Slowly but surely, things are loosening up, and there are indeed some openings and live cultural events beginning to take form in and around the region. A lot of thought has gone into most of these in terms of staying safe and enforcing social distancing requirements, so be sure to check details on the appropriate websites and, for my sake as well as yours, keep your masks on.
MASS MoCA in North Adams is opening its doors for the first time this weekend, beginning tomorrow. The 250,000 square-feet of cavernous gallery space at the behemoth cultural laboratory will be open every day from 10am to 6pm except Tuesdays, and admission will be via advance, timed tickets. New exhibits open today for members only and then to the public on Saturday, all requiring advance timed ticketing. How to Move a Landscape is Blane De St. Croix’s largest and most ambitious exhibition to date, running literally from the ceiling to below the floor. The result of years of fieldwork and collaboration with leading climate scientists, the exhibition explores climate change and the precarious nature of the world around us. In Kissing through a Curtain, ten contemporary artists address boundaries and attempts to communicate across them: not just between different languages, but also nations, cultures, media, bodies, and individual minds. Throughout the exhibition, the artists reflect on timely, urgent questions about who has access to which ideas, spaces, and histories. Plus there will be music – reggae outfit SayReal will perform on Saturday night at 8:30pm, but if you’re not a MASS MoCA member, you’ll have to join beforehand – membership has its privileges, and in this case, SayReal’s concert is a members-only event. Next Saturday night, July 18, MASS MoCA will host composer-performer Treya Lam in a re-iminaged concert courtyard that takes advantage of an industrial roll-top garage door and adjacent gallery overlooking the brick-lined courtyard to reveal a new stage, dramatically floating 12 feet above the audience.
MASS MoCA isn’t the only museum in the Berkshires that’s opening this weekend. The Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge and the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown will both reopen to the public on Sunday. Each museum will require advance ticketing reservations for staggered entry, and visitors will be required to wear face coverings indoors. The institutions are also planning to use visitor information gathered at ticketing for contact-tracing purposes, so be prepared for that.
As it happened, the Clark was lucky to have planned its first outdoor exhibition, “Ground/work,” for this summer, with site-specific installations from six different artists. Rather than unveil the collection all at once, the museum is welcoming visitors to view the installation process throughout the summer — a creative solution in response to the delays the artists have had amid the coronavirus pandemic.
And for those of you who need your Tanglewood fix, while you can’t attend a live performance there, you can stream a live performance tonight at 8pm, when actress and singer Lauren Ambrose hosts a recital of BSO musicians performing horn-centric music, featuring not only the standard orchestral French horn but also its cousin, the long Alphorn of Swiss, German, and Austrian tradition. The program includes two new works by BSO Associate Principal Horn player Richard Sebring, plus Standard horn repertoire by Schumann, Dukas, and Mozart — including the latter’s Quintet in E-flat for horn and strings.
Seth Rogovoy is editor of the Rogovoy Report, available at rogovoyreport.com
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