Revisiting the NATURAL BRIDGE State Park

 This post originally appeared in our September 2009  blog, but is well worth a repeat looksee. Memorial Day Weekend is upon us, so all of the MA parks are re-opening, including this magnificent place...
I am still in the area and will definitely be having a picnic here on Monday. : ) Happy Summer everyone!  Kathy

From Sept 15, 2009 (Berkshire Ramblings):

OK, so I truly understand that today's title does not sound REMOTELY like an interesting destination. In fact honestly, when I first read that there was an “attraction” in the area called The Natural Bridge, I sighed, my eyes glazed, my mouth drooped, and I had visions of driving over a dull and boring bridge of wood logs or rocks. Whoopee. NOT.

As I was getting into the Wondercar to go see this “bridge”, I thought of my friend Mike’s favorite saying when he had to attend a dull office meeting…
“There goes an hour of my life that I’ll never get back!”
I would later be proven very wrong!!!
The Natural Bridge State Park is situated on 48 acres of land, located right off Route 8 on McCauley Road in our sister town of North Adams. You have to really look hard for the little sign pointing to turn left. Once in the entrance, you take the dirt road that goes up to the right. Drive slow.
There’s a pretty brook and small waterfalls to admire on your way up the hill, and it soon becomes a paved road…

Curving up the hill, I drove by a huge tree-topped ledge of marvelous white and black rock, looking like the movie set from 10,000 Years BC or maybe Land of the Lost…an ideal setting for a pesky T-Rex to make an appearance. NOTE: This is NOT "The Bridge"!The road ends at the Visitors Center, where you pay $2 to the nice man to park. The Visitors Center is chock full of interesting tidbits. There are bathrooms (way clean) and park activity calendars and pamphlets, along with lots of wall posters, photos and articles about the park.
The Natural Bridge Park is a participant in the cute PARK PASSPORT Program for kids. It has all the MA parks with pages in it for kids to get ink-stamped at entry, and includes a guide of animal tracks, cool photos, and a great listing of the parks (even for adults to enjoy). Kids get the gummed kind of stamps as well when they visit each park and try to fill up their “passport” by experiencing features of each park they travel to.

There are park rangers and interpreters who will readily explain anything you need to know about the park history, or all the science and geology stuff you’d ever want to know.
You have to walk around from this point to see the park.

Aww geez…time to put on the designer hiking shoes (sigh).
Being the Berkshire Rambler has its perks…Park Interpreter (and chief cook-n-bottle washer) John, volunteered to give me, the big celebrity, a personal tour of the park!
John is a retired schoolteacher and has been at the Natural Bridge State Park since 1988.
We began our walk by a welcoming tall white pine tree. “The King’s Tree”, as it was known in colonial times, because white pine trees do not grow in England. This type of special wood was used to build ships for His Majesty’s fleet. There is a Cottonwood Tree alongside it that they make Popsicle Sticks from (for Her Majesty's ice cream treats). ;-)
We walked by well-manicured grounds on a nice wide, cleared path, to a viewing area of the giant horseshoe shaped white and black marble ledge that I had seen from the street.
This marble ledge used to extend all the way to the edge of the road, but since the early 1800’s, men have been chiseling, jackhammering and dynamite blasting it, causing it to be shaped like a horseshoe.
But I am getting ahead of myself.

Time for the BIG History lesson kids…
A long, long, long time ago, (550 million years), oceans covered the Berkshire area. There were lots of seashells on the ocean floor. The decomposition of these shells over time caused powdered calcium carbonate to form and then eventually harden into limestone, which is what marble is made of.

