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'Mother, May I:' Summer Season in North Berkshire

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
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Williams College Museum of Art Director Tina Olsen, left, and Mass MoCA Director Joe Thompson listen to Williamstown Theatre Festival Artistic Director Mandy Greenfield.
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Mother's Day was last weekend, but the maternal spirit will continue long into the summer at the region's cultural institutions.
 
One of the highlights of the season is the exhibition of "Whistler's Mother" at the Clark Art Institute. The 1871 icon by Massachusetts-born James McNeill Whistler is owned by France and appears this summer on the East Coast only at the South Street museum.
 
On Wednesday morning, the Clark hosted a second annual joint press event involving the heads of North Berkshire's four cultural anchors: Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, the Williams College Museum of Art, the Williamstown Theatre Festival and, of course, the Clark itself.
 
"I'm glad to see you guys are picking up on the Whistler theme," Mass MoCA director Joe Thompson chided his colleague, the Clark's Michael Conforti. "You're a year late."
 
Thompson was referring to last year's MoCA exhibition of "Filthy Lucre," inspired by Whistler's decorative masterpiece, "The Peacock Room."
 
Although Waterston has moved on to the Smithsonian, where he opens this weekend, there are plenty of thematic connections — intentional and otherwise — that run through the four seasons previewed on Wednesday in the Clark's West Pavilion.
 
While the Clark is exhibiting arguably the best known painting ever created by an American citizen, WCMA will present "Whistler: Close-Up," which promises a look at "Whistler's gossamer brushwork and delicate use of line."
 
"When you get tired of looking at his dour mother, you can come over to WCMA for a sexy painting of his mistress," quipped WCMA Director Tina Olsen.
 
While the Clark — in addition to "Whistler's Mother" — will feature a major exhibition of Vincent Van Gogh, Mass MoCA's annual Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival will feature the premiere of a Michael Gordon composition, "to and about Van Gogh," Thompson noted.
 
While WCMA debuts a major show on the early works of Andy Warhol, the Clark will dip its toe into the pop art with a small gallery of works from the 1920s, '30s and beyond that "riff" on the iconic "Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1 (Portrait of the Artist's Mother)" as Whistler's Mother is formally known.
 
While MoCA continues to expand its campus and use more of the former millworks on Marshall Street in North Adams, the Clark continues its foray into contemporary art with a Thomas Schutte architectural exhibit on Stone Hill.
 
"I wanted to see what a work of art on our hillside would look like and whether people would go to it," Conforti said. "[Schutte has] created a reading room, so-called 'Crystal,' which is in the shape of a crystal but is actually made out of wood and metal that will be a site for contemplation and views of the Berkshires and which will actually look directly at Mass MoCA."
 
While the "dour" image of Whistler's Mother draws visitors to South Street, on Main Street in Williamstown, WCMA will explore another mother-son relationship.
 
"[The Warhol show] starts with wonderful, lyrical, gorgeous, intimate books he made, hand-colored, often with his mother," Olsen said. "As it turns out, Warhol lived with his mother for many years, and he collaborated with her, among others."
 
Even the Williamstown Theatre Festival gets in on the mother act with the world premiere of a previously lost work by William Inge, "Off the Main Road," which focuses on a mother-daughter relationship, and the American premiere of "Kinship," a play that features an "overly protective mother," according to the WTF synopsis.
 
All of the connections between the cultural institutions — whether by design or happenstance — feed into a narrative that Mass MoCA's Thompson has championed repeatedly and to which he returned on Wednesday.
 
"No single institution can hold people overnight or two nights," Thompson said. "Together with the Williamstown Theatre Festival, the Clark, Mass MoCA and WCMA, it is inevitable that people will spend more time.
 
The Clark Art Institute's Michael Conforti takes a question during Wednesday's press event.
"That's the reason we like to draw these connections ... If you see us all together, if people come to understand this as a destination, they'll stay longer and it ... makes everyone's lives in the area a lot better."
 
Thompson is as adept at discussing the commercial side of museums as he is talking about the artistic themes explored at MoCA. And again on Wednesday he hammered home the point that while day-trippers may be the base for cultural institutions, overnight and weekend visitors can have a more significant impact on the local economy.
 
Thompson pointed out that the region's many cultural attractions pack in visitors on weekends from July to August, but the hotel room shortage during the summer months will only improve if those same institutions address the "shoulder season" and midweek periods.
 
"Investing in hotels in this area is tough sledding here," Thompson said, referring to the "slow period" from September to June.
 
"We're at an interesting 'glass ceiling' now that we're going to have to break by extending our programming laterally into the off-season and the shoulder season," Thompson said. "At Mass MoCA, we're doing our part. We're going to kick off the year on Memorial Day weekend. That's earlier than it typically happens in Berkshire County."
 
Three of MoCA's summer exhibitions will open on May 23, along with a concert by country act The Lone Bellow.
 
The Clark will open "Van Gogh and Nature" and Schutte's "Crystal" on June 14, with "Whistler's Mother" arriving on July 4. "Warhol by the Book" is running now and goes through Aug. 16 at WCMA. The WTF season gets under way "Off the Main Road" on the Main Stage opening June 30.

Tags: exhibit,   museum,   

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Williamstown Select Board Awards ARPA Funds to Remedy Hall

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Select Board on Monday allocated $20,000 in COVID-19-era relief funds to help a non-profit born of the pandemic era that seeks to provide relief to residents in need.
 
On a unanimous vote, the board voted to grant the American Rescue Plan Act money to support Remedy Hall, a resource center that provides "basic life necessities" and emotional support to "individuals and families experiencing great hardship."
 
The board of the non-profit approached the Select Board with a request for $12,000 in ARPA Funds to help cover some of the relief agency's startup costs, including the purchase of a vehicle to pick up donations and deliver items to clients, storage rental space and insurance.
 
The board estimates that the cost of operating Remedy Hall in its second year — including some one-time expenses — at just north of $31,500. But as board members explained on Monday night, some sources of funding are not available to Remedy Hall now but will be in the future.
 
"With the [Williamstown] Community Chest, you have to be in existence four or five years before you can qualify for funding," Carolyn Greene told the Select Board. "The same goes for state agencies that would typically be the ones to fund social service agencies.
 
"ARPA made sense because [Remedy Hall] is very much post-COVID in terms of the needs of the town becoming more evident."
 
In a seven-page letter to the town requesting the funds, the Remedy Hall board wrote that, "need is ubiquitous and we are unveiling that truth daily."
 
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