Art made to attach to buildings or to be given away? Wearable art for street demonstrations or art that sets up a booth at a trade show? This is the art of the interventionists, who trespass into the everyday world to raise our awareness of injustice and other social problems. These artists don't preach or proselytize; they give us the tools to form our own opinions and create our own political actions. The Interventionists, which accompanies an exhibit at MASS MoCA, serves as a handbook to this new and varied work. It's a user's guide to art that is exciting, provocative, unexpected, inspiring (artistically and politically), and fun. From Michael Rakowitz's inflatable homeless shelter and William Pope.L's "Black Factory" truck with pulverizer, gift shop, and giant inflatable igloo to the Biotic Baking Brigade's political pie-throwing, the art of The Interventionists surveys a growing genre and offers a guide for radical social action.The book classifies the artists according to their choice of tactics: the Nomads, who create mobile projects; Reclaim the Streets, artists who act in public places; Tools for Resistance: Ready to Wear, artists who produce fashion for political action; and the Experimental University, artists whose work engages pedagogy and theory. The accompanying text includes essays by noted scholars putting the work in a broader cultural and social context as well as texts by the artists themselves.

The Interventionists: Users' Manual For The Creative Disuption Of Everyday Life

Reference

MASS MoCA

Unnatural Science: An Exhibition Spring 2000-Spring 2001

Arts & Photography

Heon, Laura Steward

ACKERMAN, John

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Game Show: An Exhibition Spring 2001-Spring 2002 Mass Moca

In an uncommon move this summer, MASS MoCA exhibits dozens of lush, richly-painted canvases and beautifully rendered large-scale wall drawings, all from contemporary artists working in Vienna today. These uncommonly beautiful pieces--represented in this exhibition catalog--draw on the history of decorative patterning and a strong tradition of painterly gesture in Vienna. Vienna is also home to artists who challenge established art forms with wit, cunning, and subtle innuendo, much of which in informed by Vienna's geopolicital location at the crossroads of east and west Europe. Experience Peter Kogler's wraparound video room and see Erwin Wurm's groundbreaking Fat Car (an actual Bentley overdosed on steroids. 
Decorative, lithe and beautifully-drawn are all words that describe this exhibition, but so do fat, pink, and out-of-control.

Uncommon Denominator: New Art from Vienna

When MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) opened in 1999, it was hailed as the largest contemporary art center in the United States and also a symbol of economic revitalization in a blue-collar New England mill town. The story of how MASS MoCA came to be was eloquently told in MASS MoCA from Mill to Museum. Now, three essays about the transformation of a row of mill houses across the street from the museum, accompanied by over 100 color photographs, form the perfect companion to this earlier book and extend the story from the museum to the town itself. 
Porches: Art and Renewal on River Street is about the transformation from mill housing to guest housing, and more: it’s about the transformation of a city as it retools itself for the 21st century and about the marriage of art and commerce in an industrial mill town. It’s about innovative urban renewal, and sensitive architectural design that transforms a property while respecting the history of its place. And, in the words of photographer Nicholas Whitman, this book is about the "back and forth" through the windows: from the people in the early 1900’s who looked out the windows of their River Street apartments to the mill where they worked across the river to the entrepreneurs, architects, and museum visitors of the 21st century who looked through those same windows, from the museum to the inn, and from the inn to the museum, and saw a parallel sort of socio-economic interaction across River Street. It’s a way of viewing things.

Porches: Art and Renewal on River Street

History

Whitman, Nicholas

Americas

Blane De St. Croix's work sits at a cross road - inspired by the long history of landscape painting as well as the land art of the 60s and 70. De St. Croix takes these dual approaches (the depiction of landscape in painting and the use of sculpture to highlight changes in the land) and deepens them by engaging with the ecology and the politics of place. By starting with intense research - site visits, interviews with local inhabitants and researchers, and consultations with scientists, journalists, and cultural historians - De St. Croix unpacks his subject collaboratively to create a more complete picture. The resulting artworks are not only visually seductive but tell stories in order to facilitate a greater understanding of the shared social, political, and environmental changes we face globally.How to Move a Landscape is De St. Croix largest and most ambitious exhibition to date and will open in MASS MoCA's 18,000 square foot first floor galleries in July 2020. The exhibition will include existing works alongside new monumental installations focusing on field research about the Earth's dissolving permafrost layer. Focused on the rapid changes in arctic climate and topography, De St. Croix's blend of science, data, sculpture, narrative, and technology will result in the design and creation of a soaring multistory sculpture of a Glacier alongside a research gallery featuring interviews with scientists and residents of the Arctic Region. These interviews address both the scientific data and transformation of residents' ancestral landscapes. The lushly illustrated book will showcase De St Croix's multi-faceted project with texts from scientists and researchers such as Julie Brigham-Grette, Vladimir Romanovsky, Patrick Megonigal and Craig Tweedie, alongside poems from Joy Harjo and Matthea Harvey, essays by Denise Markonish and Jeffrey Kastner, and an interview with Martha Scwendener.

How to Move a Landscape

Blane De St. Croix

Denise Markonish

Travel Light (at The Porches Inn)

Mike

Glier

Nine cars arced through the 300 foot long gallery, tumbling and suspended in mid-air as if by stop-action. Long transparent rods radiated from the car, pulsing with dazzling multicolored light. An explosive moment, expanded in time and space as if in a dream, the cars formed the centerpiece of Inopportune by Cai Guo Qiang.
An adjacent gallery opened for the installation housed Inopportune: Stage 2, in which nine realistic tigers also hovered in the air, each one pierced by hundreds of arrows. The imagery in this gallery referred to the famous 13th-century Chinese story epitomizing bravery, in which a man named Wu Song rescued a village by slaying a man-eating tiger. In yet a third space, a phantom car bristling with fireworks floated like a ghost through the glittering illusion of Times Square at night.
Engaging images of our unsettled world, Inopportune created a theatrical, psychologically charged space in which to reflect on some of the most pressing dilemmas and contradictions affecting us such as terrorism and cultural, religious conflict, violence and beauty, the meaning of heroism.
-MASS MoCA, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art

Cai Guo-Qiang: Inopportune

Cai Guo-Qiang (Exhibition Catalog). Laura Steward Heon, Robert Pogue Harrison, J

A paperback, color book featuring Mass. MoCA's "Ahistoric Occasion" exhibition. Features historically-reimagined art by Felix Gmelin, Greta Pratt, Paul Chan, Yunka Shonibare, Allison Smith, Nebojsa Seric-Shoba, Trevor Paglen, Jeremy Deller, Peggy Diggs and others.

Ahistoric Occasion: Artists Making History

Joseph Thompson

Nato Thompson

Housed in a unique slipcase of Spencer Finch's design, this first monograph is as visually stunning and thought-provoking as the work within. The confounding question of the title refers to Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophical "propositions," and reflects the inquisitive nature of Finch's practice and his interests in the limits of thought and vision. What Time is it on the Sun? presents 120 color photographs and accompanying texts documenting 40 varied works, plus three essays on the literary, philosophical and scientific inspirations that drive Finch's intelligent and quixotic musings. A conceptual artist and a romantic, he examines the problems of representation through subjects as elusive as the Milky Way and wind, rendered in unexpected materials ranging from Tang to invisible ink. Working with light and color, Finch often focuses on historically charged locales as he explores the shifting terrain of desire and memory, highlighting the role subjectivity plays in shaping our perceptions.

Spencer Finch: What Time is it on the Sun?

Hudson, Suzanne

Cross, Susan

Birnbaum, Daniel

History & Criticism

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Books by MASS MoCA