The Art of Rural Renewal

When Tom Krens first suggested turning the abandoned factory here into a huge museum--perhaps the biggest contemporary art museum in the world--the city’s mayor all but laughed. A self-styled “blue-collar mayor of a blue-collar town,” John Barrett III said he “wouldn’t cross the street” to see the sort of art Krens was talking of putting in there, those colored fluorescent lights, motorcycles on the walls and “igloos” covered with sticks.

But what better idea did anyone have in 1985 for the 700,000 square feet of red brick and smokestacks that for 150 years had been the livelihood of North Adams? Each day the clock tower remained silent was another reminder of how unemployment rates were going up and property values down.

So, 14 years later, there was Barrett over Memorial Day weekend, shaking every hand at the ribbon-cutting for the new $31.4-million Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, MASS MoCA, saying, “Go on in! Go on in!”

He also announced, “Welcome to a world-class city!”

It used to be that struggling communities placed their faith in new shopping malls, sports teams or arenas to bring them back--or lift them into the big time.

But North Adams is far from the only place that has come to see a cultural institution, a museum in particular, as the vehicle for rebirth.

Two hours south, residents of Beacon, N.Y., recently heard an international task force declare that their city could be transformed, too, if the New York-based Dia Center for the Arts turns an old factory into a $20-million museum.

Visions were offered of tourists pouring in by train from Manhattan, or by boat on the Hudson. Never mind that there’s no full rail station now--just a platform--and that the riverfront has no dock, only rotting supports sticking out of the water. Never mind that the museum would house Minimal and Conceptual art that few locals normally would go see.

Time and again, town folk applauded speakers--several from Japan--who suggested that the Dia Center’s coming could “send a message to all the world.”

No one was more upbeat than Lee Balter, head of Beacon’s Tallix sculpture foundry. A trip to Spain convinced him this was not all fantasy.

“I’ve been to Bilbao,” Balter said. “I’ve seen what happened.”

He was referring, of course, to the Spanish city that was transformed two years ago into a destination by Frank O. Gehry’s new Guggenheim museum.

Since then, more than 30 other cities and countries have approached the New York-based Guggenheim, eager to get new museums, or to redo old ones.

Communities from Lancaster, Pa., to Shanghai thirst for the practical benefits of “cultural tourism”--the dollars brought in by visitors--and for intangible benefits as well. Many hope political and image problems will evaporate through a “Bilbao effect.”

It’s a trend that concerns some art industry veterans, like Julie Lazar--a founding curator at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art--who once helped run a museum down the river from Beacon and attended the opening of North Adams’ new art showcase.

Lazar worries about the hype and rhetoric--the faith that people will fly in from around the world to see “an old warehouse,” whether it has a unique artistic vision or not. She worries about a bigger-is-better mentality, a belief people will “go to see ‘big’ art,” when such huge spaces overwhelm many works. She worries about a tendency to want museums for status, as in Japan in the ‘80s, when every small city needed its own. And she worries about viewing museums as moneymakers.

“It’s almost too much to ask an art museum to come in,” she says, “as . . . a savior.”

Try telling that to North Adams, Mass. Or Beacon, N.Y.

*

North Adams, Beacon and Bilbao. The connect-the-dot links may not be obvious, but “they’re all one story,” says Thomas Krens.

That it starts with Krens should be no surprise, for he’s quickly become the 500-pound gorilla of the museum world, leading the Guggenheim’s expansion spree. When the story began, he was just another lowly art professor and self-styled “skeptical outsider.”

In the early ‘80s, he liked to chide colleagues on the faculty of Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., “that if they were so damn smart, they should figure out how to do what they want to do and not just write a book about it.”

The 6-foot-5 Krens, now 52, got his chance to be a player when the director of the college art museum left. Krens oversaw a $10-million expansion that got him thinking about museums. The 18th century notion of them as encyclopedias (“one of everything, organized by chronology, geography and biography”) seemed dated. So did the 19th century notion of the buildings as huge boxes (“the extended palace”) amid population centers.

On a trip to Germany, he had his epiphany, “7:30 in the evening on Nov. 14 in 1985. On the road from Cologne to Frankfurt. I had just seen an exhibit of a group of dealers who were denied access to the Cologne Art Fair. They rented an abandoned factory and simply installed these giant paintings.”

“What occurred to me was: space. It’s all about space.”

