What happens when the smallest, poorest town in Massachusetts teams up with art world luminaries to build a modern art museum? Can big city conceptual artists and blue-collar natives find common ground and a common cause? That\u2019s what filmmaker Nancy Kelly investigates in Downside Up<\/i>, which captures the beginnings of America\u2019s largest museum of contemporary art, MASS MoCA (the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) and the rebirth of its host city, North Adams, Massachusetts.<\/p>\n
Through the eyes of North Adams native Kelly and her family, most of whom worked in the former capacitor factory that now houses the museum, the film explores the subtle changes in the spirit of a town that \u2014 like hundreds of former factory towns across the country \u2014 had been given up for dead. Exploring the tentative, dangerous notion of hope in a town that was widely viewed as hopeless, Downside Up<\/i> is the story of seemingly disparate people reaching across the prickly fence of class divisions to work together for a common good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Downside Up<\/i> tells the story of how a blue-collar town in rural Massachusetts reinvented itself in the post-industrial economy by opening the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"topic":[1216],"class_list":["post-74","films","type-films","status-publish","hentry","topic-arts-and-culture"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n