art & performance year round, more than ever
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ow that the hustle and bustle of summer have faded—yes, even in a pandemic year, there were public and private events competing for our attention—the region’s venues continue to debut art exhibitions and live performances, offer film screenings, host holiday tours, and more. Throughout the fall and winter, solo and group exhibits open at The Clark, Norman Rockwell Museum, Berkshire Museum, MASS MoCA, and the Bennington Museum. Berkshire Theatre Group and the Mahaiwe offer a robust roster of in-person concerts and other events, the Metropolitan Opera and Bolshoi Ballet resume in-person HD screenings, and Close Encounters With Music celebrates its return to live performances with a varied lineup that stretches into the spring. As the pandemic continues to disrupt even the best-laid plans, be sure to check each venue’s website for last-minute cancellations, as well as additions.
VISUAL ART Beginning November 20, MASS MoCA debuts “Ways to Baffle the Wind,” featuring new and recent work by French-Moroccan artist Yto Barrada. The exhibit includes sculpture, textile, films, and games assembled to model, parody, and learn from attempts to regulate and organize nature. A highlight of the show is Barrada’s film Tree Identification for Beginners. On March 12, 2022, three solo shows also take up residence at the Museum, by artists Lily Cox-Richard, Amy Hauft, and Marc Swanson. Lily Cox-Richard’s Weep Holes, featuring all new work, addresses ideas of stewardship, beauty and threat, collective action, and the building and dismantling of systems. The sculptor’s show will include large-scale works celebrating Shaker ideas of labor and reuse, with these ordinary objects made uncanny by the fact of their scale and placement. Amy Hauft’s architectural installations reorient our experience of the landscape and of planetary living. The centerpiece of the exhibition, 700,000:1, takes its title from the mathematical odds of a person on Earth being hit by a meteor. Constructed from two enormous spheres on the floor and the
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ceiling, viewers will be invited to ascend the lower sphere and place their heads in the upper sphere, invoking the feeling of being simultaneously on the ground and in the sky. “A Memorial to Ice at the Dead Deer Disco” is Marc Swanson’s multimedia exploration of the relationships between humans, culture, and nature. Two separate large-scale immersive environments—A Memorial to Ice, inspired by the dioramas found in natural history museums, and The Dead Deer Disco, a reimagined disco exploring feelings of freedom and mourning caused by the AIDS crisis—both confront loss and our inability to control human nature and the world around us. Beginning November 19, the Berkshire Museum’s large second-floor Crane Room changes into UK artist Luke Jerram’s “Museum of the Moon.” Suspended in the center of the space is a radiant representation of the Moon’s surface, measuring 10 feet across and accompanied by an ethereal soundscape created by composer Dan Jones. The internally-lit “moon” allows visitors to have a scientifically accurate, up-close experience with their nearest celestial neighbor through January 9, 2022. The Crane more news and features at theBerkshireEdge.com
