Let's get LOUD this Thursday (through Saturday)! August 1 marks the return of summer festival Bang on a Can LOUD Weekend, with playful and heady collisions of jazz, classical, rock and more filling MASS MoCA's galleries and courtyards. Single-day passes are available, and full fest passes are on sale, too! Prefer a more intimate art experience? Thursday, August 1 is also the date of our next MASS MoCA Open Studios in Buildings 13 and 34. (As always, admission is free and open to all!) Whatever you're craving this summer, from engaging author talks to powerful new exhibitions, make your plan today for everything up ahead:

CALENDAR

Exhibitions Not to Miss
On view beginning Saturday, August 3

Steve Locke the fire next time

the fire next time takes its title from the 1963 book by American author and civil rights activist James Baldwin, which galvanized the American public with its brutal honesty about racial inequality. Like Baldwin, New York-based artist Steve Locke invites the viewer to grapple with the legacies of racial violence and lynchings, yet in the artist’s work there are no images of killings to be found. Opening Saturday in B6: The Robert Wilson Building, Locke’s exhibition is a meditation on uniquely American forms of violence directed at Black and queer people. Steve Locke: the fire next time is the first presentation from MASS MoCA's Curatorial Exchange Initiative (CEI).

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Amy Podmore Audience

Artist Amy Podmore is propelled by an interest in surrealist strategies of transformation and the line between stillness and motion in sculpture. In Audience, she offers enigmatic plaster casts of found wicker baskets and cornucopias. What we see as the exterior is actually the interior of these baskets, unfolding a vulnerable underbelly in the act of reversal. Podmore embeds motorized glass eyeballs into the woven warp and weft of the basket surfaces, still visible in the plaster translation. Defamiliarized, the molded baskets and their ranging, expressive forms adopt an almost anthropomorphic quality. As their eyes sleepily fall shut and whip open, the museum visitor becomes the one being uncannily watched back.

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Coming Up

Amy Yoes Catalogue Launch & Activation
Saturday, August 10, noon

Join us for a conversation in the R&D Store with Amy Yoes and Creative Producer, Gabriel Sacco, as we celebrate the publication of our new catalogue Amy Yoes: Hot Corners (MASS MoCA). Afterwards we will explore Yoes’ drawing implements in a drop-in style activation to create artworks on paper in Yoes’ Hot Corners exhibition, on view now in B6: The Robert W. Wilson Building.

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Roomful of Teeth
Saturday, August 24, 8pm

Two-time GRAMMY winners Roomful of Teeth return to MASS MoCA this summer for a week-long residency to workshop new music with some of today's most visionary composers including Allison Loggins-Hull, Christopher Cerrone and Mingjia Chen. In celebration of Roomful of Teeth's long-standing history of creation at MASS MoCA, the band will present a sensational retrospective performance of the iconic new works that have been born out of 14 years of consecutive summer residencies at MASS MoCA.

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Save the Date and Celebrate

Osman Khan Road to Hybridabad
On view beginning Sunday, August 25

Artist Osman Khan re-reads the magical and fantastical figures found in folktales and lore, with a particular focus on those from South Asia, the Middle East, and other Muslim and immigrant traditions, in this upcoming show. Khan interprets these figures through contemporary technologies and concerns, inviting us on a journey across borders, through time, and between legend and history in this sprawling and wryly funny exhibition. You are invited to reconsider - and perhaps rewrite - the narratives around identity, difference, and power reflected and recounted in the tales we tell ourselves.

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See it first! Members are invited to celebrate Road to Hybridabad and the group exhibition Eluding Capture: Three Artists From Central Asia, in a Member Celebration on Saturday, August 24. Not yet a member, and want to join the party at no extra cost? Become one today.

Osman Khan in Conversation
Sunday, August 25, 2pm

Join us for a conversation with artist Osman Khan, whose exhibition Road to Hybridabad opens on August 25. The artist and MASS MoCA Curator Alexandra Foradas will discuss the process of creating the exhibition, and explore how stories shape who we are - and the power of the choices we make as we retell them.

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