They then climb up ladders to an overhead platform constructed of millions of chandelier crystals and covered on top with bric-a-brac seemingly collected from a thousand basements and backyards. Visitors enter the exhibit by walking through hundreds of circular foil shapes dangling from the ceiling. Cave’s recent work, “Until,” is now on display in the museum’s largest room.
With the $35 million state grant and additional private funds, the rambling old factory buildings were remodeled to showcase the work of contemporary artists who like the challenge of exhibiting their work in spaces that are as large as a football field.
Krens went on to become director of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, so Joseph Thompson, his young colleague, took over, gathering the support and funding needed to open the museum in 1999. John Barrett III, the former mayor of North Adams, suggested the vacant factory, and the idea of revitalizing the city by turning the old factory into an art museum began to hatch. Business in the city’s center, which had already suffered when several older, prominent buildings were bulldozed by the federal government’s urban renewal program, started to wane.Ī year after Sprague shut its gates, Thomas Krens, then director of the Williams College Art Museum, went looking for spaces to exhibit contemporary art. Residents left in droves in search of jobs. Unemployment in North Adams soared as the last 2,000 workers were pink-slipped. The company’s payroll, which supported 4,000 workers at its peak in the mid-1960s, started to decline over the next two decades and in 1985, the company finally shut its doors. In the 1970s, sales continued to rise for Sprague components, but profits sagged due to overseas competition. Mayor Richard Alcombright shakes hands with former governor Jane Swift, a North Adams resident who also spoke at the Building 6 opening. Twenty years ago, MASS MoCA opened its doors with the help of $35 million in state funding and a promise to bring much-needed jobs and visitors to North Adams. The grand plan for MASS MoCA has always been to create a synergistic relationship with its host city. “I see this as a generational shift,” he says. He says the shift from a manufacturing to an arts community is as much cultural as it is economic, and takes time. He is confident the museum will not only attract more tourists who will spend money in other areas of the city, but will act as a catalyst for other arts-related businesses that will call North Adams home. Halio says she and her husband plan to eat at the museum café on this visit, but maybe they’ll eat downtown on their next. The gun barrel is angled toward a would-be voter’s head. “This one is about social justice,” she says, staring at a piece featuring a gun rack mounted on the outside of a voting booth. Marcia Halio, who drove up from Delaware with her husband to visit their daughter at Williams College in neighboring Williamstown, says she is very impressed by the level of art in Building 6. “We want to make it impossible for people to visit MASS MoCA and the northern Berkshires and to leave after a few hours or even a day,” says MASS MoCA’s founding director, Joseph Thompson. “We want them to take the time to stay and shop around town and buy two to three meals before heading back home.”