The Magic of MASS MoCA

MASS MoCA is not a museum. Even though its initials stand for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

It really should be called the Massachusetts Magical Destination for Contemporary Art, because it’s more than the white walls and thoughtfully arranged paintings and sculpture you’re probably envisioning right now.

It’s an art funhouse, a wonderland, and a mind- and heart-opening experience. I’ve called it my happy place a few times in other stories (including my Ukulele Alphabet installments here and here), but I’ve never fully waxed poetic on it until now.

So let’s take a trip to MASS MoCA together!

all photos copyright Casey Barber – please be respectful and don’t use without permission!

Tucked into the northwest corner of Massachusetts, way way up in the Berkshires and almost at the Vermont border, MASS MoCA lives in the former Sprague Electric Company campus, which itself was the location of the Arnold Print Works textile mills from 1860 — yes, just before the Civil War — to the mid-1940s.

The monumental task of turning these deteriorating cathedrals of brick was a brilliant stroke of adaptive reuse way before it was cool for developers to create apartments and mixed-use complexes. The abandoned industrial buildings were restored but not sanitized to the point of erasure — and the history of the space makes itself clear everywhere.

The first time I walked into MASS MoCA, I felt unmoored by the possibility of the architecture, wandering through the labyrinth of buildings and passageways, finding a new visual delight as I rounded each corner.

And this is the key. Yes, you can wander through the Pompidou or MoMA or LACMA and stumble upon art that stuns and surprises you, but I believe that the unconventional setting of MASS MoCA is the secret sauce.

The sheer scope of the campus and the space afforded in these former factory buildings allows for some truly wildly imaginative art. Even trying to describe the breadth of artwork I’ve experienced here is so daunting that I keep devolving into lists instead of paragraphs.

Building 5 gets a lot of attention because it’s the biggest, most un-carved-up space: a cavernous, football field-length room where some of the most ambitious installations are situated.

It’s where I walked into Nick Cave’s glittering forest Until on my first visit to MASS MoCA, dazzled and disoriented by a rainbow of spinning discs.

And it’s where I zoomed around on Brava!, EJ Hill’s bubblegum-pink rollercoaster that was the centerpiece of his Brake Run Helix show, and wandered through the projections of Glenn Kaino’s In the Light of a Shadow.

But I’ve seen a lot of showstoppers and breathtakers throughout MASS MoCA. There’s an entire building devoted to the wall drawings of Sol Lewitt, each one executed carefully by a team of draftspeople. (You can see a timelapse of one of the drawings at the bottom of this page.)

If you hustle up to the Berkshires before September 2026, you can experience Alison Pebworth’s Cultural Apothecary, exploring the very real concept of “Americanitis” with a host of interactive elements. I sat at the elixir bar to partake of golden root tea and was given a paper blood droplet on which to tally my hopes and dreams, to be added to the neon heart at the center of the installation.

And, of course, my most ambitious MASS MoCA participation ever, jumping stepping into a cold plunge pool carved into the center of a first-floor gallery as part of Taryn Simon’s A COLD HOLE.

What else have I discovered at MASS MoCA?

• a wall of blinking wicker baskets (one of the funniest and most captivating installations I’ve ever encountered, so much so that we now own TWO of Amy Podmore’s Audience pieces)
• a post-apocalyptically decorated Airstream trailer suspended high above an outdoor path and accessible only by ascending through the ruins of the factory’s boiler house
• the Milky Way as envisioned in suspended light bulbs in Spencer Finch’s Cosmic Latte
• a swampy pine forest with animal totems hidden in a third-floor alcove gallery in Allison Janae Hamilton’s Pitch
• once, an entire storage room filled with Jenny Holzer benches awaiting display!
• quite frequently, a spider admiring the Sol Lewitt wall drawings

Oh, let me just show you a bunch of cool stuff in a slideshow:

Finally, if I had to choose my favorite MASS MoCA installation, it would have to be James Turrell’s Perfectly Clear, a room that glows with changing light. This is one of Turrell’s works that uses the Ganzfeld effect, a perceptual phenomenon that removes the sense of depth in your field of vision. You’re enveloped in a fog of color, simultaneously deprived of and immersed in sensation.

I have no photos of this because a) Turrell prohibits photography of his works and b) it’s nigh impossible to convey the sensation of being in one of these spaces through two-dimensional photo or even video. Even in this official museum image!

And frankly, I think this sums up the ethos of MASS MoCA: No matter how wonderfully I try to describe it to you in words and pictures, the best way to understand it is to experience it. You have to explore, to discover, to let yourself exist in the space.

The magic is in being there, no matter what’s on view. Because there will always be something incredible, no matter what the season.