When Sprague closed its North Adams operation in 1985, the local economy had the stuffing knocked out of it. Art - and a museum director called Thomas Krens - came to the rescue.
Krens, as many people know, later became an aggressively expansionist director of the Guggenheim Museum, where he was responsible, among other things, for reviving the languishing Spanish industrial town of Bilbao with a spectacular, Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim outpost. Back in the 1980s, he was still director of the Williams College Museum of Art.
Seeing North Adams’s plight, and hunting around for a flexible space suited to the showing of large scale contemporary art, he backed a town proposal to convert the old Sprague campus on Marshall Street into what is now Mass MoCA, which has since become one of the most dynamic contemporary art museums in the country.
Mass MoCA can do things that no other museum can for one simple reason: space. It has room to burn. Right now (until Oct. 31), for instance, you can see a remarkable installation made from giant shards of white Styrofoam and huge heaps of soil, delivered by truck, that have been spray-painted lurid colors by the German artist Katharina Grosse. It’s vast. It’s amazing. It’s worth checking out.
There’s also a group show called “The Workers’’ - 25 artists engaged with what it means to be a worker in today’s global economy. And of course, you cannot go to Mass MoCA without seeing the semi-permanent, still flabbergasting retrospective of Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings. These hypnotic works - deadpan, but full of sly wit - spread across three levels, and remain as fresh today as when the show opened three years ago.
(Hurricane Irene devastated picturesque Route 2 between Charlemont and North Adams in August. I have been told it’s impassable, with road signs suggesting a detour that takes an extra half hour. Mass MoCA’s website, under “Directions,’’ suggests a much shorter detour - but which requires you drive right past a sign saying “ROAD CLOSED.’’)