The advances and retreats of the glacier ice sheets made the earth’s crust buckle and heave, causing the constant catastrophic collision of the limestone, and creating mountain ranges. (Still with me?) It takes extreme heat and pressure to make marble from limestone and the Ice Age forces managed to do this wonderous thing.
In North Adams, this process created the Taconic Mountain Range that rose up over 140,000 feet. 350 million years of erosion has revealed the lower marble layer (once 5 miles under the ground) that is now showing topside. The mountain stands at only 1,100 feet high today.
When the glaciers melted, there was a great surge of water that ran through the mountains, carving and weaving paths through the rock floors. This became the river that flows under the Natural Bridge.
This stone and sediment-filled water crashing against the bedrock made "potholes" and twisted caves in the mountain and formed what is now known as The Natural Bridge.
Even today, small rocks and stones (called “cobbles”) race in the water flow and bounce off the bedrock walls, carving about an inch or so each year into the marble walls and floor.
About 2 million years ago, the ice age sent glaciers down again, like bulldozers, creating the geological phenomenon called Striation. We see a nice example of this in the Honeymoon Point Rock. This is called “Honeymoon Point” because folks would stand here to sign into a book if they were visiting on their honeymoon.In the 1740s, this part of Massachusetts was a military camp called FORT MASSACHUSETTS.
A Lieutenant named Seth Hudson went exploring and found this Natural Bridge area and the river that ran below it. He named the river after himself. The Hudson Brook (also called Hudson Falls). He was also one of the founders of Pownal, VT, btw.

In the late 1700s and early 1800s, local men chiseled the stone to use for hearthstones, walkways, cemetery gravestones, mantles and made decorative items with it. It was all rather helter-skelter until a man named Mr. Sherman started a marble quarry business and built a huge 3-story high mill building on the land in 1810. This was the first official marble production mill. The marble quarry brought wealth and jobs to the area. Many North Adams houses were built just for the mill workers and their families.

There were two main kinds of marble production.
One was to hammer out larger pieces to be used in construction and cemetery monuments. The quarry produced the 28 foot tall pillars that stand in the state house in Philadelphia, PA , and has produced a slab as big as 62 feet long!

The other type of marble production was to grind the marble to a powder.
There are many uses for crushed marble. It is mostly calcium carbonate, which is a stomach acid neutralizer and a mineral supplement. Next time you pop a tummy upset med, have a look at the ingredients.
Marble powder (calcium carbonate) is also used in wine production, puddings, chocolate (huh?), cereal, cake icing, chewing gum, fruit juices, health foods, ice cream, toothpaste, soap, make up, face powder, paint and putty, among other things.
Marble powder was mixed with chicken feed so eggs would come out having harder shells. This helped reduce cracking. Weren't they clever back then!
Tracks were built to allow for dump cars (Koppel side cars) to run on the tracks directly from the top of the marble mountain work areas straight into the 3rd story door of the mill building, where men would then process the marble with crushers and other machinery.
When blasting the marble peaks with dynamite, men ran for cover behind what is known as the BLASTING ROCK until the dust settled. This large dark rock sheltered them from falling marble and gave reprieve from breathing in all that dust directly. It sits by the side of the road with a picnic table next to it now. I am sure none of the workers had a picnic back then however! You see this blasting rock when you first drive up into the park.
Here is a view from behind the blasting rock, looking at the marble bed they blasted away at.
When the marble dust settled after a blast, men would grab jackhammers and picks and go make 1 foot pieces out of the fallen rock piles.
The life of a quarryman was hard. 12 hour shifts of very hard labor, then home to no electricity, no running hot water, and basic poverty living conditions.

Water power was created later (in 1850), when a large man-made white marble dam was erected on the property to channel the water flow. This is the only white marble dam in North America. It is the real star of this park.
It is 30 feet wide and 30 feet deep and the water cascades through 475 feet of twisting rockbeds through a 60 foot deep chasm.

A 50 foot catch hole at the bottom of the dam is connected to a long, large, cement-covered tin pipe called a Penstock (shown here stretched across pillars for support). This forced water directly into the mill at a high enough speed to generate power, using special equipment. Power was needed to run the pulleys and belts for the crushing machines that make marble powder, and electricity for the building use.
When water was low, such as in summer droughts, they had a diesel engine to kick in as back up power.
There is a neato sign that explains the process.
FUN FACT:In 1889, a huge dynamite blast, using 25 holes that were 12 feet deep, set back about 15 feet from the front, blew up a mass of marble that weighed 25,000 to 35,000 TONS!

