How would I describe Mass MoCA to somebody who had never been here?

I would describe it as a 24 acre factory site from the 1800s.

That is now an exploratorium for contemporary artists and the public.

I think when Mass Moca began, everyone was very excited about this massive space and seeing what it would turn into.

You can always find yourself in relationship to the world outside.

You can look out and you can see the world, and then the art is in the world.

It's not just in the museum.

There's a sense that the artist is closer to that institution, and I really like that a lot.

There are artists who are developing work here that work in film.

There are artists who are working in AI and sculpture, installation, printmaking, drawing, painting, dance, theater, and a lot of different kinds of genres of music.

You turn a corner here and you go from one immersive experience into another, and yet another and yet another.

I think here at Mass MoCA, things function a little differently than normal museums.

We have 300,000f of galleries to work with.

So I don't want to do a show that an artist can do anywhere else.

We have a unique building, so I want to be either working with an emerging artist where this is their first big opportunity, or working with an artist who's known and letting them do something that they couldn't have dreamed that they could do anywhere else.

The museum itself works with artists, really, from a foundational beginning point of a question.

And that question is: What is an idea that you have not yet realized?

That a space like this can make possible.

And that can be your pen on a page.

It can be your body on a stage, that can be a bow and a string.

That can be a paintbrush, that can be a string of code, that can be a number of different things.

Immersive art is becoming a genre unto itself.

And the approach to immersion is really different.

I think part of it is it uses more of our senses.

I think immersive work is saying and cueing to audiences of multiple generations, not just spectacle and not just multi-sensory, but actually that you complete the art by being present for it and within it.

People come here to have an experience, and I think taking that a step further to give people experiences that they can feel like they're inside of, it only amplifies that.

Everything that we do here also design, lighting, the soundscapes, everything that we go on has elements of surprise and adds to that full experience.

And it uses the building and the factory and the historic architecture to give us a sense of feeling free.

Right?

Everything's not pristine and perfect.

You get to actually see a long lived in factory of making, and the immersion in imagining that transition over time is another one of the journeys that happens here.

The site that Mass MoCA is the steward of is old factory sites in western Massachusetts, rural western Massachusetts, that was built originally in the 1800s.

It opened in 1860, and the town and the city grew around it.

So when this factory closed in 1984, it was decimating to the region, economy, people and the scale of it being such 25 buildings.

How would you even approach another use?

At the time, there was the idea of creating a contemporary art museum here, and the only other idea that was sitting in the wings was a penitentiary.

I always say that Mass MoCA gives people permission to get lost, permission to wander, to wander.

There's no easy way to design a map of this place.

And I always say, like, sure, use the map as your guide, but just discover.

Just like follow every passageway.

And we also try to use art to guide people.

So like an old tunnel walkway that goes between the lobby and the Sol Lewitt, we've installed Julian Schwartz to do a sound piece inside.

And it is this incredible piece where that whole tunnel just sings.

Or another space that we often use for weddings.

We installed this beautiful Spencer Finch on the ceiling that's like a Milky Way.

Artists are always helping each other by provoking new ways of approaching something that is inspiring.

I mean, artists are problem solvers.

They're always asking a particular question, which is where to from here, where best from here?

And what artists tend to move towards our installation projects.

They can utilize our art fabrication studio spaces with our team to build ideas that they couldn't realize on their own.

And those installations tend to be very immersive because of the scale itself.

So where we're sitting right now is one little section of one ground floor building with Sol Lewitt.

Early career works that you could immerse your entire self in through three floors and tens of thousands of square feet of space to really look at what he had designed, what he was focused on, and what was executed.

So this is a long term project that will be here for well over 25 years.

And it's like a pilgrimage.

People come from all over the world to experience this work.

I'm particularly fond of the Khan exhibition that we have up right now.

The road to hybrid iPad.

Not only is the artist amazing, but it's based outside of Detroit.

This is the first major installation project that would bring him to a certain level of national attention, and it took years and years of fabrication with our team to be able to build that dream.

I think, one of the things that a lot of people don't know about Mass MoCA is the length in which we work with artists.

Right now, we're putting the finishing touches on Jeffrey Gibson's installation, and that has been a seven year process.

Earlier we were talking about Sarah Oppenheimer.

That was also seven years.

Especially also with the scale which we have here, you know, building five in particular, where Jeffrey Show is, is the size of a football field.

And, you know, just like your standard objects don't work in there, they just disappear.

And so whenever I work with artists in that space, my thing is always not just what it looks like, but what does it feel like?

And I remember having that conversation with Jeffrey early on, and he keeps saying about this, this is not an exhibition.

It's an experience.

I think over the years, creating immersive work has really kind of grown into my overall practice because of my interest in the body and wanting other bodies to experience.

