A fantastic Museum

This past week I had the pleasure of visiting The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, MA. Honesty requires me to admit that I went there with low expectations, and avoidance of going sledding, but was pleasantly surprised!  Contemporary Art is not my favorite genre. I often find it both self-serving and pretentious and not enlightening or  uplifting in the least. Well some of it was. But the experience overall was wonderful and expanding.

The facility is both innovative and wonderful. It is a warren constructed of several buildings that once housed a 19-20th century manufacturing concern. They have retained the bricks and mortar and connected the buildings with tunnels and bridges that are interesting in and of themselves.

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While at times I felt I had fallen down the rabbit hole, I nevertheless enjoyed the adventure of exploration (and was glad they hadn't felt the need to add Ikea -like arrows for navigation!!) At the end of the tunnel, you can see a glimpse of the Sol LeWitt exhibition. It was three stories of precision and color! While the top two floors were interesting in the chromatic cacophony they presented, it was his early work in the first floor that I found intriguing. They presented his grid system and process with which the exhibit was constructed.

What struck me most was how very similar it was to the thought process that quilters go through while designing with multiple blocks of a repetitive design.

The highlight of the museum was the Anslem Kiefer exhibit. He is one of those artists that should rarely be shown in reproduction. The monumental size and the textural richness of his work is just not done justice no matter the number of dots per inch in reproduction! There is an entire building that has been erected to house three major works of his. The Museum will house these for no less than 25 years. The three works are vastly different in both concept and execution, but each as resounding as the other. For me, there have been few works (especially in the "contemporary" genre) that have moved me as the "Women of the Revolution" The literature about the exhibit explains the work as: It takes "its inspiration from Jules Michelet's 1854 study, Les Femmes de la Revolution, which chronicles the lives of specific women. who, in their uncompromising willingness to pursue democratic values, played an important role in the French revolution."
Click on any of the below photos to see larger and fully and at full crop.

Thank you Mr. Kiefer. You have done what art should do. Your craftsmanship is impeccable and supported fully by a strong concept and point of view, with not a trace of self-aggrandizing. You made me think on many levels.