Officials had other plans in mind, including one to build a prison, but Krens persisted with his vision. What if there was an institution big enough to host them? Having visited the 1985 edition of the Art Cologne fair, where dealers trotted out monumental works and placed them inside a factory setting, Krens imagined he could do something similar. He’d been thinking of works by Minimalist and Land artists that museums had generally shied away from collecting in depth because of their size. In 1986, he was director at the nearby Williams College Museum of Art when he came up with the idea of converting a newly closed Sprague Electric factory into an art museum. The person who came up with the idea for MASS MoCA, Thomas Krens, worked tirelessly to realize the museum, however. (“People in North Adams are not ready for this,” a volunteer at MASS MoCA recalls thinking at the time.) Befuddled art critics looked on in wonderment as the people facilitating the $37 million renovation of a former mill complex. Locals viewed the museum as an art-world outpost intended to woo the elite, effectively bringing with it art no one in town would understood along with a wave of gentrification. Massachusetts politicians worried that such a project would grow too big, too costly, and too hifalutin. Fire and Ice: Marc Swanson at Mass MoCA and Thomas Cole National Historic SiteĪs Museum Town goes to show, nothing about MASS MoCA guaranteed that it would be a success when plans for it were first announced in 1986.
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