My Yearly Visit to MASS MoCA

MASS MoCA is one of my favorite museums, and it never disappoints.  Sometimes, given the large numbers of exhibitions on display, I will find an exhibit that I just don't get, or dislike for some reason.  but then there are other exhibits that really move me.  That happened on this visit as well. The largest exhibit is called "Ceramics in the Expanded Field" and it brings together a group of eight artists who are changing the way we think of clay. Their ambitious works integrate ceramics—a medium long  marginalized—with disciplines ranging from photography and video to painting and performance. Ceramics as a medium, it’s as old as the hills, or at least humankind. The prejudice against it was rooted less in its newness than the heavy historical freight it carried. Ceramics were decorative, or utilitarian, or women’s work, or ethnographic craft, and often all of the above, So this exhibit set about to change all that.

Well many of the artworks were dramatically distanced from what I have always thought of as ceramics.  Were they ever!  So I was taught by a brilliant professor of art in college to be very careful about dismissing something new that I may not understand the point of.  Apparently there are deep philosophical issues which many of these works are dealing with.  I did try hard to experience it, but because I am not a sophisticated observer, many of the pieces failed to move me emotionally.  Well, that's not entirely true.  Some of them I felt were ugly and so I was put off by them.  But that's on me, not on the works.  And maybe that's the point.

This is a view of one of the larger galleries which gives you a sense of the size of some of these pieces, in the background, while perhaps slightly more traditional pieces are shown in the foreground.

I did find some pieces that I got to enjoy a great deal.  This is one of them, and the richness of the details and the brilliant colors and the whimsey of the watering-can head were really a joy to behold!

But the piece below was lost on me.  Perhaps a curator could explain it to me, and the purpose of the upside down chair as foundation as well.  I am always willing to listen and to try and understand.  Perhaps the best example of that in my life is that I always waited to see how I felt when looking at paintings.  I found some that moved me immediately, and some that left me with no strong feelings.  But then I came to Mark Rothko and his paintings.  I was not moved by them, but then heard an art historian talk about how when he viewed some of the Rothko pantings, he swooned at the power of them and what he saw and felt.  And so that has set me on an exploration of his works for perhaps the last 7 or 8 years, and now I have a completely different sense about his work and enjoy the experience of being in their presence.

I really enjoyed this work, which is a dock and a neon sign, underneath which are a bed of oyster shells.  I can't explain it, but I really enjoyed this work.  And there are other exhibits that I saw as well, and I will be talking about and showing those in later posts.