The mill changed hands a few times over the years. It was The Hoosac Marble Quarry, and later, the Micro-White Corporation until 1947, when a terrible fire crumbled the mill and destroyed all the equipment. The entire hollow caught fire. It was quite a spectacle.
This is all that remained of the mill. Note the Blasting rock on the left. A small shack now stands in the place that a mighty 3 story mill once stood.
John took me through a wooded path to visit the foundation. Like chess pieces in the forest (John said that!), the eerie foundation blocks remain, nearly hidden amongst the overgrowth and trees. The basic stone outline of some of the building rooms and divisions of the mill are visible.
As I took photos, John explained one of the mill tragedies. It happened in 1945 (2 years before the fire). William Tattro was a mill worker who’s job was to keep the belts and pulleys well oiled. As he leaned over to perform his usual tasks, his loose apron strings got caught in the belts and he was pulled into the machinery, brutally torn apart and painfully killed. Yikes! (NOTE: my camera did not function correctly after photographing this area and my stomach hurt!...attention Ghost Hunter fans!).
There are reminders around of the magnificance of this building. You can still see the elevator shaft walls up against the banks of the road.
The elevator cables rust slowly in a pile. Forgotten marble pieces sit in a moss-covered mass, awaiting crushing. It is silent and still in the "basement", though situated in a pleasant tree-filled forest. John said they try to keep the paths cleared for visitors to be able to walk down and see it. The path to the foundation is about 200 feet from the little shack on the road.
Even in the 1800’s there were graffiti artists, and for this place, you needed a chisel to do it. John had the theory that marble cutters who made gravestones needed a place to practice their lettering, much like schoolchildren practice their penmanship on dotted and lined paper.
See the lines in this rock that someone carefully had to stay within to make their letters?
Some of the names in these rocks are mill foremen, owners and workers. Sadly, erosion and the elements will erase these engravings completely, over time.

After the tragic fire, the mill closed down. Amazing, because it was yielding 200 TONS of marble per DAY and was so popular it did not even need a sales team!
The mill property was bought by Mr. & Mrs. Elder, who built the walkways and fencelines on the property. They decided to run it as a tourist attraction and it opened at North Adam's famous Fall Festival in October of 1950. The Natural Bridge was a "tourist spot" until Mr. Elder's death in 1983. The state bought the land from his widow and made it an official State Park in 1985.
There are several "stops" to make in your exploration of this park. Make sure to go down every stairway and walk every path...cool views await you, especially under the bridge itself...
OH...you want to see THE BRIDGE? As John decended these steps, he said "this is the bridge"... (kind of an anti-climax...waaa-waaaaah) The rock ledge and natural bridge are about 30 feet thick (just like the dam). The glacial "potholes" have a 30 foot waterfall running through them.

Fans of Nathaniel Hawthorne will recognize the natural bridge described in his AMERICAN NOTEBOOKS. He visited the Natural Bridge in the late summer of 1838 while the mill was in operation and was totally awed by it.
We continued our walk to the trail entrance, which is just off the side of the road that leads to the visitor center. There are two ½ mile trails that pass by maple, birch, oak, cottonwood and white pine trees. The trails are rated HEART HEALTHY because they are under a mile. (YAY)
Our tour finished with a visit to the Statue Garden, known as THE GUARDIAN PROJECT. Teenagers made sculptures of what they envisioned a "Guardian" to be.
There are guardians for animal life, trees, water life, and an all knowing/all seeing "eye" that you can look through to see behind it.
Oh...umm, that is a black cat on a wall, btw, not a rabbit, and that is not Jesus, but Hamadryad, a tree guardian. There is also a phoenix, an angel (shown) and a round clocktower looking thing.
The "hiker" looking one is actually a caveman with a tree and a crow behind him representing man's relationship with nature and how it tends to both their needs.

