practice. My body in relationship to the piano and to bodies in the audience.” While experiences of live music vary from venue to venue, the embodied exchange between performers, instruments, and audience members–in the form of sounds, movement, and even touch–is central to experiences of live music across spaces throughout history. Black Stars: Writing in the Dark encourages visitors to explore their own physical and historical proximity to the physical acts of making and witnessing live music.
Gunnar Schonbeck: No Experience Required, Building 6
Over a period of fifty years, Gunnar Schonbeck assembled a collection of hundreds of instruments, handmade from a diverse and unexpected range of materials. His unmistakable works include a 9-ft banjo, 8-ft tall marimba, drums made from aircraft fuselages, welded steel harps and countless steel drums, zithers, pan pipes, tubular chimes, and triangular cellos. His practice drew on a core philosophy: anyone can be a musician, and music can be made from the most ordinary of objects. This exhibition brings Schonbeck’s distinct approach to music-making to a wide audience, encouraging visitors and artists to play and experiment.
Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective
Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective occupies nearly an acre of specially built interior walls that are installed—per LeWitt’s own specifications—over three stories of a historic mill building situated at the heart of MASS MoCA’s 19th-century, former factory campus. A landmark collaboration of MASS MoCA, Yale University Art Gallery, the Williams College Museum of Art, and the Sol Lewitt estate, over 60 artists and art students spent six months rendering 105 large-scale wall drawings spanning the artist’s storied career.
Amy Yoes: Hot Corners, Building 6
Amy Yoes’ site-specific installation Hot Corners, transforms a 142-foot space in MASS MoCA’s Building 6 into a multi-room, immersive complex with thematic forms and functions. Each of the installation’s five rooms—the Foyer, the Parlor, the Library, the Theatre, and the Drawing Room—are designed with custom-built mobile furniture acting as shifting set pieces for a variety of functions including artmaking, socializing, reflection, and performance. Rather than static and fixed, the installation is a set of evolving propositions and possibilities.
James Turrell: C.A.V.U.
Thirty years in the making, James Turrell’s largest free-standing circular Skyspace — titled C.A.V.U. — measures 40 feet in diameter and 40 feet high. This repurposed concrete water tank transforms into one of Turrell’s signature immersive light installations, carving out a small piece of the sky and framing it as a canvas with infinite depth.
Chris Doyle: The Coast of Industry, Building 5
Chris Doyle’s video animation The Coast of Industry runs nearly 300 feet along one wall of Building 5, like a vast panoramic scroll. The Coast of Industry is inhabited by a family of machines that have learned to work together in concert with the natural world in loops of perpetual labor. Like organs of a body, the machines are interconnected, and each has a discrete function that contributes to the life of the larger organism.
Carly Glovinski: Almanac, Hunter Hallway
Almanac is Glovinski’s largest pressed flower work to date. Spanning 100-feet, the work envisions the late April through mid-September northeastern New England growing season, through hundreds of painted and cut out blooms of dozens of flower varieties: cold hearty daffodils, violas, and bleeding hearts, to irises, Queen Anne’s lace, morning glories, and cosmos. By observing, tending, and preserving these flowers, the installation becomes a visual record of time and seasons passing, as well as a commentary on the labor of care.
kelli rae adams: Forever in Your Debt, Building 6
Student loan debt in the US today totals over 1.7 trillion dollars and is collectively borne by more than 44 million Americans, including artist kelli rae adams. With her installation Forever in Your Debt, adams converts this abstract burden into a tangible volume. She has crafted hundreds of wheel-thrown vessels, sized to collectively hold the average individual student debt —$37,000—in the form of coins. Each unique bowl holds approximately a pint of mixed change, worth about $40; this is also the value she assigns to the labor embodied in each vessel.
The artist will be on-site daily during SSF.