Ten Minutes With Kristy Edmunds

MASS MoCA’s New Director

Kristy Edmunds had just arrived the day before to North Adams, following a red-eye flight from L.A. to Boston and then a drive across the state to the Berkshires. She was beginning the process of unpacking and meeting the layers of people who make MASS MoCA what it is—the staff, patrons, board members, cultural leaders, and other people in the region. Edmunds is filling the shoes of MASS MoCA’s founding director Joseph Thompson. For now, she lives right across the street in an apartment, and this is her first full day in person, on the ground. She sits comfortably in the striking Building Six and talks with Berkshire Magazine editor-in-chief Anastasia Stanmeyer.

Have you completely moved on from your prior position as artistic director of UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance (CAP)? I am no longer the artistic director there. I am more the artistic advisor, so there is a transition while I onboard at MASS MoCA. And my kids and my partner won’t be moving here until they finish the school year, so I’ll be going back and forth. I will see through a number of program initiatives that we have coming up over the winter and spring.

Are there any connections between CAP and MASS MoCA? Yes, a lot of the artists and projects that have been in residence or have done creative development at MASS MoCA have presented their full finished form at CAP. And there are artists like Glenn Kaino who are based in L.A. and are exhibiting at MASS MoCA. There is a lot of interconnectedness.

Which exhibitions are you excited about at MASS MoCA? I’m really excited about “Ceramics in the Expanded Field.” That is just stunning. My mom was a potter—she made bowls and cups and plates. You hardly ever get to see the wild imagination that lives inside of that material and that medium. Where are you going to see something like that if it’s not here? That, to me, is really inspiring.

Do you feel connected to what is going on here? Totally. Angelique Kidjo was just here in residence with her work, and she will be back. Taylor Mac was just here in residence, and I’ve co-presented and co-commissioned his projects in Los Angeles.This gives me a lot of excitement. Esperanza Spalding is in residence right now, working on the Wayne Shorter opera. She has been working on that project for over eight years with Wayne. [See page 6.] I know both of them well. In fact, I first met Esperanza when she was a high school student in Portland, Oregon, and I was running the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. I went into the local school to talk and, boom, there she is. I’ve presented her work before, and I’ve been watching Wayne as they have tried to figure out how to manifest this opera over time, and it’s an epic journey. So, the fact that they are here gives me total joy.

Does this new position you have at MASS MoCA bring together everything that you have been doing professionally in the past? Yes, totally. There is also the artist residencies. The thing I love about MASS MoCA is that it’s in its bones, it’s in its DNA, it’s in its predisposition, and the evidence of it is everywhere. You can have an entire creative pipeline across the arc of an artist’s work. In these 16 acres at MASS MoCA, all of the possibilities are real—studio space, support, knowledge building, dreaming, fabricating, building, going off into the great unknown to see if you can reach for that high-water mark in your artistic practice. And there is the liberty to be able to dream at scale, work at scale, and work in very small intimate ways. The small sublime things live next to the giant maverick things.

What do you see as your role in this? It’s first and foremost— especially in the moment that we are in—looking at the staff, the board, and the people who have really carried this thing forward, and re-tuning that instrument so that people feel less anxious. Imagine that you’re a founder who has been with the organization for 30-something years. Some of these people have journeyed with Joe during that time. Some of them have been here for only a year—a year when there has been a pandemic. How do we find the logjams and start to free them? There is another pair of shoulders, and there is a lot of that work that is necessary at this juncture. It’s a real inflection point across our entire country.

Do you want to improve things? The word “improve” is kind of tricky, because I’m full of respect for what has happened. Also, improvement indicates that nothing can ever fail again. Failure is important in the creative world—not as a planned failure, but the risk to try. It’s kind of like you can decorate mediocrity because you know how it’s going to work, and it usually will pass, or you try and you push toward something that might be extraordinary, but its outcome is unknowable. You have to have the grit and the fortitude to work in that way, and to meet the artists in the moment that they are in.

