The Not-So-Secret-Star of Wilco’s Solid Sound Festival: MASS MoCA

One of this year’s highlights for a small group of attendees at Wilco’s wondrous biannual Solid Sound Festival (June 26-28) came Sunday afternoon while seeking shelter from a short burst of intense rain—a not altogether uncommon occurrence in late June in the Berkshires. The epiphany, however, had nothing to do with music.

Of course, for the 8,500 folks attending Solid Sound the rapturous live music performances led by Wilco are the primary reason to attend. This year’s wildly impressive bill included a transcendent set by Wilco and British singer and political activist Billy Bragg performing for the first time their landmark 1998 album Mermaid Avenue. The performance of the Grammy-nominated LP built around unpublished Woody Guthrie lyrics included appearances by 10,000 Maniacs singer Natalie Merchant and Guthrie’s daughter Nora. The weekend’s other phenomenal performances included sets by Gang of Four, The Breeders, The Messthetics, Sylvan Esso, The (Mini) Mekons, The Sharp Pins and Elizabeth Moen as well as a skronk-heavy jam set by Wilco on the second day and something of a lovefest led by Jeff Tweedy and his band of family and friends to close out the third.

Fest 411: Wilco + MASS MoCA + Incredible Music & Art = The Sublime Solid Sound Festival

What made this non-music revelation so special was that it came while escaping inclement weather and led to stumbling upon the phenomenal artwork of an 81-year-old German conceptual artist Anselm Kiefer. The installation entitled “Velimir Chlebnikov” (named for a Russian poet and futurist with a theory about sea battles) featured one room covered with 30 abstract ocean-like “paintings” with boats using a thick viscous metal material in varying states of decay with rust and oxidization leaving those avoiding the downpour utterly agog.

“It’s one of my favorite spots, too,” says Addie MacDonald, MASS MoCA’s Managing Director of Performing Arts and Film, of the Kiefer installation. “It’s such an oasis. I’m always happy when people stumble across it. That’s the joy of the festival. That’s one of the spots immune to a lot of sound bleed, its air conditioned and you feel like you’re entering somebody’s wine cellar or something. It’s one of the more all-inspiring things you can discover as a museum patron or a festival goer.”

Kiefer’s work is housed in a standalone building by architect Bill Katz and the Hall Art Foundation near the fest’s food truck area that could easily be overlooked at the sprawling industrial complex that is the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, a wonder unto itself.

The former factory was built in 1860 by the Arnold Print Works and later acquired by the Sprague Electric Company in 1942. The industry labyrinthine complex, with shoots, ladders and vast open spaces takes up a large block of land and traverses the Hoosic River. It wouldn’t look out of place in an industrial part of Berlin or South Brooklyn. In 1999, the factory was converted into the largest contemporary art museum in North America. This includes some 300,000 square feet of interior space and brilliant installations by artists like Kiefer, James Turrell, Sol LeWitt, Louise Bourgeois, Laurie Anderson, Jeffrey Gibson and many others

“Everybody calls themselves a ‘music and arts festival,’” says Alex Crothers of Higher Ground Presents, which co-produces Solid Sound with Wilco and MASS MoCA. “You look at any of the list of major festivals, and it’s always ‘music and arts,’ which is appropriate, but this one really leans into the art side, even more so, particularly the visual arts. We’re not just putting up some sculptural pieces to build out a concert site. We’re literally inhabiting the largest contemporary art museum space in North America. And there’s a beautiful symbiotic relationship that happens every year.”

Solid Sound’s every other year schedule means most of this non-collecting museum’s exhibitions are turned over with the exception of several long-term artworks on loan. That means there’s room for new art discoveries and epiphanies for longtime fest attendees, providing wildly additive experiences. Some of this year’s art shows included “New York State of Mind,” a group photo exhibition on New York City’s historic music scene; a “Cultural Apothecary” by Alison Pebworth offering healing teas and potions for modern day anxiety; an installation by musician/artist Laurie Anderson, “Ocean/Canoe,” 2026, bathed in black light centered around a golden canoe along with glowing graffiti and holographical human figures sharpening knives  (“Citizens,” 2021); and an exhibition entitled “Technologies of Relation” featuring hand-drawn QR codes by artist Roopa Vasudevan that led to sites offering sage-like insight into coping with the plague of technological overload. (One QR code led to the question “When was the last time you felt caught up with everything?)

The music and art experience at MASS MoCA isn’t just confined to Solid Sound. “We program throughout the year and not just concerts, of course, but all types of performing art and film,” MacDonald said. He cites upcoming concerts by Lucy Dacus of boygenius and Big Thief as well as past performances by Courtney Barnett, Modest Mouse, Pixies, Lake Street Dive and others (some done with Crothers’ Higher Ground Presents)

In the next few weeks, there are a number of less mainstream shows that include Pianist Lara Downes with Theo Bleckmann, 9 Horses (Joseph Brent, Sara Caswell, and Andrew Ryan) and Vuyo Sotashe (July 18); comedy with Robby Hoffman (July 24); the experimental Bang on A Can Loud Weekend music festival (July 30 – Aug 1); and a sound installation and audio takeover of Jeffrey Gibson: POWER FULL BECAUSE WE’RE DIFFERENT by Halifax-based Two-Spirit Cree transfemme artist Arielle Twist (Aug 1-9).

