Lum On View at MASS MoCA
Visual arts faculty member Mary Lum has been commissioned to create a large-scale wall work for the bike tunnel that transverses the ground floor of MASS MoCA’s new Building 6, a three-story facility that will double the museum’s exhibition space, making it the largest museum of contemporary art in America.
Lum’s monumental painting, “Assembly (Lorem Ipsum)”—inspired by the text that graphic designers and typesetters use as placeholders for actual texts, and which was originally drawn from Cicero’s writings on ethics— covers four walls, and fragments writing, image, and pattern, speaking to the way in which we acquire information and see language in today’s world.
"If you look more closely [at Lum's painting]," the curators at MASS MoCA explained, "random English words can be found within the seemingly haphazard mix of letters. Lum has buried within the mesh of letters sections of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which protects the freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the freedom to peaceably assemble. Lum's title references this right of assembly, as well as the assembly or construction of language–and the work itself."
The work will be on view beginning May 28 as part of the Building 6 grand opening.
Hyperallergic also covered the story.