The picnic areas are beautiful, despite the recent ground damage made by skunks hunting slugs that are so prominent after all the rain we had this summer...
This is a really peaceful and beautiful place.
They have regular hikes, even some just for seniors, and "sunrise hikes" during the week. They have children’s activities too. Check online for their weekly calendar.

The park is officially open 9 to 5 daily from Memorial Day until Columbus Day. You are welcome to go there in off seasons when the park is closed, but you have to park at the bottom of the hill and walk up to get to the park. (uuugh).

To time your trip, it will take a minimum of 1/2 hour to walk the 1/4 mile paths through the “stuff”. The walk to the foundation is about a 1/2 of a mile more.
I love the little details I discovered.

Let me share a couple of my other photos with you.

Look all around for beauty close up and on the ground...Early to mid morning and mid afternoon to sunset are the best photo-taking times. High noon casts harsh shadows and if you are using a low end digital camera, the contrast is too extreme and you will get blobs of white instead of color in your photos.
Here's a 550 million year old art original! (Jackson Pollack, eat your heart out!)
I was so enthralled with this park, I have returned twice to take more photos. As an avid photographer, I have never been to a place that offered so many opportunities for “a great shot”.

Picnic tables and grills are available, but no alcohol is allowed (dang).
The park has gorgeous settings for weddings and other events. John said there were two weddings in the past week. Hey, they even allow you to bring your dog (leashed), but they ask that you clean up after your dog. Don't make John or one of the other park rangers scoop the poop!

As with most MA parks, please take away whatever you bring in. Garbage bags are available in the Visitors Center.

Mass MoCA, (those rascals!), installed 10 speakers into the marble ledge walls!
Every evening, at the exact scientific moment of SUNSET, a “song” (extended tones sorta) plays from the ledge. The song is called "MUSIC FOR A QUARRY" and it was composed for the Natural Bridge Park by a Swiss composer named Walter Frahndrich. Not much of a tune to hum, lol, but quite effective for the surroundings.

Here is a recording someone put on YOU TUBE with a short video by Craig with his son taking a walk by the ledge...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvgaWVmA98o

Going to this park should not be an afterthought, but a planned destination!

Hope many of you come here too!

XX
Kathy

Saying goodbye to the Berkshires

Well it's been a year and now I am headed back to the flatlands of Connecticut to start a new life with a wonderful man and a new job. I reflect on my experiences here with a bittersweet lump in my throat. I love the Berkshires and will always treasure the scenery, the people and the quality of life I knew while living here.

What a wonderful place to have the honor to live in.

I have tears in my eyes as I pack, but all good things must come to an end. I loved my time at the 1896 House, meeting our guests, hanging out with the airedales and enjoying some great festivals and events.

Thank you for reading these silly blog ramblings of mine and thank you people of the Berkshires for your warmth and hospitality through 4 unbelieveable breathtaking seasons.

I look forward to visiting soon...and now I know the best places to go!



Love and peace,
Kathy

My Visit to MASS MoCA

One of the biggest draws to the North Berkshire area is the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art...fondly called MASS MoCA by the locals, visited by thousands every year, and loved by everyone for their contribution to the community, to the Arts, and their major role in cultural education.

Since this is a difficult and heavy subject matter, I am going to ask my favorite art-world heroine, SISTER WENDY, (British critic, writer and nun!) to explain some of the "artistic" facts, as I journey through the walls and floors of the masterpieces.
Some of you may know Sister Wendy from her PBS specials...she is amazing. There is a 6 DVD set of her talks available in media shops like Borders, Barnes & Noble or FYI.
"Sister's" conversation is of course, entirely fictional, but I know you have a superior imagination and will humor me in this endeavor.

Sister Wendy will explain the real meaning behind some of the artwork in this museum...and I will be the everyday clod who knows nada about art philosophy, commenting on the pieces as I see them... in my ignorant, heathen manner.
Let us begin...
Driving to North Adams from The 1896 House is about a 10-15 minute journey straight down Route 2 East. MASS MoCA sits on the left and is easy to spot along the road. Parking is free.