I think what I feel when I'm making or what I feel when I'm engaged in movement, I think more about atmosphere than the objects.

I'm interested in this notion of faith, in particular in what we wear and the kind of faith that we can imbue clothing with, and different kinds of things, amulets and things that we wear on our bodies to protect ourselves.

In this case, I wanted to think about queer bodies and explore the term two-spirit, the indigenous term for people who exist on the spectrum within male and female attributes.

And that can vary from tribe to tribe.

In this case.

Also, I wanted to make an atmospheric environment that was somewhere between a church and a disco.

I mean, for me, that is a communal space that's imbued with faith, and there's a tremendous amount of comfort in that, that I've experienced.

The way that I envisioned, you enter into a darkened space first, and that darkened space feels very much like a nightclub.

There are video screens suspended from the ceiling, which is this montage of about 25 indigenous and queer online content creators.

And we've remixed it, we've resampled it, we've looped and we've chopped it up and layered it.

And I was thinking about like the videos that I remember seeing in gay clubs in the 80s that were just these television monitors, like, tucked into the ceiling.

And they were kind of nonsensical, like sometimes there would be like a commercial for something, or there would be porn, or there would be just colors and patterns moving, and then it goes into this kind of dreamy state of bodies morphing, and then you walk through this long portal, this tunnel that brings you into this space that we're in now.

And it's very bright.

And I wanted it to feel like this atmosphere of being in a kind of daytime space, kind of counter to the nighttime space of the nightclub.

And then when you enter into this back space here, there's a video of me wearing all of these garments at different points and moving.

And I just thought, there's this thing about when objectifying yourself to be looked at.

Mine, of course, is done for the camera, and it's been edited in a way where it is seven versions of me moving around the screen.

And then upstairs there's a resource room where we have some artists videos.

We have vintage footage of indigenous pride festivals in the early 90s, and we also have three indigenous drag garments on view.

I hope when people visit the exhibition that I hope there's joy.

First of all, I think that there's also something of a feeling of when you're young and you're fearless.

Before you know that the world is as scary of a place as it can be.

And I think there were moments in my teens and early 20s when I really felt very grounded amongst my friends and my peers, and it was listening to music, dancing the way we would dress, maybe language that we shared.

And there was such a feeling of camaraderie and, unity and hope about that experience.

And I'm hoping that will translate for people here.

Welcome to the Plastic Bag Store, the world's only all packaging grocery store.

Each item is handcrafted from the finest plastic bags pulled from the garbage and offered to you, our most valued customers.

The plastic bags star Robin Pro Hart's Plastic Bag Store was a great initiative that our director, Christy Edmonds, brought in.

As we've been thinking about greening around our campus and around town.

I always say that all art is political, but what's beautiful about it is that we as an institution, it's not like us saying like, you need to recycle, but it's like us bringing in an artist who is talking about this and who can get people to think about it in a way that that information hasn't been presented to them yet.

So going into Robin's very immersive environment that is part theater, part installation, part film, and like all this kind of beautiful folly.

You walk in and it feels like you're in a grocery store bodega, but everything in there, every apple is made out of found plastic.

Every milk jug is recycled.

There's so much sort of playful language within there to of referencing this material.

And what's unique about that is in this instance, there are like docent actors who carry the audience through.

So rather than a sort of self-guided experience, it is a theatrical experience.

Everybody who I talk to, who comes from there, it's like: "We sat down to watch the first film and then we got to walk into the freezer!"

And everybody loves that moment where you like part the plastic slats and you get to sort of be inside the freezer, and then the next thing you know, you're like moving on to the faux museum of plastics and so this sense of like, in the far future, these things are going to become artifacts.

The films use puppets and then we have the actual docents.

And so it's it's really this kind of fantastical experience, but one that you come out of and you think, well, for that not to happen in the future, what do I have to do today?

More and more, I'm interested in things that don't have big walls in front of them, but they're just like, yeah, you can come in, have a look.

And that generosity is so amazing.

It helps people who don't necessarily know what they want to see, or if they're interested in art, to go and check it out and that's, you know, not intimidating for people.

I used to not value the context as much as I, I do now.

By that I mean that I thought any kind of theater would work well enough for me to put things into, but the more I do things, the more I realize that that's very, very important, how you come in to the place and and what it feels like.

And Mass MoCA is, you know, for me, it has this kind of crazy sense of continuity because it has given me a chance to kind of unfold in different ways.

I always like making things as a kid.

And I never was asked what I wanted to do, mostly because I come from a very big family and you get lost in the crowd, so no one goes, what are you going to do?

So I was free.

I didn't have to define anything and I still haven't defined anything.

So I'm just going for world.

That's it.

To me, the most important thing about a work of art is that you take it in somehow, not that you go into it, but you take it in and that it means something in your life.

