Opening Celebration: New Exhibitions in Building 6

Join fellow museum members, MASS MoCA curators, friends from the community, and the artists to celebrate three new exhibitions in The Robert W. Wilson Building (Building 6): The Oath, Machine Dazzle: Changes, Slumpie 69, and new works by Laurie Anderson.

The Oath, by Annie-B Parson and Alla Kovgan, is a film based on Parson’s stage choreography. It explores humanity’s dance of vernacular and poetic group actions. Set in a vivid universe of color, the work spans time, from the primeval age into the future, and features seventeen women and femmes moving as one for purpose and for pleasure: to gather, to bond, to intimidate, to believe, to fight, to promise — to dance.

Machine Dazzle has been creating extraordinary costumes for over 30 years. An artist, costume designer, set designer, and performance artist, he has presented his genre-defying work at venues ranging from Broadway to the runway, wowing audiences from Joe’s Pub to the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. As the nation marks 250 years of America’s history, MASS MoCA will showcase the artist’s wearable sculptural looks created for Taylor Mac’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, which examines the 24 decades since the founding of the United States in 1776.

Slumpie 69 is part of a series begun in 2016 by Miami-based artist Jillian Mayer, who calls the works “functional sculptures made for bodies in dialogue with screens.” A tongue-in-cheek response to our seemingly hopeless dependence on smart devices, the brightly colored cast-aluminum sculpture invites visitors to sit, rest, or even slump on its lumps and loops. For Mayer, its handmade, bumpy surfaces and loose, painterly colors are antithetical to the optimized, frictionless interactions that personal technology promises.

Laurie Anderson’s seemingly boundless oeuvre includes books, albums, and performances incorporating film, slides, recorded audio, live music, and spoken word. Anderson has long been recognized as a groundbreaking leader in the use of technology in the arts and has developed new musical instruments, including the tape bow violin, in which the bow has been replaced with magnetic audiotape and the bridge with a reader.

After the celebration, join us in the Hunter Center to keep it going with Perfume Genius & Kate Wallich: The Lesson.