This picture of rain clouds and a highway guard rail, taken through the car window on my camera phone as we drove back to Boston along the Mohawk Trail, seems a fairly representative, if somewhat colorless, amalgamation of John Constable's classical cloud studies on display at the Clark Institute, and the modern, geometric wall drawings of Sol LeWitt that we'd wandered around at Mass MoCA.
But the Berkshire image that endures most in my mind is of two abandoned shopping carts whitewater rafting down the Hoosic River, observed from the windows of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams city center when I'd grown bored of gawping at the wavy colored lines and confabulations of oil and steel exhibited there.
Tourists like us, visiting the converted industrial plant that is now Mass MoCA, must bring a bundle of much needed money into North Adams, a former factory town turned into a rather awkward art mecca, and people talk of a "downtown renaissance," but I found it hard to tell what buildings were being renovated and which were shutting up shop for good. There is a cool restaurant called the Gramercy Bistro, cute coffee shops, and a trendy hotel named The Porches, both rubbing concrete shoulders with a Family Dollar store and shambolic triple-deckers. Unfortunately, I feel that Mass MoCA has done North Adams no favors in this regard by installing LeWitt's enormous work on its walls for twenty-five years.
The Clark Institute, in contrast, can be found amid the elegant collegiate architecture, quaint little shops and well-groomed lawns of Williamstown. Viewing the paintings there was like greeting old friends; well-known canvases by Degas, Remington, Winslow Homer, Gauguin, Monet, Toulouse Lautrec and many others. Here was a collection of pictures I would want to return to, perhaps even by the souvenir baseball hat of.
I thought MassMOCA a colossal waste of time, but I love the Clark. The Williams College Art Museum is also worth a look. It has a nice shop.
Posted by: miriam | May 09, 2009 at 20:36