Kidspace Celebrates New Location with Open House
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The child-center art collaboration between Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Clark Art Institute and Williams College Museum of Art now has more space for more kids. Relocated to the second-floor at Mass MoCA, it adds another 1,200 square feet of exhibition and art-making space.
Kidspace celebrates the move on Saturday with an open house featuring the debut of "Cribs," a new exhibition by installation artist Matt Bua. The daylong free family celebration will also include performances of a series of plays written by local schoolchildren in collaboration with professional Berkshire writer Juliane Hiam.
The expansion allows Kidspace to better serve the community by increasing opportunities for public engagement in the space and bringing larger exhibitions to children, say musuem officials.
"Cribs" is a three-part installation project organized by Bua that celebrates alternative/experimental architecture. It 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. Visitors will be able to create their own found masterpieces.
 Courtesy Mass MoCA
Matthew Bua's take on 'Cribs' at Kidspace opens today. |
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 "Architectural Cribbage," a game in which he encourages others to start constructing their own small-scale visionary spaces.
The third piece will take place in downtown North Adams at 107 Main St. 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) will create installations for this space as part of "Cribliousdome," an off-shoot of "Cribs." Pupils from the NBSU will also work with writer-in-residence Hiam on a project for this space called "Writing on the Walls," creating poems and stories related to the themes in Bua's "Cribs."
A full schedule of art classes will be offered over the summer, relating to the exhibit.
Saturday's festitivies run from 11 to 5. The family event will include art-making activities all day long, as well as refreshments and Bua will be talk about his work at 11:30 and 1:30.
Kidspace will also celebrate its Massachusetts Cultural Council Creative Schools-funded artist residency program with three performances. 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 also inspired by the "Illuminations" exhibition, will be performed by the Berkshire Country Day School sixth-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 school.
Start times are at noon, 2 and 4 in the B-10 Theater; the running total of all four plays combined is about an hour. The performances are free but reservations are recommended to guarantee seating by calling the box office at 413-MoCA-111.
Bua of Brooklyn, N.Y., is an installation artist with extensive experience establishing artist collaborations. He holds a bachelor's degree from East Carolina University and has collaborated with Jesse Bercowitz to create large-scale installation projects for such sites as Governor's Island, the Brooklyn Museum and the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh. His solo work has been shown most recently at galleries and sculpture parks in New York City and upstate New York.
"Cribs" runs through Sept. 7. Kidspace is open this spring from 11 to 4 through May 31, daily on April 13 to 17 and on Memorial Day, May 25. Extended hours begin in June.
For more information: 413-664-4481 Ext. 8131 or visit www.massmoca.org/kidspace.