How did you explore this community before being selected? I made sure I was around on Mondays when things were quiet, and Tuesdays. Not just on a Saturday when the farmers market is on and things are up. I asked people in cafes, salons, and the bookstores, questions like, “Tell me about MASS MoCA.”

And what did you hear? When I would sit in a bar or a restaurant or a café or in an antique shop, they told me the story of something that was impossible to have happen, that did happen. It’s a different kind of pride that has restored something in the community. Everyone wants to tell you what that story is, and they all have a shared approach to the history. This crazy, wild, whacked-out idea that everyone thought was impossible, did in fact happen. But what is important is they tell you the story of themselves through telling you what MASS MoCA is.

When did you first come to the Berkshires? I was probably in my middle-30s. MASS MoCA was just getting to its opening point. Sam Miller ran the New England Foundation for the Arts and hosted a meeting of national arts leaders at Jacob’s Pillow. They looked at the future of the arts in America. That was in the late-’90s. The townships and areas around Jacob’s Pillow were where I got my first impression of the region—the fierce independence of people who lived there. It’s not about the pursuit of scaling up to have success. It is a fiercely independent spirit of caring about quality. The scale of that quality is connected to my identity and the way I want to live my life. The brain power, the creative power, the land care—it is all remarkable.

Where were you born, and where did you grow up? I was born in a very small town in Lake Chelan, Washington state, so most of my family heritage comes from that area. It’s next to the Colville Indian Reservation, where my mother was born, and Lake Chelan is a small lakeside glacial community. My father’s side worked the orchards. My mother worked as a legal secretary to put my father through college, and he went to a state university and majored in economics and business. Over time, he became employed in a trajectory that was different than his family history, and he lifted his family out of extreme poverty.

How has your upbringing impacted who you are today, professionally? My mother was a potter—a functional potter. My grandmother would make dried flower arrangements, all kinds of wild things, so they were artisans and were remarkable, but that was the vernacular that they lived in. My mother was always trying to make all the bowls the same so the set would match. I remember this one time she was making these honey pots. I made this little sculpture of a bear with the little honey jar on the top, and she said, “I’ll give you 10 cents for every one of those you make,” and I was like, great, but I could only make one more then I was bored to tears. So that was probably one of those moments where she realized, as did I, that I wasn’t going to be interested in repeating myself. I liked trying something new versus the discipline and the rigor of making something uniform. We lived in Minneapolis for a chapter of my young life, my 5th-, 6th-, 7th-grade years. That was the first time I’d lived in a more major urban city. The Walker Art Museum was there, the Guthrie Theater was there, the Chanhassen Dinner Theatre was there. For me, it was that change from being exposed to art that was from the world of craft and artisanship used to create useful functional and expressive traditions, into abstraction, contemporary art practices, and an entirely different way of looking at art.

What does that mean to you? It’s a desire to invent a future that causes us to be awake to our lives while we are living it. And we all can belong to it; we just need a ladder toward what it might be, and it doesn’t mean we need to become it. It’s just another framework of the pursuit of life, in generous service to ignite our imaginations in different ways. In a place like MASS MoCA, you can do that in small sublime ways, or in monumentally scaled ways, but it’s the human endeavor of trying to manifest something into the world that might matter to a complete stranger.

What are you most excited about your coming to MASS MoCA? Everything. I’m excited to learn more about place. If you are not born here, you are not a local. I’ve been in this situation before, when I moved to Australia. You can see things anew, because you are not from it. So things that people become acclimated to and don’t look at anymore, or forget to feel celebratory over, or no longer identify as neglected—you see it, and it is all vivid. That is helpful. It is not judgmental, but it’s a way of learning, and it can help to open people to remember to see something that they had forgotten.

So you are most excited about everything then? I’m all caps! Space in-between each letter, underlined, bold, italics, exclamation point!

