MASS MoCA: From Mill to Museum

by Jennifer Trainer Thompson (Photographer), Nicholas Whitman (Photographer), Joseph Thompson (Contributor)

The result of more than a decade of careful planning, designing, and building, the newly opened Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art pays tribute to nearly a century's worth of industry, labor, and commerce. Located in the college town of North Adams in a series of old mill buildings that once housed a textile factory and later an electrical company, MASS MoCA is a stunning example of intelligent, civic-minded architectural gentrification and visionary planning.The story of how MASS MoCA came to be -- from its conception in 1986 to its opening in the summer of 1999 -- is eloquently told in words and pictures in this beautifully designed volume. More than 100 black and white and color photographs document the painstaking transformation of a 19th-century mill complex, listed on the national Historic Register, into a museum that would house the world's largest collection of contemporary art. Museum Director Joseph Thompson offers a fascinating history of the site and his struggles to get the project off the ground, as well as a curatorial essay that reveals how the AIA Award-winning complex blurs the traditional lines between production and exhibition space to offer unique opportunities for artists and visitors alike. A unique and triumphant story of successful interaction between postindustrial concerns and historic preservation. Mill to Museum is a lesson in how architects, artists, citizens and government can work together to transform not only a building-but the very way we experience art and architecture.

Hardcover

First published September 8, 2000

About the author

With several hundred thousand books and posters in print, Jennifer Trainer Thompson has written more than sixteen books, including The Fresh Egg Cookbook, Hot Sauce!, Beyond Einstein (co-authored with Michio Kaku), and Jump Up and Kiss Me: Spicy Vegetarian Cooking, among others. Nominated for three James Beard awards and dubbed the “Queen of Hot” by Associated Press, she’s recognized as a leader in the spicy foods movement for her cookbooks and the hot sauce posters that she created, which have been featured everywhere from Playboy Magazine to Good Morning America.

Her books have drawn acclaim in the national press, and she’s been on hundreds of talk shows, including Live with Regis, CNN, and Good Morning America. The chef and creator of Jump Up and Kiss Me, an all-natural line of spicy sauces, she is passionate about spicy foods, and has followed her own personal “Trail of Flame,” speaking at festivals and in the media about hot foods, serving as guest chef at Hot Nights at restaurants in Boston, Philadelphia, and the Berkshires, and even going so far as to try Armageddon Sauce at a bar in the Adirondacks that’s accessible only by snowmobile in the winter.

A journalist for over 20 years, Jennifer writes about topics that interest her – science, food, travel, art, and lifestyle – for The New York Times, Travel & Leisure, Omni, Discover, Harvard Magazine among others, and has garnered a reputation for sniffing out trends. She wrote the first objective book on the commercial nuclear power controversy (Nuclear Power: Both Sides), and co-authored a popular book about scientists’ quest for the unified field theory (Beyond Einstein) when the superstring theory was proposed in 1987. She wrote the first national story about the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) for The New York Times in 1987, and was so taken by the idea of establishing a contemporary art museum in an abandoned mill complex in a small New England city that she asked the fledgling institution’s founding director Joseph Thompson for a job. Thompson hired her to become MASS MoCA’s founding development director, and several years later married her. She and her husband Joe live in western Massachusetts with their two children. Family and family traditions have always been important to her, which led to write The Joy of Family Traditions.