Wide clay bowls are piled in the corner of the room against the brick wall. I’ve come looking for them in Mass MoCA’s new spring shows — drawn by a local story I heard months ago about their making. They’re fire pits. Lily Cox Richards, the artist who made them, gave them to people in the community and asked people to set them alight.
She gave one to friends of mine. They say she wanted people to gather around and be warm — come together safely in the pandemic. She wanted people to find their own uses for a central fire and then talk with her about them. I imagine my friends on a quiet night, sitting outside by their raised beds of herbs and looking at the new moon … and I want to talk with local folks who took in these handmade hearths.
They hold something I was looking for on an afternoon at the end of winter, as the pandemic is ebbing again and the ground shifts between freeze and thaw. We’ve spent the cold months in retreat, afraid when we’d started to think we were free, and now we’re stirring, a few steps at a time. Small gatherings happen face to face. Summer plans begin to surface. The first snowdrops appear overnight. And we’re newly aware how fragile and vital they are.
In Weep Holes at Mass MoCA, Lily Cox Richards has made fire pits and given them to people in the community, and woven frames for tomato plants out of kudzu vines.
As we emerge with the spring, if we have room to think and act, we’re getting to our feet and asking how we can keep afloat in all this surging change and move ahead. That’s what I hear in these new artists as they’re trying to navigate with us in these beginning places. Richards says she is thinking about ‘stewardship, beauty and threat and collective action’ in this installation. She has created Weep Holes in response to chaos in the land, the climate and the country — the 2016 election, the pandemic.
In the rooms beside hers, Marc Swanson is also exploring loss for humans and the natural world — linking deep and cataclysmic change in climate change and the AIDS crisis — in A memorial to ice at the dead deer disco.
‘The two spaces where I have felt the most comfortable and spiritually connected are in the night clubs of my youth and in the woods today,’ he writes in the wall text as I walk in. And I’m looking at what he calls future ruins, a long room as bleached as stone or bone that has stood in the sun for a thousand years.
Armando Guadalupe Cortés’ 'Castillo' honors the people and the land in his native Mexico with vividly bright seeds as well as stones, feathers, figurines and more, at Mass MoCA.
Everything seems to be coated in white plastic. Almost everything. Candles on tree branches draw me closer. Black and white photographs suggest people in the past — are they people he has loved, maybe, people he lost to illness 50 years ago and remembers every day? I walk through these rooms wanting to know their names, and wanting the music of the night clubs and the warmth that moves in a circle of dancers.
I look at his casts of animals, a bird like an ibis caught in an oil slick, and I want the living deer in the winter woods. They will come down from the ridges in a few weeks, as the valleys thaw and buds start to break. I understand the need to reckon with all we’re losing. And yet, if we’re talking about the change in the land, I want to see what we’re losing, so that I can feel why it matters.
Places in this room are beautiful, and places make me keenly aware of emptiness. And I am looking for a future to fill it, not to lessen all we have lost but to make room for the living alongside.
I think of what I saw when I first walked into Close to You to see Clifford Prince King’s photographs. He shows his friends informally together, braiding each other’s hair, dancing in the kitchen to the music on their phones.
Kang Seung Lee makes a hammock for the choreographer Goh Choo San, who was known around the world when he died in his 30s in 1987, and I see a Singaporean dancer, the beauty of his work and the kindness in offering him a place to rest when he is sick, in pain, full of dreams.
This is how I understand the AIDS crisis. How would it have felt to find family in a nightclub when you were young, to have this place where you could relax into yourself? And this is how I try to begin to understand how it would feel to have an illness tear through the place, take apart, make you terrified years before you knew what the illness was or how it spread. This is how I understand how it felt to lose people you love.
And this is how I want to understand the questions many of these artists are wrestling with now, in our relationships with our communities, our countries, with the land.
Armando Guadalupe Cortés’ 'Castillo' honors the people and the land in his native Mexico with vividly bright seeds as well as stones, feathers, figurines and more, at Mass MoCA.
In this conversation, acres of plastic feel smothering. When I look into Amy Helm’s Terra + Luna + Sol and see a dome of astroturf, my gut clenches. I want to see and feel the land — not the absence of it. I want to see and feel the connections between people that Richards and Swanson are reaching for. I want to sit with people gathering around fire pits, talking in the dark.
And so Armando Guadalupe Cortés’ Castillos caught me and held me when I walked back downstairs. Here in a room facing west into the afternoon light, with windows opening onto the cement chutes encasing the Hoosac River, he has made pillars of adobe and cedar wood. I had walked through the ceramics show in the winter, but I hadn’t seen what they hold.
The leather shoes caught my eye first, hanging by their thongs, then a marble-white stone over my head, carved in arcs like petals. I think it’s a grinding stone. And I realized that the square pillars set with cedar poles hold niches, and they carry mysteries. I know now that the seed pod with straw-colored filaments, like a beech bur an order of magnitude larger, is datura — but what are the red-orange berries, beans, seeds as bright as swamp maple in the fall?
The description he offers is almost as varied as an ecosystem and still doesn’t seem to have room for all of the details and stories he is gathering. I can find the fire opals, but are the creamy amber-orange stones the flints, and if they are, why has he chosen this vivid shade? What birds gave the yellow-orange-blue feathers curved into this sphere, and what are the Mesoamerican creation stories they refer to?
I want to sit down with Cortés and ask him, if he will. Who carved the alabaster and the clay figures … Who wore the armadillo mask in las posadas, the celebration of the nine days when Mary and Joseph traveled from Nazareth to Bethlehem, and what role were they enacting — what myth were they embodying?
Cortés says in his own show notes that he often thinks about the blending of cultural influences. He lives and works in urban California, and he grew up in Urequío, a farming community in Michoacán, México. I wonder about the stories he is weaving in here, and why he has included, among the whistles and natural elements in warm colors, braided strands of his mother’s hair.
Armando Guadalupe Cortés’ 'Castillo' honors the people and the land in his native Mexico with ceramc bowls as well as stones, feathers, figurines and more, at Mass MoCA.
I’ll come back to see his work again, while the show is still here in March. It forms a contrast for me, and it speaks powerfully to so much of the work around it.
The winter morning when I first saw the ceramics show, I spent time quietly with Anina Major’s All Us Come Across the Water. In hommage to the African diaspora, she sets baskets on a pier as though people had left them at the water’s edge when they were forced onto ships. They are woven ceramic as variagated as the nacre inside a mussel, and the ground below the dock covered with shards like broken shells.
She is holding people who have had to leave their homes, as Swanson is holding the memory of people and time he has lost. And Cortés is holding the stories of people who live with their land for centuries. He is reckoning with losses too, and still in these seeds I find some glimmering of what we have and what we need in the time ahead.