That idea was clearly in the ether. In Los Angeles, artists and arts patrons in 1983 had taken over a Little Tokyo warehouse for a 55,000-square-foot Temporary Contemporary museum.

Krens, though, was eyeing acres of factory in North Adams.

It was here that an ironworks forged armor plates for the Monitor, the Civil War ship. The 1860s brought Arnold Print Works, which knocked off designs from Paris until the Depression, when the textile industry headed south.

Next came Sprague Electric, which employed 4,000 workers in the 28-building compound, making capacitors. Then high-tech manufacturing went overseas.

So even if Krens’ goal was to create “a platform of culture like no other in the world,” his sales pitch was economic. And political.

The city of 18,000, he reasoned, could tap into a spirit that had been part of the Berkshires since Hawthorne and Melville. Seasonal residents and visitors supported the Tanglewood Music Festival--summer home of the Boston Symphony--and Jacob’s Pillow dance performances. Next door, in Williamstown, a wealthy couple--seeking to put their art out of reach of atomic war--created Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute, showing 34 Renoirs in a cow pasture.

The political realities, meanwhile, were these: Gov. Michael Dukakis wanted to be president. His biggest selling point was the state’s economic boom. But western Massachusetts was hurting. Sprague’s closing didn’t help.

In 1988, Dukakis signed a special allocation of $35 million in state funds for a North Adams museum.

“That had nothing to do with culture,” Krens says. “That had everything to do with the fact that light manufacturing left Massachusetts. And Dukakis was running.”

The kicker: Dukakis lost to George Bush. The state’s economy tanked. A new governor, Republican Bill Weld, faced a $2-billion deficit. “One of the first things he sees,” recalls Krens, “is, ‘What’s this cultural boondoggle?’ ”

MASS MoCA was back to the start.

Yet Krens learned a lesson that served him well in his next stop--art isn’t all that sells a museum.

*

In 1988, Krens took the helm of New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which had a Frank Lloyd Wright building on Fifth Avenue, a stellar collection of Modern and Contemporary art--and a terrible balance sheet. With 95% of its works in storage, it was receptive to his notions of seeking space and unique “platforms.”

Indeed, it had just opened an overseas offshoot, on Venice’s Grand Canal, to display the Peggy Guggenheim collection. Talk about chance: She had become estranged from the museum bearing her family’s name and was going to give her art--which she kept in Italy--to the Tate in London. But English officials would not let her dogs into the country. So the Guggenheim became international.

After Krens arrived, Austria expressed interest in a Guggenheim for Salzburg, too. Though wanting more contemporary art, Austria--ringed by communist bloc countries--also was eager to remain a neutral haven, the Switzerland of Central Europe. There also was the taint from President Kurt Waldheim’s alleged Nazi past. “How do you deal with this all at once?” asked Krens. “Well, a cultural alliance with an American institution with a Jewish name isn’t so bad.”

That project never happened, in part because of the demise of the Soviet bloc, which sent refugees pouring into Austria. But it, too, became a lesson in the realpolitik of building museums. Then, Krens says, “Bilbao came along.”

Image problems? Spain’s Basque region was best known for 30 years of terrorism, and the game of jai alai. Bilbao’s shipyard on the Bay of Biscay had just closed.

“My response was, ‘Bilbao? Are you crazy?’ ” Krens recalled. “Then they said an interesting thing. ‘Put your misconceptions aside for a second. What would it take?’ ”

Krens’ principle was that for a museum to work in such a setting, they had to “think of the Sydney Opera House”--which became an instant symbol of its city in 1973--”then take it up a level.”

The Basques would have to pay for the museum, a $100-million endowment and give the Guggenheim a $20-million fee, upfront, plus $10 million a year to run the place “with the kind of programming we might have in New York.” Plus $50 million for art acquisitions.

Done. Gehry’s sculpture-like Guggenheim opened at the shipyard in October 1997.

The prediction was for 485,000 visitors the first year. Instead, 1.4 million came. Economists estimated the impact at $219 million.

*

Beacon’s Nabisco plant went up before the stock crash in 1929, by railroad tracks that run along the Hudson. The 292,000-square-foot factory made containers for Milk Bone dog biscuits and Ritz crackers. Later bought by the International Paper Co., it closed in 1991.

These days, the biggest employer in the city of 13,000 is a prison, Fishkill Correctional Facility. Of 219 storefronts on Main Street, 51 are vacant.

