KidSpace at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art Continues to Grow
Installation of Cribs Expands Space Substantially
By: Ariel Petrova - Mar 04, 2009
With an opening celebration - free to the public - slated for March 21st, 2009, Kidspace at Mass MoCA grows once again. Kidspace is a collaboration between The Clark, Williams College Museum of Art, and Mass MoCA - and has recently been moved to the second floor of the museum's central building. In the process it has added an additional 1,200 square feet of exhibition and art-making space. This expansion allows Kidspace to better serve the community by increasing opportunities for public engagement in the space and bringing larger exhibitions to local school children.
Kidspace originally opened its doors in January 2000, and will be celebrating its most recent expansion with events, performances and the opening of Cribs, a new exhibition by installation artist Matt Bua. On March 21, kids and families are invited to a day-long family celebration in Kidspace to mark the opening of the new site and Cribs installation. The day will also include performances at noon, 2 PM, and 4 PM of a series of plays written by local school children in collaboration with professional Berkshire writer Juliane Hiam.
The new Kidspace exhibition is a three-part installation project organized by Matt Bua celebrating alternative/experimental architecture. The piece features an overloaded crib complete with hanging mobiles, recorded "lullabies," and the bars that keep the infant safe. Surrounding the crib is an "outro-spective" purging of the artist's pack-ratted material possessions - random detritus: lost gloves, found paintings, vacation slides, many guitars rescued from the streets of New York - all organized into presented collections. The installation also includes a special project by Jesse Bercowetz, and work by Carrie Dashow, Ward Shelley, Lisa Ludwig and other previous collaborators.
The second part of the installation, ...To Cribbage, is a piece of the crib climbing out of the second story window of the Kidspace gallery. To escape the chaos of the cluttered future that encroaches on it, the crib must breech the gallery walls, pouring itself down on the museum's entrance below. This piece of crib can be entered outside the museum to experience the collaborative "building game" Bua calls it Architectural Cribbage, a game in which he encourages others to start constructing their own small-scale visionary spaces.
The third piece of the installation will take place in downtown North Adams at 107 Main Street as part of the annual DownStreet Arts festival and will open on May 2. Students from the North Berkshire School Union (Savoy, Florida, and Clarksburg, Mass.) will create installations for this space as part of Cribliousdome, an off-shoot of Cribs. Students from the NBSU will also work with writer-in-residence Juliane Hiam on a project for this space called Writing on the Walls, creating poems and stories related to the themes in Bua's installation. Visitors to Kidspace at Mass MoCA are invited to visit the 107 Main Gallery and add their sculptures to the installation during these hours: May 2 - June 20: Saturdays from noon to 2; June 25 - Labor Day: Wednesday through Sunday from noon to 4 PM.
In the new exhibition, visitors will be invited to make their own "junk-itecture" sculptures using found objects. A full schedule of art classes will be offered over the summer. Public hours for Kidspace are:Saturdays and Sundays from 11 am to 4 PM through May 31 and everyday during Spring Break (April 13 - 17) and on Memorial Day (May 25). From June 1 through June 27 Kidspace is open everyday except Tuesdays from 11 am to 4 PM. From June 27 through Labor Day, Kidspace is open everyday from 11 am to 4 PM.
As part of the opening, the artist Matt Bua will talk about his work at 11:30 am and 1:30 PM. At the opening, Kidspace will also celebrate its Massachusetts Cultural Council's Creative Schools-funded artist residency program with three special performances. Juliane Hiam, fall 2008 writer-in-residence at Inkberry in North Adams, worked with the third graders of North Adams to create three 5-minute one-act plays relating to Kidspace's Illuminations exhibit, which was featured in the fall. These short plays will be performed by professional adult actors. In addition, Mrs. Shadowbrook's Attic, written by Hiam and inspired by the Illuminations exhibition, will be performed by the Berkshire Country Day School 6th grade class, for whom the piece was originally written. All of the plays are directed by David Librizzi, one of the theater department directors at Berkshire Country Day School. There will be three performances of all four of these plays as a group - start times are at noon, 2 PM and 4PM in MASS MoCA's B10 Theater and the running total of all four plays combined will be about an hour. These performances and events are free and open to the public. While tickets for the performance are free of charge, reservations are recommended to guarantee seating by calling Mass MoCA's Box Office at 413.MoCA.111.
Matt Bua of Brooklyn, New York, is an installation artist who has extensive experience establishing artist collaborations. He holds a BFA from East Carolina University and has collaborated with Jesse Bercowitz to create large-scale installation projects for such sites as Governor's Island, NYC; The Brooklyn Museum, NYC; and the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA. His solo work has been shown most recently at galleries and sculpture parks in New York City and upstate New York. Bua has also worked with students to develop an installation for the Socrates Sculpture Park in New York City. Cribs will be installed at Kidspace from March 21-September 7, 2009.
Major support for Cribs is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts; the Massachusetts Cultural Council; the Nimoy Foundation; the Brownrigg Charitable Trust and the Alice Shaver Foundation in memory of Lynn Laitman; and the James and Robert Hardman Fund for North Adams, a fund of the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation.
For more information contact Kidspace at 413-664-4481 ext. 8131 or visit the Kidspace website.