What do you bring to MASS MoCA from your past that is unique or beneficial to this institution? I am my least favorite subject to talk about, so it’s a little hard to answer that question. I have a deep commitment to creative potential that takes its form through multiple art forms—it’s really about the human beings who have the drive to manifest those ideas. I have a profound love of the human spirit when it is operating toward a sense of possibility that is not self-beneficial, but humanistically beneficial. That is what I see in this organization, in this town, in this region, that makes sense here, and that then tells me that I will make sense here.

Is there a lot to learn? I am interested in the why, and I look at things through the lens of why, and that gets me to the meaning quicker. Why do we do it this way? Or, Why did the artist give 20 years of their life in service to this project? The why helps us find where the emotional meaning lives. I’m incredibly aware of the what, the why, and the how and with whom, those would be immense for me to experience. I come full of questions, but I don’t come with an absence of experience or exposure as to why this stuff works so well.

Are you on the clock now? Since October 1st. I will go back and forth to L.A. probably once a month to see my kids and my partner, keep working on the projects at CAP. By January, I will be here for three weeks then back for a week, then by next summer, hopefully I will have figured out where we are going to live. I only just stepped into my office yesterday, and my apartment yesterday.

Your apartment is two-bedroom? Yes and it’s above this Italian restaurant that I believe plays Frank Sinatra songs late into the night. (Laughs) The last time I lived above a retail store was a Western-wear store with a neon sign that would keep me up in the night. So, it’s kind of exciting.

What are your immediate plans in your position here? If you look at what has happened to the arts across our entire nation and the world, from the coronavirus, from the Black Lives Matter movement, and from the exposure of radical inequity in all different kinds of American life, there is a lot to really deeply reflect on. So it’s not like I have a load of expectations. My first move is to say, “Let’s settle in together here.” There are things we can do in small ways around here. I’d like to set up an environmental committee of the board to look at recycling and plastic use and things like that, that are small but model a moral obligation to the youth, to the young people in this community.

What goes through your mind when you walk through the museum? When I walk in and start journeying through the exhibitions—I’ve done it a lot now so its already becoming part of my ethos—I feel a sense of wonderment and wonder. Any institute would want you to experience a sense of wonder. It’s not only what happens with the exhibitions, the projects, and the objects, but it’s the space itself—in scale, in layout and creative connection across all these different buildings. I can’t even sit in here and not think about architecture and design of the current moment as it is framed in an art exhibition space, and the history of the architecture before that. Why is this pipe, these beams, totally different than those beams? They left the paint raw, kept the brick exposed, there are layers of decades, centuries. Those choices are also about how you honor the dreams of those different generations and what they used this for and how they invested an entire life and livelihood, and supported their families. Now it gives way to another that is doing the same thing, and another that is doing the same thing. So, when I come in, I am full of wonder about the past, about the current moment, and about how it makes me think of the future.

So these buildings are not disconnected from their history? You can look at factory conversions in Europe and even the Hudson Valley, the existing old building is really just a skeleton to support a very different vernacular. But here, it’s included. So I can use my imagination to picture when somebody who comes in here, maybe this was part of where they did something at Sprague Electric. Somebody would have had a desk there, a station there. Now, young people have a relationship with this. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

How do you spend your free time? With my family and kids and friends. And I cook. When we first came here, it was the first time my kids had seen this part of the world. My youngest, who is 13, said that even if I didn’t get the job, we have to move here because he feels free. What he means is the natural world, the curving river, the sense of things, the freedom that you can just grab your bike and ride into town and get an ice cream cone, and feel safe.

What book are you reading? I love cookbooks, a total fetish. It’s the same thing as art making. When you are pursuing an unknowable outcome in service to your imagination, or the possibility of it mattering to someone, it’s the same thing if you are cooking, same thing if you are a gardener, or a farmer—you are tilling, you put those seeds in the ground, and you have to have a lot of wisdom but also faith that they are going to sprout. Then you look after it; it’s a duty of care.