It seemed like divine intervention, then, how the plant was discovered--from the sky--by Dia Center director Michael Govan.

Govan was a Krens protege, his deputy at the Guggenheim. Hired away, he wanted a home for key holdings of Dia, founded in 1974 to promote artists such as Minimalist Donald Judd (who created a desert art colony in Marfa, Texas) and Walter de Maria (creator of New Mexico’s “Lightning Field”).

Expert at finding raw space in depressed areas, Dia had taken over a warehouse in Manhattan’s Chelsea district in 1987. But the West Side site couldn’t accommodate enough works like Andy Warhol’s 454-foot-long series “Shadows,” paintings done in 1979.

Last year, Dia seemed set on a site--the campus of MASS MoCA. Govan was flying there in a private plane, with his architect. Heading up the Hudson, they noticed--60 miles north of Manhattan--”this mill space, [with] acres of north-facing skylights.”

Dia’s Beacon project was unveiled in March. Unlike MASS MoCA, most funding would be private, the state kicking in only $2.6 million.

Though Dia helped revitalize Chelsea--88 galleries popped up around its museum--Govan emphasized that his goal in Beacon was to showcase Dia’s “treasures.” And he expects large deficits after opening in 2001, estimating 50,000 to 60,000 visitors a year.

“I’m not saying there couldn’t be a huge economic impact,” he said. “But I don’t want to pin a real town’s future on contemporary art.”

Beacon insists it’s not. At the town meeting in April, a team from the Glynwood Center--which fosters exchanges of ideas about development--said the city will have to push ahead with plans for waterfront parks and a dock. It will need better welcome signs (“so you know you’ve arrived in . . . a special place”) and to spotlight its history--how during the Revolutionary War, aides to George Washington lit torches here to signal his camp across the Hudson.

But much hope centered on an “art core.” Speakers suggested sculptures at the rail station and along hiking trails, as well as sketching clubs and buses from Dia’s facility to Tallix foundry, which made a statue of Franklin Roosevelt installed in the new memorial in Washington.

Balter, Tallix’s chairman, realizes that much of Bilbao’s appeal stems from Gehry’s building. Still, his visit (“people streaming in who’ve never been in a museum”) left him confident tourist trains could be pulling up to Dia’s converted factory, supporting restaurants, galleries and a riverside inn.

“It’s not a slam-dunk,” he said. “Would I bet my kid’s life on it? No. Would I bet my own? Yes.”

*

That’s how folks were talking a decade ago in North Adams, before the state money vanished.

The project survived largely because of Joe Thompson, who was 29 when Krens brought him in as director. Now 40, he’s spent half his adult life on MASS MoCA, from arranging removal of 4,600 tons of asbestos to convincing former Gov. Weld it was not mere welfare.

Chance again: “He has a fishing cabin in the Adirondacks, which took him by Route 2,” Thompson noted. “He’d drop in and see we were always here, even though he’d given us a cease-and-desist order.”

Despite the iffy status, Thompson staged exhibits in the mill. At one, the governor studied a lead-covered spiral table of Italian artist Mario Merz. “He asked me, ‘Is this the kind of thing you’re going to do? Well, I could be interested.’ ”

Weld challenged MASS MoCA to raise $1 million privately, “then 2, then 4,” Thompson said. “Then he said, ‘If you can raise $8 million, I’ll support the first phase.’ ”

Though wealthy donors accounted for most, Thompson got 646 pledges from local merchants,

imploring a car dealer to promise 10% of profits he stood to make if the city revived. In 1995, the state released $15.7 million.

The space for art in MASS MoCA’s first phase is less than a third of the 435,000 square feet envisioned at the start. Then, it was going to be “a one-stop do-everything art ghetto,” Thompson said, with stores, a hotel and all.

That has been pared away, but the galleries are still football-field huge, capable of showcasing works that often languish in warehouses, like Robert Rauschenberg’s “The 1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece,” 206 panels of painting and collage. And performing arts have been added, a more mainstream way to bring revenue. A 600-seat theater doubles as a sound stage. The calendar includes silent movies in a courtyard, Saturday cartoons and polka and swing dancing nights.

A computer center has enabled 1,000 residents to have e-mail. While the museum is not a big employer--with 40 staffers--commercial tenants have created jobs on site, too, including the Kleiser-Walczak special effects firm.

