New MASS MoCA Exhibition Asks What Art Can Be Made of Air and Debris?

On view now through April 2027 | North Adams, MA

"Spatial Poems," which opened at Mass MoCA last weekend, is the kind of show worth getting to while it's still new. The communal exhibition was developed by CEI Fellow Marissa Del Toro in collaboration with guest curators Ninabah Winton and Jamillah Hinson, who aimed to disrupt the art world's usual curatorial structures. The three-part show is organized around the precarios of Chilean-born, New York-based artist Cecilia Vicuña. they are fragile sculptures made from found debris, string, feathers, and other discarded materials, assembled and then often left to dissolve back into the world.

Vicuña, who is in her late 70s and has been making precarios since the 1960s, uses them as both physical objects and conceptual frameworks: the works are composed in part of sculptures made from debris and in part of collective rituals of dissonant sound, exploring ephemerality, memory, and cyclical repetition. The two other artists in the show, Sam Frésquez and Lola Ayisha Ogbara, respond to and extend those themes.

Del Toro, who organized the show as part of Mass MoCA's Curatorial Exchange Initiative (a fellowship designed to bring emerging curators from underrepresented backgrounds into the institution) describes the project as a score rather than a conventional group show. The building it occupies, Building 4, gives the work room to breathe in ways that smaller venues can't.

Mass MoCA, 1040 Mass MoCA Way, North Adams, MA. Admission and hours at massmoca.org.