The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the only institution in Connecticut devoted solely to contemporary work, boasts 17,000 square feet of gallery space and a two-acre sculpture garden. Open since 1964, it has a history of showing now-legendary artists, including Agnes Martin, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella. Admission is just ten bucks. So why haven’t you been?

For one thing, “We’re in a colonial-era town, in a historic district—not the normal place you’d expect to see contemporary art,” explains executive director Alyson Baker of its Ridgefield location. But far from displaying musty antiques, the former home of visionary collector Larry Aldrich shows only the most of-the-moment art. Aldrich grew to understand that keeping a permanent collection limited his ability to support current artists. In the 1980s, he sold his acquisitions, and the Aldrich Museum was reborn as a place able “to be nimble and responsive,” says Baker. “Often, we’re commissioning artists to make work.”

For example, take a look at Your Turn. Through April 22, artists Alex Schweder and Ward Shelley are living on either side of a wall-like structure comprising sliding modules—bed, desk, kitchen—that can only be used by one person at a time. Visitors can chat with the artists as they go about their day.

Baker hopes pieces such as Your Turn will make Ridgefield your next art destination. “Places like MASS MoCA have done a great job of making people understand that contemporary art can be seen in places that are non-traditional or unexpected,” she says. “You really have to make it a sort of pilgrimage.”

Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
Ridgefield, Connecticut
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Illustration by Jen Epervary

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When Mass MoCA asked watercolorist Barbara Ernst Prey to capture on canvas the pre-renovation state of its new wing, Building 6, for the space’s opening, Prey thought such a big event deserved a painting of equal magnitude. The result is her largest work to date, 8 feet by 15 feet, taking a year and a half to complete.

It’s certainly huge, but the work is just as much about her relationship with Mass MoCA. In her student days at Williams College, where she is currently an adjunct professor, her teacher and mentor, S. Lane Faison, took her on a tour of the space that would become the museum, which Prey now sees as bringing her full circle.

“I really wanted to stretch the watercolor medium, take it in a whole new direction because no one’s done this,” Prey says, “but I was really interested in the space because I had a personal connection, and I think that comes out in the painting. It’s not just coming and doing a commission. It’s something where I lived there, I spent a lot of time in the building looking at the space, thinking about the space. I was there in my down jacket when it was dusty and dirty, and I would come out with dust all over me.”

Pencil study for final work, 5″ X 10″, Barbara Ernst Prey

Prey grew up in an art studio. Her mother was head of the Pratt Institute design department and Prey started painting as a small child alongside her mother. She’s since had work commissioned by NASA and for the 2003 White House Christmas card, but the Building 6 painting truly kept her on her feet, both figuratively and literally.

“You’re up and down,” she says. “I always like to step back and see. That’s my process—go back and see how it integrates with the whole. I’m painting something that is a defined space, but my painting is really abstract going into the structure so I’m always comparing different parts of the painting and going back and going up and down. Very aerobic.”

This came after a significant time just planning the work, which the scope of the work demanded. Merely tracking down a source for oversized watercolor paper took time and Prey had to figure out positioning such a large piece at an angle to prevent drips, while at the same time working from a ladder and scaffolding.

Prey started the process with nearly 50 on-site color studies. She continued work in her New York studio but moved everything to her Williamstown studio to be physically closer to the space. The final work also features experimentation of material not often found in watercolors—dust, dirt, and paint chips from the space embedded in the painting.

Though the work was daunting in the beginning Prey is pleased with the outcome, so much so that she’s not inclined to think small if she doesn’t have to. “It was actually pretty scary,” she says. “When you’re looking at this huge white piece of paper and it’s like, ‘Oh my God, how in the world am I going to pull this off, how is this going to work?’ Then you just dive in and work and work. I want to continue large. I feel like I can do this, whereas in the beginning I thought, ‘How do I do this?’”

Barbara Ernst Prey–artist
Williamstown, Massachusetts
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Top image, Building 6 renovation, watercolor, 8’ X 15’, Barbara Ernst Prey. Photos by Jack Criddle

The post This Watercolorist Thinks Big appeared first on Take Magazine.

At 200,000 square feet, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (aka MassMoCA) has always been large. But now, thanks to the renovation of Building 6 on the campus, MassMoCA has effectively doubled its space—and its opportunities—for ground-breaking exhibits and relationships with artists. The additional 130,000 square foot expansion opens to the public May 28 with a variety of events, many of them free to North Adams residents.

MassMoCA’s expansion means more than “simply” additional gallery space or even extending relationships with artists such as Jenny Holzer. The improvements to performance space and amenities—updated green rooms and catering services for performing artists, as well as additional bathrooms for concert-goers—mean that MassMoCA now can offer top-of-the-line experiences for all. “We’ve upped our game with the ability to host performing artists,” says MassMoCA Director Joe Thompson. “It’s been a little rough around the edges up until now.”