Thompson views the first years as an experiment to “see what works.” He also wants to see the impact of MASS MoCA’s decision “not to do everything.” Will it “push things out,” into North Adams?

To some degree, that’s happened. The business district has been spruced up with banners, flowers and antique street lights, and one artist, Eric Rudd, bought his own 130,000-square-foot mill and turned it into studios, four galleries and a loft.

It’s classic trickle-down. Much as MASS MoCA hopes to draw visitors from the Berkshires’ other cultural events, Rudd hopes its MoCA’s crowds spill over to his galleries.

“If you’re in the art business, you’ve got to come to North Adams now,” he reasons.

But opening weekend provided reminders that this form of urban rebirth is not without tensions.

While celebrating “At long last MoCA,” the local newspaper lamented that some here still view the museum as for a “hoity-toity” elite, like the 600 at a $500-a-plate black-tie Saturday night gala.

There also were quips about “Tree Logic,” the work in the museum’s entry courtyard by Australian Natalie Jeremijenko. It features six 18-foot maples in stainless-steel planters--hung upside down.

One resident wrote that anyone missing the display could simply “take a walk in the forest and stand on your head.”

But Mayor Barrett, the original skeptic, was reassuring everyone “the space is great” and that he would now gladly “walk across the street” to see this sort of art. “I’m starting to understand it,” he said.

Massachusetts’ new governor, Paul Cellucci, declared that MASS MoCA had brought “a new life, a new energy to this great city.”

Then the people poured in, waves of them, for a free first peek, the tuxedos of Saturday night replaced by T-shirts and sundresses. The staff later estimated that 6,000 visited that first day.

Talk of a “Bilbao miracle” is premature, though. Only 200 showed up Tuesday, 400 Saturday. With prime season coming, Thompson avoided prediction games. “It’s all voodoo,” he said.

He’ll be delighted to get enough visitors, 150,000 a year, to pay the bills. He doesn’t expect to match the crowds that go to see Americana at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge--he just wants enough of the curious to check out his place.

“The quality of what we’re doing is second to none and it will attract an international audience,” he said. “But it will probably take a while for everything we envision to happen. In the meantime, having opened up is a miracle enough.”

*

Krens, only half-joking, compares art museums to theme parks. To be successful, you need “five rides.” At Bilbao, there’s “architecture, a great permanent collection, great special exhibits, shopping opportunities and eating.”

MASS MoCA? “The five rides are here, on a smaller scale.”

A unique one is the mill setting, like a medieval village with its crooked courtyards, elevated walkways and exposed brick--they’ve even left it painted pink where there used to be a ladies’ room.

To get people coming back, Krens says, it needs more space (“Phase 2 fairly quickly”) and “best-anywhere” installations that give a real feel for artists. He cites a room of pieces by Merz, including two “igloos,” one covered with branches and neon, the other glass and stone. “Merz has never looked better.”

While Krens has nothing against polka, he thinks MASS MoCA needs events that draw the world art crowd, like Venice’s biennial.

If you do things like that, “then you’ve got a shot.”

It was two hours after the ribbon-cutting. Krens had stayed away, letting Thompson and the pols take the spotlight.

There’s tension here too. While most of the works are from the Guggenheim, MASS MoCA is not a “branded” offshoot. “The Guggenheim is a partner,” Thompson says, “among other partners.”

Krens understands that the museum he originated might want to assert its independence. “Territoriality,” he notes, is one of many issues that must be played out--over years--in launching such a place. “That’s what intrigues me, the next 15 years. It’s the logic of Bilbao; ‘what will it take to make this great?’ ”

Since Bilbao, dozens of locales have knocked on Krens’ door.

“The range,” he says, “is from ‘Take over the old Woolworth’s store in Lancaster, Pa.’ to meeting with the president of Chile, who has personally visited Bilbao and wants a Guggenheim of the same dimension in Santiago.”

But Krens is aware of cities that opened museums with high hopes--like Barcelona, Spain, and Grenoble, France--only to create “fundamentally provincial operations on a local scale. And after the hand-clapping stops and the initial rush of visitors [they’re] basically boring.”

Krens himself has had a tough go with a branch of the Guggenheim in Lower Manhattan’s SoHo district, which opened in 1992. The small museum there, he concedes, has just “a ride and a half.”

Even at Bilbao, he sees no guarantees.

“So far so good. But who the hell knows? If nobody goes there next year, we’re going to look a bit foolish.”