I don't care if it's something that's brand new.

You know, I'm not looking to make something that no one has seen before.

I'm actually looking in a way, for the opposite.

Somebody who says, I know what you're talking about.

They recognize it.

It's a little bit different, maybe, than the way they thought about it.

But there's a sense of recognition.

Recognition, I think, is something that I am interested in.

I did not initially want to do VR because I was like, it comes from the gaming world.

And I thought, should adults just do that?

And then I kind of went into it.

I was like: "Oh, I love it!"

Chalk Room was a VR installation, let's say that was an experiment originally, and we worked out a lot of those ideas at Mass MoCA.

How many people should experience it at the same time?

What kind of place it was?

Should there be an intermediate area that has something of the imagery of the piece, like a little kind of anteroom to that world?

We learned a lot at Mass MoCA about how to present VR specifically, which is a tricky thing, I think.

So that was a really wonderful way to experiment with stuff like that.

I'm hoping to the next thing will be to convert the old VR place into a new project, which is top secret.

The other thing that was there is this table, which you can hear sounds through bone conduction, a very, very old piece from 1975 that I built at MoMA in their basement originally, and I found that really fun.

I love projecting onto different types of surfaces.

I would project into corners, or bend the image or projection to three dimensional things or from above anything to get rid of this.

You know, I just found the rectangle and shoving things into it really oppressive.

So sidewalk is in the shape of a sidewalk, and it's about this deep with paper which is shredded.

And I really love this kind of texture.

You know, an image broken up, it's like light refracting onto water or something.

It's just so beautiful.

And it's a story that is scenes from a hospital where I spend a lot of time as a kid, and it had to do with a lot of things from childhood and what it's like to to be a reader and to be read to as a child, what a story is.

But I've never changed when my work is about, it is always what is a story?

Whose story for?

To who and what is it?

And why are you telling me this story?

Way the whole sort of Boiler House Airstream trailer was another one that when I first came here, I was asked, like, what do you think we should do with that?

And I was like: "Art!

It has to all be art!"

I was like: "We don't need to take the machinery out and have a big space."

We've got plenty of big spaces.

So I started working with two artists.

So for the Boiler House itself, I worked with Steven Vitiello to do a piece called All Those Finished Engines.

He was really looking at the industrial past here, and we left all the machinery inside this former coal powered boiler house.

And it's just like this amazing rusted tangle.

I was also working with Michael Oatman, who did the piece All Utopias Fell, which sits on the truss that carries the old pipe from the boiler house to the factory.

So Michael was starting to think about solar power, and he wanted to create a folly where he could create this story about this person who once worked at the factory and was obsessed with the sun.

So he built a spaceship to try to reach the sun.

And of course, the whole piece is solar powered.

And when you wander, you walk up all these metal stairs and out on the gangplank, and then all of a sudden you're in this repurposed Airstream trailer, which has now become a spaceship, and it has all of his tools and his notes inside jars of canned tomatoes for his food source.

It's really this sort of like complete vision of who this person would have been.

And of course, the Airstream trailer then, or the spaceship that landed here when solar energy was a thing.

So often you go to museums and you don't hear people saying anything, or you hear them whispering, and to be inside a museum where people are just having fun, it like it breaks people's brains and in a really interesting way.

And I love when we accomplish it here.

I think people want to feel engaged and they want to feel in their bodies and in the world.

We spend so much time on these tiny little screens on our computers.

It reminds you that you're alive just point blank.

You know that you are in your body and you're in a place and then there's that very collective experience, too.

I might not know the person there, but I know we're having this shared moment.

And so it's like, it just it's a different kind of human connector.

I think the experience of Mass MoCA is one in which people walk away having felt like they could shed the anxieties or the various kinds of everythingness of the average day, and they get to take that energy with them.

And I want people to think so much of not always when they leave going, did I love everything that I saw?

But did I feel the way in which human beings are really working to make phenomenal things happen together in this place?

One of the things I always say about how we work at Mass MoCA is we don't reinvent the wheel, but we redesign it for every project.

You can tell stories in so many ways, and for me, I always say like, there's only a few reasons we don't do things.

And it's like if we truly can't find the money, if it's going to permanently alter the structural integrity of our building, or if it would do somebody harm.

It can be an outlandish idea, but actually when it has integrity and there's a will, then we can get there.

I think I'm always looking for gaps and how can I help to fill those gaps?

Now I feel like I get to make really what I want to make and what I can imagine.

I can't imagine doing anything else.

I always am very happy to work with a group of people who enjoy what they're doing.

Just call me shallow.

I just want to have fun.

I really do.

I really think that that's what we're here for.

It's about how you serve artists to liberate their imagination and not just dream their ideas to a marketplace.

And that truth for artists is what we hold dear, and that will continue into the future.

You.