![]() Not surprisingly, tensions persist between MASS MoCA’s cosmopolitan appeal and the lived reality of North Adams locals. View of columns along the outer perimeter of the interior of Building 6 at MASS MoCA (image by Alex Jen for Hyperallergic) ![]() A series of aerial shots contextualize the museum’s sprawling presence relative to the rest of North Adams, which is a quaint but largely uneventful place. Museum Town was shot by a team of three cinematographers, and for the most part the camera stays close to the ground as it explores the massive complex and admires its scale much in the way we look up at skyscrapers in a metropolis. Comprised of 26 brick buildings, one exhibition space the size of a football field, and 600,000 square feet dedicated to the seemingly boundless display of art, MASS MoCA is now considered a cultural landmark and a site of pilgrimage for arts enthusiasts. Truly preposterous in scale, MASS MoCA resembles a campus more than a typical art museum. It was in development for 13 years before it finally opened its doors in 1999 Museum Town‘s release coincides with its 20th anniversary. The museum, as a result, had to evolve to mirror these concerns. The strand of contemporary art they hoped to exhibit concerned itself with resisting its own commodification through sheer impracticality and size. Inspired by the conceptual goals of large-scale public artworks, such as those of Donald Judd and Richard Serra, the MASS MoCA founders sought to reinvent how museums function. Museum Town, which premiered March 10th at the South by Southwest Film Festival, is comprised of two main narrative threads: the first lays out a history of the institution’s funding challenges since staff members of the Williams College of Art took hold of a newly vacated North Adams factory space in 1986. Narrated by Meryl Streep, and featuring a gentle but energetic original score by Wilco bassist John Stirratt, the film is a deceptively breezy retrospective on Mass MoCA’s unlikely success it illuminates how and to what extent art and cultural institutions can help revive communities under duress. In her directorial debut, journalist and author Jennifer Trainer returns to a project that first fascinated her back in 1985, when she wrote an article for The New York Times about the fledgling idea to situate an art museum in a struggling small town. Fast forward to today and North Adams is best known as home of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) - one of the largest contemporary art museums in the world.Ī new documentary called Museum Town chronicles MASS MoCA’s tumultuous early years and examines its founders’ vision of art as a tool for economic development. Since then, the town has been mired in financial troubles. During the postwar boomer years, the town was a bustling manufacturing center, but in 1984, the local electric company shut down its factory operations, putting thousands of residents out of work. Promotional materials and publicity have altogether failed to acknowledge this pertinent detail.”ĪUSTIN - The picturesque mill town of North Adams, Massachusetts sits nestled between state parks and mountain reserves a few miles south of the Vermont border. The film itself makes no reference to this conflict of interest, and publicity for the film treats this fact disingenuously by referring to Thompson as simply ‘writer and journalist’ Jennifer Trainer in both her South by Southwest director bio and in her official festival interview. ![]() “Museum Town was directed by Jennifer Trainer Thompson, a former MASS MoCA director of development and the former spouse of current MASS MoCA director, Joe Thompson. We contacted the writer for clarification on the matter and received the following response: ![]() Aerial view of Building 6 at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) (image courtesy MASS MoCA)Įditor’s Note: After the publication of this review, it has been brought to our attention that the director of the MASS MoCA documentary is also a former employee of the museum, a fact that was not made clear in the publicity materials or during its screening at the SXSW film festival.
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