You are met with a clump of luminous factory buildings and dangerous looking alleyways to trek through. Large yellow "arrows" point the way...one would expect at any moment, a gang will appear and steal your handbag or ipod, or at the very least, a long coated man will try to sell you a watch for $20.

Be brave...it is safe. Go ahead down the alley and head into the open center, where you will see your first "art" display...

ME:  Oh look! Wicked cool trees hanging upside down!

SISTER WENDY: In Tree Logic, the art of the piece is not found in its condition at any single point in time, but in the change of the trees over time. Trees are dynamic natural systems, and Tree Logic reveals this dynamism. The familiar, almost iconic shape of the tree in nature is the result of gravitropic and phototropic responses: the tree grows away from the earth and towards the sun.

When inverted, the six trees in this experiment still grow away from earth and towards the sun - so the natural predisposition of trees might well produce the most unnatural shapes over time, raising questions about what the nature of the natural is.
ME: I wonder if birds nest upside down in the branches?

Heading past HUDSONS shop, I glance in the window at the cool vintage and artistic stuff they have for sale. Chewing gum wrapper handbags, records, old posters, jewelry...way neat.

GRAMERCY BISTRO is located in this setting as well...great food and solid rep for consistant quality.

Heading for the MoCA door, you see the entrance to a large old factory. 

MoCA has quite a history.

In the 1800's, the building housed a printworks shop. It later spent time as Sprague Electric and was a major employer in the area. MA MoCA took the property over in 1986 and has since renovated many of the spaces, brought amazing artists and performers to the area, and has become somewhat of a phenomenon in the Berkshires. It costs about $15 to get in.
Kids cost less and there is a lot for them to do and be interested in.
The staff are really friendly and helpful and there are tours given every hour or half hour...so wait for one of them. You will be given a great objective tour of the displays and gain insight and education about what the artists are saying. Much better than trying to rough it by yourself.
DO NOT GO BY YOURSELF UNTIL YOU HAVE TAKEN A TOUR. The tours are free, so make sure to join one.
Luckily, there is a great gift shop and cafe to visit while you await the next tour.





My tour began with a walk to the video area... a very awkward and uncomfortable 5 whole minutes watching a film by Guy Ben-Nur showing his family dressed up in swan costumes gathering sticks in the woods. My eyes glazed over. In another room's vid, he is acting out the book MOBY DICK with his young daughter in their kitchen... ME: Oh come on! This is not art!

SISTER WENDY: Kathy, this medium is modern and is indeed "art". Over the past decade Guy Ben-Ner has become known for a series of playful videos which often star the artist and his young children. The humorous, home-made films have an authentic, do-it-yourself appeal, though their deceptive simplicity quickly reveals sophisticated cinematic and literary influences - ranging from the physical comedy of Buster Keaton and the humanist films of François Truffaut to literary classics such as Herman Melville's Moby Dick and Daniel Dafoe's Robinson Crusoe. With humor and pathos, Ben-Ner re-tells these iconic stories of the individual's search for meaning and identity in relation to the influence of society's mores and traditions.

Through these timeless tales he sheds light on contemporary philosophical and political issues, while avoiding a didactic approach. Often exhibited with the simple sets and props created for the videos, Ben-Ner's work de-mystifies the creative process, symbolically inviting the viewer to move beyond the space of reception into the realm of production.
ME: Longest 5 minutes of my life!

We proceeded by a bicycle you can pedal to view a video of how the elctricity is generated to power the video. People seemed to enjoy this and there was always someone riding the thing, so I never got a turn.

We next entered an exhibit called THESE DAYS: ELEGIES FOR MODERN TIMES... which is a collection of paintings and videos about hope and despair. I enjoyed one of a cello player, passionately playing a Bach prelude. You get sound and vision here...but the cool part is that artist Sam Taylor-Wood (female) has digitally REMOVED the cello, so it appears the guy is playing nothing at all. Some folks thought he was acting, pretending to play.  
ME: I'm way impressed with the clean digital removal of that cello...being an avid photoshop user taking wrinkles out of my facebook photos, I can appreciate that skillset.

