NORTH ADAMS, MASSACHUSETTS.- Mass MoCA presents “Yankee Remix.” Yankee Remix began with a simple premise: that artists would use the collection of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA) to make new works of art for MASS MoCA. SPNEA’s collection encompasses domestic artifacts (such as furniture, paintings, and kitchenware), archival material (photographs, letters, architects’ drawings), and houses (including the modernist Gropius House, the 17th-century Coffin House, and Beauport, a Victorian fantasy).
The locality of the collection is what binds these elements together: New Englandness provides the "Yankee" in Yankee Remix. The "remixing" is engineered by nine artists – Rina Banerjee, Huang Yong Ping, Manfred Pernice, Annette Messager, Ann Hamilton, Zoe Leonard, Martin Kersels, Lorna Simpson, and Frano Violich – whose bodies of work, though they differ greatly from each other, often allude to historic topics or incorporate pre-existing, or "readymade," objects. The artists, from five different countries and working in as many different media, have made works that range from poignant to humorous for the exhibition. Some tackled specific historic people and events, such as Crispus Attucks and the Battle of Bunker Hill; others worked more generally, referring obliquely to the China trade, the enduring uncanniness of the home, and the idiosyncratic business of historic preservation itself.
Although MASS MoCA has commissioned new works of art before – some of them of considerable size and complexity – this is the first time that an entire exhibition has been created from newly commissioned work. Despite the variety in these nine works, several factors unify them all: the origin in SPNEA’s rich, geographically targeted collection, the production during the same twelve-month period (a tumultuous one in U.S. politics), and the consideration of MASS MoCA’s particular spaces.