
#Mass moca concerts manual#
During World War II Sprague operated around the clock and employed a large female workforce-not only due to the lack of men, but also because it took small hands and manual dexterity to construct the small, hand-rolled capacitors. Sprague) Sprague Electric Company was a local North Adams company, and it purchased the Marshall Street complex to produce capacitors. In 1942 Arnold Print Works was forced to close its doors and leave North Adams due to the low prices of cloth produced in the South and abroad, as well as the economic effects of the Great Depression. In addition to printing the textiles, Arnold Print Works expanded and built their own cloth-weaving facilities in order to produce "grey cloth", which was the crude, unfinished textile from which printed color cloth was made. Arnold had offices in New York City and Paris. Arnold produced 580,000 yards or 330 miles of cloth per week. The industrial qualities of the buildings remain, despite the conversion to a fine arts museumĪt its peak in 1905, Arnold print works employed more than 3,000 workers and was one of the world's leading producers of printed textiles. By 1900, every building but one in today's Marshall Street complex was constructed. Despite a nationwide depression during the 1870s Arnold Print Works purchased additional land along the Hoosic River and constructed new buildings. Rebuilding started almost immediately and an expanded complex was finished in 1874. In December 1871, a fire swept through the Arnold Print Works factory and destroyed eight of its buildings. Aiding their success were large government contracts during the Civil War to supply cloth for the Union Army. They began operating in 1862 and quickly took off. In 1860 the Arnold brothers arrived at this site and set up their company with the latest equipment for printing cloth. Since colonial times small-scale industries had been located on this strategic peninsular location between the north and south branches of the Hoosic River. These buildings, however, were not the first to occupy this site. The buildings that MASS MoCA now occupies were originally built between 18 by the company Arnold Print Works. Museum location and history Arnold Print Works MASS MoCA, along with the Clark Art Institute and the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA), forms a trio of significant art museums in the northern Berkshires. Starting in 2010, MASS MoCA has become the home for the Solid Sound Music Festival.

The festival, started in 2001, includes concerts in galleries for three weeks during the summer. It is the home of the Bang on a Can Summer Institute, where composers and performers from around the world come to create new music. In addition to housing galleries and performing arts spaces, it also rents space to commercial tenants.

It has expanded since, including the 2008 expansion of Building 7 and the May 2017 addition of roughly 130,000 square feet when Building 6 was opened. MASS MoCA originally opened with 19 galleries and 100,000 sq ft (9,300 m 2) of exhibition space in 1999. It is one of the largest centers for contemporary visual art and performing arts in the United States.īuilt by the Arnold Print Works, which operated on the site from 1860 to 1942, the complex was used by the Sprague Electric company before its conversion. The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art ( MASS MoCA) is a museum in a converted Arnold Print Works factory building complex located in North Adams, Massachusetts.
