Five mysterious black structures that have appeared on the Mass MoCA campus are the work of architects Tessa Kelly and Chris Parkinson. Called the Mastheads, they’ll be there through October and offer writers a chance to get down to work, and to link their current efforts to the literary past of the Berkshires.

Kelly is from Pittsfield and began devising a Pittsfield-centric project while working on her master’s thesis in architecture at Harvard. Her partner Parkinson moved to Pittsfield with her, and the two concocted an architectural project celebrating something unique about Pittsfield. “The idea was to create something smallish scale that we could feasibly get done,” Kelly says, “and bring new creative people into the city of Pittsfield to introduce them to this place in hopes of secretly recruiting a younger creative set to look at Pittsfield in a new way.”

Each structure is based on the historic home of a Berkshires writer. This past July was the first season of the Mastheads program inviting five writers from around the country to spend the month working in the tiny writing studios placed around the Berkshires. The Melville and Hawthorne studios were at Arrowhead, now home to the Berkshire Historical Society; the Holmes and Longfellow studios were at Canoe Meadows, Holmes estate and a meeting place for the Fireside Poet group; and the Thoreau studio was in Springside Park, which was on Thoreau’s path to Mount Greylock.

Thoreau studio in Springfield Park, Pittsfield. Photo courtesy of the architects.

“The approach we took with all of them was to simultaneously look at the houses themselves but also to understand what works they were actually producing when they were in those houses,” says Kelly, “and to think about ideas we could take from the thinking they must have had to write those works, and then somehow set up those conditions in the studios.“

Portland OR-based writer John Lusk Babbott worked in the Holmes studio through July and said it was a productive time for him. “The interior was pale, grained pine and larch, and was fragrant with wood, pine tar, and stayed comfortable well into the afternoon despite the summer heat,” says Babbott. “To write in an environment like the one The Mastheads offers is to write truly in situ, and to do so as many hours as desired, for 31 days in a row.”

Hawthorne Interior. Photo courtesy of the architects.

Comfort was a big part of the architects’ consideration. Each studio features a built-in desk and bench, along with a chair, as well as various-sized operable panels in the walls. Cross-ventilation created by these keeps the atmosphere fresh, and the use of cross-laminated timber to build the structures maintains the night-time cool throughout the day.

Tessa Kelly and Chris Parkinson. Photo by Ben Garver of the Berkshire Eagle. Provided courtesy of the architects.

Kelly says that while they are unsure if Mass MoCA will repeat the project in 2018, it will return to Pittsfield next summer, though the Mass MoCA location has been unique to the architects, giving the studios a chance to stand united for a change. “When they were in Pittsfield, writers were alone in one vast studio, so this was our first time seeing them all together as a little community,” Kelly says.

Tessa Kelly and Chris Parkinson, architects
Pittsfield, Massachusetts
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Top image: The Mastheads at MassMoCA. Photo courtesy of MassMoCA

The post Literary Structures in the Berkshires appeared first on Take Magazine.

“My heroes have always been artists who reinvent themselves every few years,” says Brattleboro, Vermont artist Mutsu Crispin. “I love it when an artist goes through a transformation repeatedly. Picasso. Miles Davis. Someone who isn’t afraid to step out of their norm and become something new.“

Mutsu Crispin is also the pseudonym of John DiGeorge, a bouncing, 46-year-old dervish of an artist who is at times a costume designer, puppeteer, oneiric film instructor, filmmaker, choreographer, and, currently, a classic visual artist. Mostly though, Crispin is an explorer interested in transformation.

Mutsu Crispin | Photographed by David Nielsen

Crispin grew up in Marietta, Georgia, and then attended Harvard, where, he says, “they’d just hand you a camera and tell you to go make something.” After Harvard, Crispin moved to New York City, where he learned how to make movies, then to Brattleboro to begin work on Redbelly, a film written with his cousin Justin Allen. Redbelly is a freakishly old-world fairy tale, featuring a princess trapped in a stone tower, bereft of human contact. It also features a prince with an external glass stomach, born unable to use his mouth to speak, cry, or eat, who was captured by an opportunistic moonshiner who uses the glass stomach as a still.

“I’d been doing a lot of dream work,” Crispin explains. “I’d been delving deeply and consistently into my dream world. There were a lot of themes and images and interior dramas playing out in my dreams that a fairy tale would be an easy vehicle for. Redbelly (still in production) is very particular to Vermont, but not set in Vermont. It all grew out of the landscape. The stone tower. . .there’s stone walls everywhere. There’s also a monster in the movie. What’s the monster in the woods of Vermont? It’s a bear that carries winter in its belly. The prince gets stuck in his belly, and it’s the harshest winter imaginable. We filmed that sequence in a snowstorm in the White Mountains. The mythology is definitely grown out where we were when we conceived it.”

Redbelly Tower | Photographed by Mutsu Crispin

Crispin’s alternative project, Bouncy Ball Art, seems crafted by an entirely different artist. The series, which can be seen at the A.P.E. Ltd. Gallery in Northampton, Massachusetts March 8-April 2, is whimsical, bright, and playful. The constructions feature bouncy rubber balls pressed between plates of heavy plexiglass, then screwed together to hold them in place. The clue that links both pieces is an almost mythic reexamination of the fantastical aspects of childhood, never mind that the finished pieces look like massively constructed Hasbro Lite-Brite screen panels.

“There’s a lot of places these pieces go,” Crispin says. “The grids are pixelated. I grew up playing Atari, playing Nintendo. I was totally into video games—all those early video games like Super Mario Bros. All of these pieces are like the background of Zelda or Super Mario Bros. They’re also used to express the deepest impulses of things I’m exploring in my life.”

So where did the name Mutsu Crispin come from? DiGeorge used to spend summers working on a farm; he saw the words repeatedly on old apple crates, and they caught his imagination. “I’ve always felt a connection with Japanese words and filmmakers,” he explains. “I liked the juxtaposition of the Japanese word Mutsu with the English word Crispin. I came up with these two characters: Mutsu is an alien and Crispin is a monkey. They came together to form Mutsu Crispin, which is an apple, but also the name of my production company.

Sanctuary | Photographed by Mutsu Crispin

“I’ve always been caught by cultures where as an adult you name yourself,” he continues. “You go on a vision quest, and when you come back you name yourself. Sometimes at an art opening, someone will come up to me and ask, ‘Are you Mutsu Crispin?’ I really like that.”

Mutsu Crispin – multimedia artist
Brattleboro, Vermont
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Top photo Bugs, photographed by Mutsu Crispin.

Bouncy Ball Art can be seen at the A.P.E. gallery in Northampton Massachusetts, March 8-April 2, 2017.

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