Aisha and I took a mini vaxxed vacation to North Adams MA to visit one of the largest contemporary art museums in the country—Mass MoCA! This was Aisha’s first time to the museum, and I hadn’t been in over a decade. My underlying motivation for this particular destination was to take photos for visual inspiration for my novel-in-progress, which is set in and around a similar (albeit much smaller) New England mill building. Also, I wanted to see some weird stuff.
Mass MoCA is enormous. We went on a Monday with our timed tickets, and it wasn’t particularly busy. We had some whole exhibits to ourselves for wandering and photo-taking. We spent about four hours there, including a break for lunch at the museum cafe, and I’m still not confident we saw it all.
One of the main draws of Mass MoCA is the James Turrell light exhibit, which required a separate timed ticket for entry. The exhibit involved standing in a totally white room with a handful of strangers as colored lights changed and flashed around us. Felt very Willy Wonka, minus the candy.
We also kept accidentally walking through this incredibly giant room that had epic music, moving shadows, and strobe lights going on sometimes. One of the times we walked through, I just absolutely cracked up because I mean… how did we get here?
I loved the three-story Sol LeWitt exhibit. Very colorful, with lots of surprises around corners (all except for one harsh orange and green mural that is forever burned into my retinas). It was around the LeWitt exhibit that we were trying our darndest to get to one of the buildings on the map, and we just could NOT figure out how to get there. We finally got to it by going outside, checking out a couple outdoor exhibits while we were out there, and then climbing up a fire escape. Pretty sure we weren’t supposed to do that, but another visitor saw us and let us in and it was all good.
After the museum we walked around North Adams’ downtown a little bit. There wasn’t much to see or do, and lots of things were closed on a Monday. So we got some beer at Bright Ideas Brewing and some A-OK BBQ and ate in the tented picnic table area in the museum parking lot. Yum.
We stayed a couople nights at Porches Inn which we both enjoyed so much, especially the pool and the “granny chic” aesthetic. Oh, and the porches, of course!