Over the next few months on WAMC, we’re going to take you inside MASS MoCA in North Adams. The largest contemporary art museum in North America is allowing WAMC to follow the full course of an exhibition — from conception to opening. This is part one of our series Mind Of The Museum.
Denise Markonish is one of MASS MoCA’s four visual arts curators.
“I always kind of loathe to use the word curator, because I think producer is actually a better term,” she told WAMC.
Markonish, a graduate of Brandeis and Bard, found her place in the arts at 17.
“I had wanted to be an artist, and then I went to the local art museum in my hometown — Brockton, Massachusetts — and I met a curator. She gave us a tour and I thought, ‘That’s a job?’ I was like, that’s what I’d be good at," said Markonish- who has been at the museum since 1997. “My last big show was Nick Cave’s ‘Until,’ which was a huge kaleidoscopic exhibition that dealt with gun violence, but also how we lift ourselves up as communities.”
She’s also worked with sound, visual, and virtual reality artist Laurie Anderson on her multiple installations at the museum, as well as helming the largest survey of contemporary Canadian art ever presented — the 63-artist “Oh Canada” installation, which ran from 2012 to 2013. Markonish’s current project is bringing the work of Trenton Doyle Hancock to MASS MoCA.
“I’ve known Trent’s work for a really long time," she said. "I’ve always — I’ve been following his career for years and always admired what he did. Loved his work as painter, and saw him branching off into these other realms — thinking about toys, thinking about pop culture.”
She first met Hancock in 2015 in Houston, where he lives and creates. He took Markonish to his studio — a warehouse that houses his work as well as his considerable toy collection.
“And one of the first questions he asked me was, ‘what was your favorite toy growing up?’ And I said, ‘well, I’m a total nerd, so it was Alfie, the learning robot,’ and he goes, ‘Oh, you mean like this?’ and he pointed to a high up shelf and there were three of them there. And he said, ‘would you like to take him home with you?’” she told WAMC.
Markonish says she and Hancock are pop culture nerds of the same generation, and they bonded over the movies, television, and music of the 80s and 90s.
“I’m also a big fan of what a lot of people in the art world think is a dirty word — but like, narrative," said Markonish. "And art that is about storytelling. And he is I think one of the supreme contemporary artists that is engaging with mythology and storytelling.”
Despite the references to mythology, there is a very real undercurrent to her curatorial choice to bring Hancock to northern Berkshire County.
“When we find ourselves at a loss for our current moment, our current condition, we want to invent stories, we want to invent things that are better or worse than what we’re dealing with, as this form of understanding," she told WAMC. "So much of it is allegory and relates to things that have happened. So I think it is our way of putting together the world for ourselves.”
Markonish brought Hancock out to MASS MoCA in the fall of 2016 to sketch out ideas for how to realize his vision at the museum.
“So when I first brought Trent here, I said, 'what would it look like if we put the inside of your brain in a gallery?'” she said.
Hancock took that prompt to heart, and has envisioned giant, life-sized mounds that will be each filled with a different medium — one lined with a selection of toys from his collection, another filled with video art, and more. For Markonish, who’s tasked with finding ways to bring the sketches to life, it’s just another day at Mass Moca.
“I always say unless it’s truly dangerous or it’s really going to irreversibly alter the structural integrity of our building, we’ll probably do it," luaghed Markonish.
Hancock’s installation — “Mind of the Mound: Critical Mass” — will be housed in Building 5, the museum’s largest gallery, with an expected opening in Spring 2019.
The next installment of WAMC’s series Mind Of The Museum will explore Hancock himself — the intertwined stories of his complex artistic mythology and that of his own life. As he puts it, “from birth almost, I’ve always had a pencil in my hand, I’ve always identified as an artist.”
