By Cate McQuaid Boston Globe Correspondent,Updated October 24, 2024, 11:05 a.m.
Building a pipeline from Fall River to an art world many find exclusionary and far off is personal for the married couple behind Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art.
FALL RIVER — Artists hungry to show their work sometimes open cooperative galleries or alternative spaces. Brittni Ann Harvey and Harry Gould Harvey IV opened a museum. At their Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art, the museum is the art.
“This is our social practice,” said Brittni, FR MoCA’s executive director, speaking with the Globe at the museum earlier this month. Traditional museums focus on exhibiting objects. Social practice artists craft conceptual art projects that support the community and question old ways of thinking.
“We’re preserving this space for art within the city. We’re providing space for students to find the creative practice of their own,” Brittni said. “We’re also having discourse around the structures that we’re all within as human beings in society. They’re ever-changing and powerful. How can we be critical thinkers within that and create action?”
At FR MoCA, the Harveys, who are married, aim to forge a concourse between the global contemporary art world and their struggling industrial city, which has gone through long cycles of boom and bust. And it’s working: They brought FR MoCA to Paris for the invitation-only art fair The Salon by NADA & The Community for a few days earlier this month.
“We’ve made great contacts with collectors, curators, and people on the boards of prominent organizations who are excited to learn about what we’re doing,” Brittni reported over the phone on their last day there.
Their booth featured artwork by professionals such as Jake Tobin and Henry Hawk alongside a denim jacket designed by 17-year-old Fall River resident Johnathan Pinero during a summer course at FR MoCA.
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