SISTER WENDY: As the lone cellist mournfully plays his music, the cello has been erased, evoking a stark sense of loss, yet he still plays with passion and life. Vitality and mortality battle one another without a clear victor. There is a sense of hope in the saddest of conditions.

This theme prevails throughout Sam's exhibit's, including her other works of note, such as Ghosts VI and Escape Artist. I'm quite taken by her Little Death video. 

ME: Eeeoowww! Sister, that Little Death vid gave me the creeps. A dead rabbit hangs by a foot and the camera captures it rotting over a period of time, being eaten by maggots while the body fluids soak up into the wall...everything except the fluffy tail is gone by the end. So glad I didn't get an ice cream cone before this tour.

SISTER WENDY: But Kathy, the fruit in the video remained fresh throughout the hare's decay process. In Europe, fruit represented new life, hope and vitality in art.
The video

One of the other artists displayed in this group was ROBERT TAPLIN. He created 9 scenes with resin figurines depicting a DANTE Inferno like world. Seriously engaging and interesting peeking into little caverns and boxes to see the eery scenes.

Another video was shown in a 360' room. It was called BELOW SEA LEVEL, by Pawel Wojtasik.

ME: I got a little queasy sitting in that room with all the New Orleans wetlands water rising and falling around me. There were scenes of musicians and Mardi Gras players in a post Katrina environment...kinda funky this one.

SISTER WENDY: This film engages viewers in the contemplation of elements, natural and man-made, that make New Orleans such an essential site.

The connections are palpable from the eerily quiet waters surrounding the city, to the life that goes on within it.

OK, on to another room...this one with huge wall paintings of words over words. This exhibit is called THIS IS KILLING ME.
ME: I kind of enjoyed looking at all the layered words on the wall...especially seeing the thought process of going to eat, feeling sad and stuff, but many of the words were mis-spelled and that drives me nuts. (Did I just miss spell mis-spelled?).


Present in much of the work are deep feelings of inadequacy-the artist plagued by the idea that she or he is not good enough, hard-working enough, or famous enough (and never will be). Some of the work unveils the sources — or lack thereof — of the artist's inspiration — laying bare the unending pressure to develop meaningful and original ideas. Other work gives shape and form to the creative process, pointing to the labor, the hand of the artist, and accompanying procrastination entailed in making art. Ultimately, many of the pieces derive content from an engagement with psychoanalysis and a mining of one's own unconscious and psyche. The works presented, far from becoming cathartic votives, are embodied monuments to the complexities of artistic practice.
There was also a case purposely left with a film of dust on it, housing mannequin heads that look like the artist. Interesting grouping this was.

Into a really large room, we came upon a HUGE slab of curved concrete. My lawyer friend said "this is a lawsuit waiting to happen!" when we got close enough to notice protruding rusty coils. The tour guide explained that this was loaned by a collector who could no longer "display" it in his yard, as neighbors complained about the eyesore. Really? Imagine that...lol

ME: Isn't this from the BIG DIG? How the heck did they hoist this up to the 2nd floor?! More importantly...WHY?

SISTER WENDY: True, they are wavy planes of concrete as thick as 10 inches bristling with rusty, bent lengths of rebar form a long pile that looks ready to be carted away. Because we’re in an art museum we know we’re looking at a work of art. So we read the pile not as junk but as sculpture, a formally impressive arrangement of undulating ribbons punctuated by the busy staccato of the rebar pieces. Splayed sheets of lead lying over one section, like pages of a newspaper or an oversize book, add a poetic grace note.
ME: Let's take a drive on the pike and go see the mothership in Boston.

Further into the room, we see artist Keifers work...actually really nice post war wall art scenery pieces in a 3 dimensional medium.

