The gallery and arts center MASS MoCA occupies the space of a nineteenth-century textile mill in North Adams, Massachusetts. This week we spent a brutally cold winter day roaming its galleries. Two exhibits stood out to me.
Vincent Valdez’s work focuses on identity, social justice, and American History. A number of his oil paintings are done in grayscale, which I’ve not seen often. This one of Klan members may seem to be a snapshot from history, but look closer and you can see that one of the robed figures is holding a smartphone, and the masked baby has on a pair of Nikes. It’s contemporary, relevant, and a subtle yet powerful way to convey the sinister stickiness of the Klan in our society.
Valdez I would call a born artist. The exhibit contained many works of art that he’d done as a kid—nine years old and drawing a sophisticated rendering of the space shuttle Challenger and the astronauts who perished in the explosion. The talent, even at that age, was obvious. And the passion, too. He produced many works from an early age.
The connection between talent and passion fascinates me. Do we become passionate about what we naturally do well? When our work is widely praised—I can imagine Vincent’s parents recognizing the talent and skill in their son and heaping him with encouragement—does it create a feedback loop within ourselves that we call passion and that makes us want to produce more work because of the rewards bestowed upon us? Or is the passion as natural as the talent?
The other exhibit that stands out to me is one I’ve seen before: the Sol LeWitt: Wall Drawing Retrospective, which includes more than 100 of his wall paintings and drawings. Some are simple, some are mathematically complex. All of them are mesmerizing. I’ve included a few photos, but this link gives you much more.
LeWitt created guidelines for his wall drawings and paintings, including detailed instructions on where and how to draw a line. These instructions enable the works to be executed by people other than the artist himself, and in doing so make the art more participatory and ephemeral—the works will be destroyed once the exhibit has ended, but can be reproduced on other walls in other spaces. His wall drawings have been compared to the work of a composer, whose musical compositions are performed by different groups of musicians.
