Our final stop on our whirlwind sightseeing trip to the Berkshires: Mass MoCA, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. It’s in an incredible restoration of old factory buildings in the center of downtown North Adams.
Art is everywhere, even the parking lot.
The campus also has shops and restaurants:
And one of my favorite food and lifestyle book publishers, Storey Books.
The entrance:
Lobby:
Even the bathrooms are cool: 
First stop, kids art:
Having fun with portraits:
Cool craft tables:
This reminded me much of Garner Arts.
A massive display of Sol Lewitt:
More industrial beauty:
And more Sol Lewitt:
This was called Encampment by Francesco Clemente.
Big tents… all of the fabric hand-made. From the web site: “Clemente’s transitory experience of changing geographies, diverse cultural climates, and indeed consciousness itself infuses his imagery and art with a particularly rich range of references and meaning.”
Now I’m getting artistic myself:
This tree below had passenger pigeons fill its branches and then fly off.
It was incredible:
“Eclipse consists of a massive 100-foot video projection, screens on the walls and ceiling of MASS MoCA’s four-story atrium. The video loop shows a flock of passenger pigeons in reverse-negative silhouette lifting out of a life-sized tree, accompanied by sound design consisting of layers of digitally processed human voices. The exhibition offers a space for reflection with a limited-edition artist publication that includes writings by Kolbert, original photography by Sayler/Morris, and archival images.”
Jim Shaw’s Entertaining Doubts: 
An octagonal room of curiosities. Called The Octogon Room by Mark Dion. The kids loved to explore. 
From the web site:
“The Octagon Room takes the appearance of a Brutalist styled bunker. However, within the installation the viewer is invited to browse through an abandoned office, the contents of which represent the artist’s own labyrinthine history of the past eight years. Dion’s decision to utilize the octagon was inspired by the 19th century mania for octagonal buildings, popularized by the American phrenologist Orson Squire Fowler, who championed the merits of octagonal homes over rectangular and square structures. Ultimately, octagonal houses never took hold and, instead these eight-sided homes seemed to be the choice of the individualists, standing defiant among their four-sided neighbors.”
That was about all we could manage — and it was a lot! — but there is so much more to see. A really mind-blowing place. I would love to see Rockland achieve something as ambitious with Garner Arts.