Laurie Anderson, photo by Leland Brewster

The expansion also adds more workshops so that various artists can work on site in addition to showing their finished work. The museum has created, as part of this renovation, multi-year relationships with artists such as Laurie Anderson and James Turrell. Visitors can see works in progress in artists’ workshops, and the artists will perform or show works as often as once a year as part of this new arrangement.

James Turrell, Breathing Light, 2013, LED light into space, dimensions variable, photo by Floriann Holzerr

Look for exhibition space that is more hands-on. A gallery devoted to Gunnar Schonbeck, for instance, will invite viewers to make their own music. A firm believer that every object has its own inherent musicality and that each human is a musician at heart, the exhibit will feature many of the instruments he and Bennington College students created—all of them open for touching and playing. A gallery near Laurie Anderson’s workshop, meanwhile, will take viewers on a virtual reality tour as they walk into a space onto which she has painted every available surface with words and images.

August Solid Sound by Rick Levinson

The renovation has a practical side: it makes it easier to circulate between exhibits because it joins together buildings that were previously separated. “If all else goes to hell in a handbasket,” Thompson jokes of the new four-mile circumference—an intern actually clocked it with a pedometer—”we can open a health club.”

But the expansion goes beyond the MassMoCA campus itself, a critical part of the mission, according to Thompson. Expanding MassMoCA is just another step toward helping the entire Berkshire region. Located at the base of Mount Greylock, MassMoCA is a linchpin in a series of bike paths and hiking trails in the area. That’s one reason why—wait for it—a bike path will go through the middle of MassMoCA to more easily connect the other bike paths once they are finished. “It will be a microcosm of the best of New England,” Thompson says of the final development. “It could be one of the really wonderful attractions to this area.”

Joe Thompson–Director
MassMoCA
1040 MassMoCA Way
North Adams, Massachusetts
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Top image by Douglas Mason

The post The Ever-Expanding MassMoCA appeared first on Take Magazine.

Ascending the stairs to the second floor of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Massachusetts, I see Tanja Hollander on her phone, head tilted in that familiar position while bathed in the glittering light from Nick Cave’s nearby installation Until. I’m accompanied by curator Denise Markonish, one of Hollander’s IRL friends. We arrive at a table in front of one of her self-portraits; Hollander is still on the phone. I’m not offended or annoyed. In fact, as a digital native who’s lived much of my social life through a cell phone for almost eight years, I feel quite content. I’ve always believed that friends should be able to silently sit together while on their personal smart devices without it being an issue.

Tanja Hollander, Detail of Grid of 16 Travel Ephemera Still Lifes, 2011-2016, Archival Pigment Print, 44×44 in. | Photo courtesy Mass MoCA

In her exhibit Are you really my friend?, which opens at Mass MoCA on February 18th, it’s not this feeling of momentary kinship that Hollander seeks to unpack so much as the idea of true friendship—and how that’s changing in our digital age. The show features formal portraits of Hollander’s Facebook friends taken in their homes, the Maine artist traveling across the United States and Europe for nearly six years to capture as many of her 626 friends as she could. Adjacent to several of the resulting 430 portraits, Hollander also shows thoughtfully arranged and curated bits of ephemera from those travels: everything from a flattened Plan B box to personal notes left for her.

“My data is relevant, and your data is relevant. . .our data is relevant,” says Hollander, gesturing at the scanned bits of ephemera cropped square and arranged in a grid-like pattern, “and this boarding pass with its beautiful TSA mark is relevant in the same way that a handwritten note from one of my friends left in the morning before I got up is relevant.”

Tanja Hollander, Detail of Four Large Portraits, 2011-2016, Archival pigment print, 42×42 in. | Photo courtesy MASS MoCA

“In the same way that a beautifully staged and composed portrait is relevant,” adds Markonish, who points to an iPhone photo of a landscape shot through curtains.“They’re all relevant and all democratized, where each thing is as important as the next. I’ve done a lot of big shows here, but I think this show involves the most amount of information.”

Markonish’s comment is not an overstatement: Are you really my friend? Features 5,701 images (edited down from over 100,000) displayed on the walls, assembled over giant curtain banners, and framed in quiet concrete corners. It’s the first time that all of Hollander’s Facebook-friend portraits are being shown in one place.

Clip from Are you really my friend? The Movie | Directed by Robin Greenspun.

Hollander’s approach to dissecting and understanding friendship, the data we compile about ourselves over time and travel, is surprising and extremely contemporary. The scanned familiar objects from her travels link to a specific time, location, and, finally, to a Facebook friend portrait shared via a data visualization platform that will be available online and at the show. While the ephemera and notes don’t literally relate to each other, they act as markers of time and place throughout Hollander’s journey. A discarded package of European cigarettes links to a post-it note left for Hollander, which links to one of the 30 large portraits installed at the beginning of the exhibition space. “Everything cross-references everything else,” she explains.

