This article is part of our latest Fine Arts & Exhibits special report, about how art institutions are helping audiences discover new options for the future.
Lancaster for The New York Times
Ms. Faler, for example, isn’t just leading financial workshops; in 2020, Mass MoCA commissioned her to create a site-specific installation for “Kissing Through a Curtain,” a group show of 10 artists about what gets lost and gained in the act of translation — between cultures, languages, people and media. (The exhibition, on view through January, was planned for mid-March 2020, just as Covid. By the time the museum reopened, the title had garnered associations thathad not been anticipated.)
In a 2,500-square-foot space within the show, Ms. Faler’s “Double Bubble,” comprising 20 large-scale “portraits” of wads of chewing gum cast in an array of materials, hangs at eye level from the two-story ceiling. The colorful, cloudlike forms emit the sounds of people chewing gum and blowing bubbles — each sound resonating differently as it travels though metal, wax, gypsum, glass and so on. It feels like walking through a microclimate of collective fret.
The group show also includes a complex multimedia installation by Detroit-based Osman Khan, a 2020 Guggenheim fellow. Downstairs, near the museum’s main entrance, a 60-foot long multimedia work on paper by the Puerto Rican artist Gamaliel Rodriguez, is on view as a solo exhibition through January 2023.Mr. Khan and Mr. Rodriguez both took part in the Mass MoCA residency program (yet another part of Assets for Artists) on the museum’s campus — which is how Susan Cross, the senior curator, and her team discovered their work.
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