Visual arts
MASS MoCA exhibits work by many of the most important artists of today—both well known, and emerging—focusing on large-scale and complex installations that are impossible to realize in conventional museums. Our broad, soaring galleries with 110,000 square feet of open, flexible space and their robust industrial character have proven both inspiring and empowering to artists.

Performing arts
An essential and integral part of MASS MoCAs mission are the more than 75 performances staged year-round, including popular music, contemporary dance, alternative cabaret, world music dance parties, outdoor silent films with live music, documentaries, and avant-garde theater.

Education
Kidspace is a collaboration among MASS MoCA, the Clark Art Institute, and the Williams College Museum of Art where every elementary student in the region—more than 10,000 annually—comes to study and create art. In addition, more than 5,000 children annually experience world-class music, theater, and dance through school-time performing arts events offered by our Art Assembly program.

Economic and Commercial Development
To offset operating costs and stimulate job growth in our region, MASS MoCA develops and leases space to a wide range of exciting business, including restaurants, publishing companies, law firms, photography studios, and computer-generated special effects. We also collaborate with many partners across the county to strengthen regional tourism, improve infrastructure for small business development, aand attract and retain residents. Much of this work has been documented and analyzed by our partners at the Center for Creative Community Development, a national research and policy organization operated by Williams College and located on our campus

Mission Statement

MASS MoCA seeks to catalyze and support the creation of new art, expose our visitors to bold visual and performing art in all stages of production, and re-invigorate the life of a region in socioeconomic need.

Or if youre looking for a fuller statement:

If conventional museums are boxes, MASS MoCA is an open platform—a welcoming place that encourages dynamic interchange between making and presenting art, between the visual and performing arts, and between our extraordinary historic factory campus and the patrons, workers and tenants who again inhabit it.

We at MASS MoCA work hard to make the whole cloth of art-making, presentation and participation a seamless continuum. Performing arts residencies offer well-equipped and professionally staffed technical facilities and stages, and a sophisticated, diverse and sympathetic audience for new work—especially technically complex work that requires generous allocations of time and space impossible in conventional theatrical settings. Likewise, MASS MoCAs vast galleries and expert fabrication staff give visual artists the tools and time to create works of scale and duration impossible to realize in the time and space-cramped conditions of most museums. We endeavor to expose our audiences to all stages of art production; rehearsals, sculptural fabrication, and developmental workshops are frequently on view to the public, as are finished works of art.

If MASS MoCAs mission is to foster and present exciting new work of the highest quality in all media—and in all phases of its production—we also work hard to position the arts as a vibrant catalyst for community revitalization: indeed, the creation of new markets, good jobs and the long-term enrichment of a region in economic need is one of MASS MoCAs driving purposes. We at MASS MoCA are convinced that advancement of the arts, increased tourism and community participation, and regional economic redevelopment are mutually reinforcing and inextricably linked, and we act forcefully on that belief. The arts create and bestow community identity. Identity rallies hope, productivity, pride and economic vibrancy. These are the base conditions for a healthy community; they cannot be created, however, without risk, creativity, adventure, and the willingness to embrace the new. This is the heart and soul of MASS MoCAs mission.