June 16, 2014

Teresita Fernández

It was only about a three-hour drive from our house in Westchester to North Adams, Massachusetts, home of MassMOCA, the country’s largest museum of modern and contemporary art. We were booked into a B&B on East Main Street, walking distance to the City’s major restaurants and only a short drive from the museum. We spent Saturday enjoying the countryside and then, right after breakfast on Sunday, headed for MassMOCA. I’m not one to spend whole days in museums. One of the reasons I have membership in so many museums is so that I can feel easier about just going in and seeing a single show, or even a single work of art, and then leaving. The last time I “did” a museum for a whole day was Crystal Bridges in Bentonville, Arkansas. We’d driven there from Memphis on a pilgrimage we were making to Marfa, Texas. It seemed worth the time, and was, but we weren’t going to spend more than a day in Bentonville and so took in all of the museum in that one visit. Our purpose in driving to North Adams was to visit MassMOCA and, too, to have a bit of a getaway from life at home. But we wouldn’t be coming back soon, we knew, so we had determined that we would spend an entire day at the museum.
And though we left the museum nearly six hours after arriving, ready for some good food and a drink (which were available only five minutes away), we left extremely satisfied and very happy that we had made the trip.
Most, if not all, of what we saw will be on view throughout the summer, so I suggest you go to their web site and see what is happening. But, in a nutshell, the two major exhibitions going on right now—“Teresita Fernández: As Above So Below” and “Izhar Patkin: The Wandering Veil”—are truly wonderful shows that are also perfectly suited to the vast spaces that MassMOCA provides.
If you’re looking to get out of town, I can’t recommend this enough. And, starting next week, they’re adding an additional two hours a day on to the museum’s visiting hours, making it that much easier to take it all in. By the way, MassMOCA is on the site of an old factory complex and there are places to walk outside that help break up the day and refresh you a bit. There’s a building down the Speedway from the main building that just houses their collection of Anselm Kiefer.
Enjoy.