ME: Ok, I like this one. These are my colors.

Oh wait...
 
On the other side of the room sits what appears to be a large broom made of mud and little clumps around it. Our tour guide explains this is on loan from Pennsylvania by the infamous Joseph Beuys.

ME: Oh great...a humungous muddy broom and some dinosaur dung. Save a huge corner in the museum for THAT.  
 
 
 
 
 

Beuys' dramatic "Lightning with Stag in its Glare", (Blitzschlag mit Lichtschein auf Hirsch),1958-85, is the only environment that the artist cast in bronze. This monumental work is encrusted with layers of meaning. At its core, it enacts a dramatic moment in nature: A bolt of lightning (the large, suspended sculpture) strikes the ground, illuminating a stag (cast in highly reflective aluminum). Other animals are present, but are not so well illuminated. There is a goat (a metal cart with a pick resting on it) and worm-like primordial animals (the dark bronze forms scattered on the floor). The final element present, the Boothia Felix, is a metal tripod with a roughly rectangular mass on top of it and a small compass resting on top of that. This element is named for a strip of land in northern Canada that was the first established location of the north magnetic pole.
ME: UH-HUH...Right...

Entering another room, we come upon an upside down glass house. Entitled GRAVITY IS A FORCE TO BE RECKONED WITH, artist Manglano-Ovalle depicts upheaval and the dualistic definition of gravity.
ME: I liked the spilled coffee on the ceiling.

SISTER WENDY: Science and emotion are simultaneously inverted and logic is therefore challenged. The artist emphasizes a shift in perception which transforms the world in twhich we know it, making it transparent. There is a phone ringing inside....did you notice that Kathy? One caller leaves the message"gravity is a force to be reckoned with and you won't win".

The star player in this museum has got to be the Sol Lewitt exhibit. Housed on 3 floors, each representing a phase of his artistic career, it is a dazzling series of colorful and intricate works. Slotted to remain for 25 years, then possibly painted over, Sol's belief that art is not precious will be honored.
ME: I loved this stuff. They built the walls in this exhibit just to house his art! Cool standing in front of the color panels too. Where IS my camera?! Is this the inspiration for the Partridge family bus?

Sol LeWitt (September 9, 1928 - April 8, 2007) was an American artist linked to various movements, including Conceptual art and Minimalism. LeWitt rose to fame in the late 1960s with his wall drawings and "structures" (a term he preferred instead of "sculptures") but was prolific in a wide range of media including drawing, printmaking, and painting. He has been the subject of hundreds of solo exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world since 1965. His prolific two and three-dimensional work ranges from wall drawings (over 1200 of which have been executed) to hundreds of works on paper extending to structures in the form of towers, pyramids, geometric forms, and progressions. These works range in size from gallery-sized installations to monumental outdoor pieces. Sol LeWitt was one of the main figures of his time; he transformed the idea and practice of drawing and changed the relationship between an idea and the art it produces. LeWitt’s art is not about the singular hand of the artist; it is the ideas behind the works that surpass each work itself.

There are many more pieces and exhibits at the museum, including pornographic cartoons, an exhibit called Invisible Art (too funny for me to even critique), and sculptures, photography and audio pieces.

This museum is chock full of surprizes and well worth a visit. I came here twice and plan to go again. They have some permanent and some revolving displays. Check their website for events and new exhibits: MA MoCA

North Adams is abundant with art studios, and the local liberal arts college feeds the town with many creative and talented artists. Venues dot the streets and there are often art fairs on weekends.


MASS MoCA has live entertainment, rock bands, avant guart artists, puppet shows, music workshops, and theater during the week. It is an amazing place. Stop in if you visit the area!

SISTER WENDY: Ta-ta for now Kathy. I'll pray for you!
 
 
 
ME: Thanks for your help Sister!

MASS MoCA is closed TUESDAYS. Open 11-5. Later on Saturdays and event days.
Take advantage of our MoCA Special at The 1896 House
 
 
 
 
 
Love & Peace,
Kathy