The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) is a museum in a converted factory building located in North Adams, Massachusetts. It is one of the largest centers for contemporary visual art and performing arts in the United States.
MASS MoCA opened with 19 galleries and 100,000 sq ft (9,300 m2) of exhibition space in 1999. In addition to housing galleries and performing arts spaces, it also rents space to commercial tenants. It is the home of the Bang on a Can Summer Institute, where composers and performers from around the world come to create and perform new music. The festival, started in 2001, includes concerts in galleries for three weeks during the summer. Starting in 2010, MASS MoCA has become the home for the Solid Sound Music Festival, curated by Wilco. The three-day-long festival takes place all over MASS MoCA's campus.
Famous quotes containing the words museum, contemporary and/or art:
“[A] Dada exhibition. Another one! What’s the matter with everyone wanting to make a museum piece out of Dada? Dada was a bomb ... can you imagine anyone, around half a century after a bomb explodes, wanting to collect the pieces, sticking it together and displaying it?”
—Max Ernst (1891–1976)
“This socialism will develop in all its phases until it reaches its own extremes and absurdities. Then once again a cry of denial will break from the titanic chest of the revolutionary minority and again a mortal struggle will begin, in which socialism will play the role of contemporary conservatism and will be overwhelmed in the subsequent revolution, as yet unknown to us.”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)
“An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)