We stroll into a partially walled-off portion of the exhibit, where most of the large portraits hang. For Hollander, it was very important to go to a person, share a meal, and sometimes even stay at their house. This emotional labor and caring connection is present in the portraits, which seems a bit ironic considering so much of social media, particularly Facebook, is about voyeurism and establishing a comfortable distance from certain people. Markonish comments on one of the portraits, a family seated upright in a clean, sunny kitchen. “They’re not uncomfortable, like a stranger is capturing them,” she says. “When I look at this portrait, I don’t feel like I’m spying on them; it feels very authentic.”

Tanja Hollander, Detail of Grid of 16 Travel Ephemera Still Lifes, 2011-2016, Archival Pigment Print, 44×44 in. | Photo courtesy MASS MoCA

“All of these people welcomed you into their homes,” Markonish says to Hollander, “and for so many of them, it wasn’t just ‘come in here, take a picture of me and leave,’ it was ‘share a meal with us, have our guest room.’ It became about welcome and hospitality.” The room of portraits features a wide variety of people in equally varied circumstances. I find myself drawn to a mother and daughter, heads tipped toward each other, sitting in a lovingly disorganized, cluttered kitchen that reminds me of home. The portrait hangs across from another featuring stylish furniture in a large living room, with an abstract painter-turned-meticulous-bird-illustrator sitting perfectly upright, almost regal, her chin up, cheek turned toward the viewer.

I ask Hollander and Markonish why, of all of the 626 friends exhibited, they decided to feature these 30 larger than the rest. “It was really based on image quality,” says Hollander, “while also keeping in mind class, race, age, gay, single parent, single person as opposed to just couples and families. Just trying to get the whole range of what is here, and highlight some of them [by making them] big. Both Denise and I were pretty conscious of not exclusively featuring white, middle-class arty people.”

Detail of Grid of 16 Snapshots, 2011-2016, archival pigment print | Photo courtesy MASS MoCA

Exiting the portrait room, I’m reminded again of how hard it is to avoid peering into the Nick Cave show adjacent to Hollander’s exhibit. “I will not lie, being next to Nick is incredibly intimidating,” Hollander admits. “Maybe I’m not as far away from Nick’s work as I think: he is overwhelming with bedazzle, and I’m doing it with the mundane, the every day. I’m saying, Look, you have these things, I have these things, we are all relevant. That’s what social media does. It’s the greatest historical archive of all time, written and visualized by the people for the people—not the aristocracy, who are usually the history writers and cultural influencers.”

Cautiously trying to avoid a Full House moment, I don’t ask Markonish and Hollander what they each have learned about friendship during the process of traveling, gathering information, and curating the show. But as I leave, Hollander, in her straightforward yet highly endearing way, offers one up herself. “One of the most important things that I learned is that I have a really close, tight group of friends that are my family,” she says. “They don’t all live in Maine; they live all across the world.”

Tanja Hollander, Detail of Grid of 16 Post-it Notes, 2012-2016, Archival Pigment Print, 44×44 in.

Tanja Hollander – photographer
Auburn, Maine
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Top photo Tanja Hollander, Detail of Grid of 16 Post-it Notes, 2012-2016, Archival Pigment Print, 44×44 | Photo courtesy MASS MoCA

The post Facebook-to-Face appeared first on Take Magazine.

On October 15th, Chicago-based artist Nick Cave opened his most epic installation to date, Until, at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. The piece broadcasts ambition on two fronts.  Physically, the installation swells to fill almost the entire volume of Building 5 – a football field-sized gallery space. The ambition of the message of Until’s is even greater ranking as Cave’s most overtly political installations to date. Full of imagery driven by the deaths of young African American men such as Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, the work’s title is a play on the phrase “innocent until proven guilty” or in this case “guilty until proven innocent.”

Until is more than an installation to be simply strolled through – as powerful an experience as that simple act can be. Cave sees his role as an artist to go beyond making work infused with a powerful political message, to make work that has a deep and meaning fun impact by instigating, provoking conversations across communities. His intention is that the gallery will play host to dancers, singers and performances and meetings by community groups over the next eight months.

Take was fortunate enough to attend a tour of Until, lead by Cave and Denise Markonish, curator at MASSMoCA for a group of about a dozen community leaders, artists and activists from Berkshire County. Cave and the museum have invited them to create work in response to Until that highlights and addresses community issues across the county. Beginning later this week, Take Magazine will begin a series following the development of this work over the next eight months, sharing with our readers how this community responds to Until, the creative output that is launched from it and the impact it has on the region.

Top Image | (From L to R) Bob Faust, Special Projects Director for Nick Cave, Nick Cave and MASSMoCA Curator Denise Markonish, Photo by Austin Harney

The post Wait Until You See This appeared first on Take Magazine.