If you’ve been following my @CultureGrrl Twitter feed, you know that I made the rounds of Berkshire museums this week. It was meant to be a mini-vacation. But then I kept seeing things that I wanted to praise—the Williams College Museum’s eclectic mix of thought-provoking exhibitions; Richard Nonas‘ massive railroad-tie installation (in sync with MASS MoCA’s industrial vibe)—and others that I wanted to criticize—Alex Da Corte‘s inappropriate appropriation of Joseph Beuy‘s “Lightning with Stag in Its Glare” (also at MASS MoCA); all the details that I had carped about (and still dislike) in my Wall Street Journal review two years ago about the expanded and renovated Clark Art Institute.
By now I should know that I can’t set foot in a museum without feeling a compulsive urge to write about it.
Photo by Lee Rosenbaum
The greatest chunk of my time was spent at The Clark. (More on that later.) For now, here are a few tweeted impressions of what I saw at the Williams College Museum of Art and MASS MoCA. Scroll down past this chain of live tweets for my unexpected celebrity sighting and my CultureGrrl Video from MASS MoCA:
Another highlight of my trip was what I believe to have been a Meryl Streep sighting in the audience of the Williamstown Theatre Festival’s uneven production of Wendy Wasserstein‘s satirical but dated (not “prescient,” as WTF would have it) 1996 play, “An American Daughter.” As I passed Meryl (or her double) at intermission, I did a double-take. One seat from the aisle, she kept her head down and her hand across her mouth as she chatted with another woman who was seated next to her, on the aisle. When I returned for the second half, the face of the mysterious woman was still largely shielded by the same concealing pose, making positive identification difficult.
I did later learn, though, that Streep had starred in the first production of “An American Daughter” (at the Seattle Repertory Theatre’s New Play Workshop Series). So I’m guessing that my hunch about that woman seated a few rows behind me was correct. When I turned to look at the end of Tuesday’s performance, the ponytailed blonde had already disappeared.
Streep and her husband, sculptor Donald Gummer, who has a permanent outdoor installation at MASS MoCA, serve there on its Director’s Advisory Council. That institution was, of course, one of the museums I visited.
So let’s head over to MASS MoCA now, for a CultureGrrl Video about two of its large-scale installations. What I didn’t capture on camera was the moment when I saw Richard Nonas‘ abandoned (little visited) railroad track suddenly animated by a few boys who (perhaps inspired by Olympic hurdlers) galloped over the entire expanse, collapsing at on the concrete floor at the end of their mad dash. There was no guard (just me) in the room at the time, but the track stars on Nonas’ tracks must have been spotted on a museum camera, because a staffer soon arrived to try to find and admonish them.