Here’s a well deserved shout out for Mass MoCA. One of my all time favorite museums, this innovative, expansive and lively space is celebrating its 10 year anniversary. That’s no small feat.
(A piece about its inception is posted on Slow Painting, excerpted from an article by Geoff Edgers in the Boston Globe.)
Here are a few shots from a recent visit:
The extravagant installation of Sol LeWitt walls
(No hurry on seeing these–the LeWitts will be on view through 2033)
Riki Moss and Thalassa Ali, day trip companions
And from the Anselm Kiefer exhibit, Sculpture and Painting:
A few words on Kiefer’s work by Ken Johnson:
Mr. Kiefer’s career-making move was to draw an analogy between two big ideas: transforming raw materials into art and transforming the raw history of Germany into a mythology of redemption and rebirth. These transformations are not literal. Rather they happen in the viewer’s mind. We see his paintings as expanses of viscerally physical raw material, and at the same time we see them as big, artistic pictures and mythic images. The thrill is not in one or the other but in holding both views in mind at the same time.
That, in a sense, is the lesson of Mr. Kiefer’s art: that we can see through a kind of parallax vision, literally with one eye and spiritually with the other. We are all alchemists. Every day we perform mental acts that transform inert objects into things of meaning, beauty and desire, reviving the world by creative acts of imagination. The lead and concrete in Mr. Kiefer’s works remain just lead and concrete if we are unable or unwilling to see them otherwise.