Berkshires

Last weekend I went with Jess and Brentan to visit Emily in western Mass. It was a relaxing, wonderful weekend! Emily took us all around to see the Sol Lewitt installation she is working on as an apprentice at the MassMoCA. It takes up an entire building behind the main museum, and is going to open this November. I had never seen so many of Lewitt's work in one place, and seeing them in progress, in semi-chronological order was very impressive. I didn't take any pictures, but there are some cool ones from the MassMoCA website.

Most of Lewitt's pieces of art are just instructions. This was part of a wall that just described the lines that were to be placed on it:
This wall was finished when I saw it, all full of the brightly colored bricks. We decided it looked like CandyLand on drugs:
Another cool, finished wall:
In addition to seeing the museum, later that evening we watched a performance of Bruce Lee's "Enter the Dragon," which was set to an original score performed live (on drums and a mixer) at the museum. It was supposed to be outside, but it rained that night.

Then on Sunday we went to Jacob's Pillow, which is this apparently world famous dance retreat/school/performance center in the middle of the Berkshires, which I had never heard of. But we saw this amazing remake of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, which I had learned all about in one of my art history classes senior year. So it was cool knowing about the original, but the performance was a modern take on it, interpreted from violence and unrest in Nigeria, using an all African dance group. The choreographer, Heddy Maalem, is half Algerian and half French, which brought a really cool afro european perspective to it all!