Mass MoCA Commission Welcomes Architecture Firm, Silkscreen Printer
NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — Two new tenants will open on the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art campus: Gary Lichtenstein Editions LLC and JZJN architecture.
Lichtenstein Editions is a publisher and printer of fine art silkscreen editions and will be located in Building 13, in the gallery formerly occupied by Eckert Fine Art. Gary Lichtenstein, with managing partner Melissa Marr, said he expects to open the second week of June.
"We've been in discussions with the director there, Kristy Edmunds, for over a year," Lichtenstein told the Mass MoCA Commission on Monday, adding he had worked with her before.
The studio is currently operating in Jersey City, New Jersey, and prior to that in Connecticut and California.
"In addition to custom screen printing services, GLE, as we like to call them, frequently curates exhibitions, produces events and cultivates site-specific projects and educational programs," said Kimma Stark, project manager at Mass MoCA.
The studio has been involved with its communities, Lichtenstein said, and has offered education through internships that have turned into jobs that have lead back to more education. He said they were looking forward to moving to North Adams "and be a part of a new community with the kind of leadership that we feel is there to begin with, that we could just blend in."
Commissioners hoped that the new business would make connections with the local high school art teachers. Lichtenstein said they'd brought in classes to see how they operate and sometimes inspires that one student to come back and talk to them.
The print facility expects to be open weekdays from 10 to 6 and weekends by appointment, but will likely shift to match the museum's hours.
JZJN offers architectural design, project management, strategic planning, exhibition design and custom fabrication and will be located directly above Lichtenstein in Building 13.
Principals Mandy Johnson and James Jarzyniecki both hold master's of architecture degrees from Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston and moved their practice from New York City to North Adams in 2016. They opened the nonprofit gallery Outside at 10 Ashland St. and had a studio in the Beaver Mill for a few years before moving here permenantly.
"We still have that space now and that's really transitioned into a fabrication space, so woodshop and there's a fiber studio in there, as well as lots of material research that we do for our projects," said Jarzyniecki. "It's sort of like high and low tech. So we've got both going on -- the tablesaw my grandfather had from the '50s and then the 3D printers ... it's sort of nice to be able to marry those two things."
The gallery, he said, "was really our exhibition space as well as our meeting space with clients. So when we hadn't needed a big table to work out with clients, we would meet with them at the end of Main Street, it really functioned really well for that."
When the gallery closed during the pandemic, they began looking for a new location and began talks with Stark.
"Everyone knows where Mass MoCA is," he said. "I will not have to explain it when people are coming to our office to meet with us. So we're excited to move in."
The firm's projects are mainly residential and cultural, and its worked with a number of museums including MoCA, the Clark Art Institute and Williams College Museum of Art.
Both ventures were approved with Commissioner Eric Kerns abstaining from the JZJN vote because he is currently a client.
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