GLOBAL CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM - NORTH ADAMS, MA

Developed as part of the North Adams Master Plan, the Global Contemporary Museum of Art is a 165,000 square-foot structure designed by Richard Gluckman that adapts the architectural language of industrial sheds and is inspired by the scale, mass, and form of nearby mill buildings.

The Global Contemporary Art Museum concept is based on showing the best international contemporary art being made today by acquiring and commissioning work directly from the artists for specific spaces in the museum. Featured artists are likely to include Carl Andre, Georg Baselitz, Cai Guo Qiang, Francesco Clemente, Anish Kapoor, Anselm Kiefer, Julie Mehretu, and Xu Bing, among others. The concept of a commission-driven collection of contemporary art will ensure that important new works by contemporary artists are displayed in the museum and will make it a more flexible model than the typical art museum. The Global Contemporary will have all the flexibility of a sophisticated art gallery while operating on the scale of a world-class museum.

As the scale of contemporary artwork continues to grow, institutions have followed suit, and the relationship between the work of art and the visitor continues to change. Contemporary artists creating large-scale works—artists such as Jeff Koons, Anish Kapoor, Anselm Kieffer, and Olafur Eliasson—would be provided with spaces appropriate to the scales in which they work and commissioned to make site-specific works.