MacDonald estimates that MASS MoCA hosts 50-60 performances a year with five primary performance spaces: The Hunter Center, a black box theater with a capacity of 1,700 or 700 seated (which at Solid Sound hosted comedians John Hodgeman and Jordan Klepper among others); Club B. 10, which MacDonald calls a “kind of cabaret style spot, almost modeled after (NYC’s) Joe’s Pub” with a 320-standing or 220 with tables; Courtyard C, an outdoor space with a viewing platform that can host “a couple of thousand;” Courtyard D, another outside space with a capacity of 3,900; and Joe’s Field which hosts Solid Sound’s main headliners and can accommodate 10,000 fans who turn out for the festival

“It’s really in the summer when we can open our courtyards because we have several acres here and 26 buildings, so we have flexibility on how we present,” MacDonald explains. “In fact, we have such flexibility we can book certain shows and if it sells well, very easily move it to a spot with a larger capacity. It really helps us be nimble and flexible and ultimately enhance the audience and artist experience.”

That versatility also gives Solid Sound the freedom and creativity of programming, which this year included a group hike, podcasting, AA meetings and one unique and unexpected event: 5,000 people apparently setting an official world record by all doing yo-yos at the same time.

“It was a fun thing to do and in the spirit of Solid Sound,” Crothers says. “We’re always wanting to add a different type of element, particularly something that is participatory, which is a big part of Solid Sound and MASS MoCA. Art is made there, music is made there; we can all make something there.

Another Solid Sound hallmark are its pop-up performances in galleries and alternative spaces across the museum. This year saw Natalie Merchant play a standalone pop-up as well as artists like Scott The Hoople, Elizabeth Moen, Anthony Pirog of the Messthetics, Respira, Hanna Cohen and others

“I reach out to all the artists that are on the lineup and ask them if they want to do a pop-up,” Crothers explains. “We try to include anyone who wants to do a pop-up. The pop-ups now have become a calling card of the festival. They are these sort of unexpected moments, even if they are expected because they’re announced. It’s a nice way to see a band, whether it’s your favorite band or you’re just learning about them in a different nontraditional setting. It’s usually smaller, intimate, a gallery space, so that makes it kind of vibey in a way because it’s surrounded by contemporary art. The bands are very often stripped down and they have to be because it’s a 15 to 20 minute set. It’s meant to be ephemeral. It’s a very in-the-moment thing.”

“Everything is a conversation with Addie,” Crothers continues, “which by extension is a conversation with the museum. So we come to the museum, and we say, ‘Hey, we’ve got these three, four, five, seven things, is there room for them, right?’ And it’s a respectful conversation, how we find space, the museum is very much in the mode of ‘yes and’ people and not ‘sort of or no’ people. There’s always a solution. We just have to think through, find it and make it work for everybody.”

MASS MoCA, of course, is in no way the only museum to program music. NYC is a mecca for live museum performances. MoMA’s PS1 Warm Up series, for example, has had acts like Honey Dijon, SOPHIE, Skrillex and Marcellus Pittman; while the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum regularly hosts artists, including acts like Sun Ra Arkestra nd Amaare, who’ve played within the building’s iconic Frank Lloyd Wright spiraling interior while more experimental acts like Clairce Jenson and Discovery Zone have played the building’s more experimental Late Shift series; this while MoMA’s sculpture garden has had jazz giants in the past like Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, Sonny Rollins and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. The Broad in Los Angeles regularly hosts shows connected to its installations and in August will host a show in conjunction with a fantastic Yoko Ono show featuring members of Sleater-Kinney, Yo La Tengo,, Tune-Yards, Sylvan Esso, Rufus Wainwright, and Nels Cline, while LACMA and The Geffen have also had their share of music nights. The Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art also host music performances. All that said, none of these institutions have a multi-day festival allowing festgoers the freedom, time and massive indoor and outdoor spaces to connect with art.

It’s exactly these enhanced, multidisciplinary experiences that help bring more patrons to museums while boosting the bottom line.

Tickets prices for Solid Sound are relatively reasonable with early-bird 3-day adult passes starting at $274 and final weekend passes retailing around $350.77. A rough average of $312 per ticket with 8,500 attendees would yield an estimated gross of some $2.7 million. But the long-term economic boost of these events for an institution like Mass MoCA and for the northern Berkshires can be far greater.”

“We’ve found more and more that people are making a day of coming to MASS MoCA because there’s such cross-pollination of mediums, art forms,” MacDonald says. “People will come to the museum and are surprised how robust our performing arts department is or vice versa. We’ll get 10,000 people here for Solid Sound and people will fall in love with the art or the space or the architecture or the vibe and become members or come back when we don’t have a show just to check out the galleries. So it makes it easier for us to program creatively to introduce our performing arts patrons to our visual arts and architecture and those that come to experience the art and architecture can learn about a show and buy tickets.”

But also, sometimes the art and the music just rock.