Edmunds, who is thinking hard about connections between the country’s economic recovery from the pandemic. Rodriguez both took part in the Mass MoCA residency program (yet another part of Assets for Artists) on the museum’s campus - which is how Susan Cross, the senior curator, and her team discovered their work.Īll of this synergy is part of the museum’s appeal for Ms. Downstairs, near the museum’s main entrance, a 60-foot long multimedia work on paper by the Puerto Rican artist Gamaliel Rodriguez, is on view as a solo exhibition through January 2023. The group show also includes a complex multimedia installation by Detroit-based Osman Khan, a 2020 Guggenheim fellow. On a recent weekday, tourists from New York and Florida perused the five rows of small, handcrafted objects and books from nearly 25 North Adams creators another visitor popped $15 cash into the machine, pulled the lever and came away with a small book by Molly Rideout, whose day job is working for Assets for Artists. Benjamin said.Īssets for Artists also supported the installation last spring of a vending machine selling art by local artists, the brainchild of the North Adams artist Nico Dery. Mass MoCA, through Assets for Artists, is the “backbone partner responsible for staff support, fund-raising, and fiscal management,” Mr. The coalition has since delivered economic grants in the first months of the pandemic and produced community events like the Swap-o-Rama. From that event, the museum helped birth the North Adams Artist Impact Coalition, a mix of art, nonprofit and governmental stakeholders, to be the central resource for artists working in the region. Benjamin “has grown to be a business mentor.”īut at a town hall Mass MoCA hosted in 2019 that was attended by more than 100 artists and art-stakeholders in the region, it became clear there was a need for more systemic economic support. Since then, “I’ve taken every single workshop Mass MoCA offers,” he said, adding that they helped him get on top of years of unpaid taxes and that Mr. He left the only salaried job he had ever had to devote himself to his artwork, and then found himself couch-surfing among family and friends. Benjamin said.Ĭliff Desravines, a Boston-based multi-hyphenate artist who goes by the moniker Cliff Notez said he was homeless before attending college and earning his master’s degree in fine arts. Next month, for example, a workshop that takes on “the myth of the starving artist,” is led by the artist Szu-Chieh Yun, who said the subject of money once filled her with “stress, anxiety, and dread.” In “Staying Authentic While Marketing Your Work,” the multimedia artist and designer Daniel Callahan teaches artists to market their work “in ways that don’t feel cheesy,” Mr. Since then, the range of workshops and coaching has broadened. Faler herself - to teach artists from an artist’s perspective about credit, debt, taxes and when it’s time to get or quit a day job. Benjamin that Assets for Artists could be more impactful, both economically and educationally, by hiring artists - including Ms. But in 2015, after Kim Faler, a local artist, learned to make a business plan for her studio practice, she helped convince Mr. Originally, financial planners and accountants led most workshops. He joined the museum in 2000 and, drawing on his background as a community organizer, in 2008 started Assets for Artists, which originally focused on financial education, but has since broadened its purview. And this year the museum is making more space for commerce, including placing a quirky vending machine selling local art in its front courtyard. It created and is leading a coalition to provide resources for regional artists. The museum’s residency program hosts up to a dozen artists who live and work in art studios and shared apartments for up to two months on the museum campus, just steps from the main public galleries. A program that teaches artists around New England to manage their financial affairs and grow their careers has tripled in size during the pandemic to nearly 900 participants. The breadth of the museum’s efforts are substantial. Since it opened in 1999 in a cluster of converted 19th-century factory buildings, Mass MoCA has been doing things its own, typically big way - and attracting art tourists because of it.īut the swap is just one example of how Mass MoCA has been quietly evolving its relationship with art communities across an increasingly broad swath of New England. Perhaps even more unexpected is that this scrappy inaugural “Swap-o-Rama” was organized under the auspices of one of the pre-eminent museums in the United States: the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.
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