Despite a nationwide depression during the 1870s Arnold Print Works purchased additional land along the Hoosic River and constructed new buildings.

[5] In 1942 Arnold Print Works was forced to close its doors and leave North Adams due to the low prices of cloth produced in the South and abroad, as well as the economic effects of the Great Depression.

[6] This department was responsible for research, design, and manufacturing of the trigger for the atomic bomb and components used in the launch systems for the Gemini space missions.

The company was almost completely self-sufficient, holding a radio station, orchestra, vocational school, research library, day-care center, clinic, cooperative grocery store, sports teams, and a gun club with a shooting range on the campus.

[10] The museum was granted $18.6 million by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts after a public/private coalition petitioned the state government to support the project.

Designed by the Cambridge architecture firm of Bruner Cott & Assoc, it was awarded highest honors by the American Institute of Architects and The National Trust for Historic Preservation.

[20] A collaboration with the Hall Art Foundation, this presentation of work by German painter and sculptor Anselm Kiefer consists of three monumentally scaled installations, Etroits Sont Les Vaisseaux, Les Femmes De La Revolution, and Velimir Chlebnikov, and occupies a 10,000 square foot building renovated for the exhibition.

Titled after an Italo Calvino book, the exhibition featured the work of ten artists who reimagine urban landscapes both familiar and fantastical.

Invisible Cities included works by Lee Bul, Carlos Garaicoa, and Sopheap Pich, as well as commissions by Diana al-Hadid, Francesco Simeti, Miha Strukelj, and local artists Kim Faler and Mary Lum.

Sean Foley's commissioned work for MASS MoCA occupied the over-100-foot-long wall outside of the Hunter Center for the Performing Arts.

Other works have included the siting of twenty-one of her carved stone benches across MASS MoCA's sixteen-acre campus.

Works were commissioned for the exhibit from Vaughn Bell, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Nina Katchadourian, Joseph Smolinski and Mary Temple.

Other artists exhibiting included Robert Adams, the Boyle Family, Melissa Brown, Leila Daw, Gregory Euclide, J. Henry Fair, Mike Glier, Anthony Goicolea, Marine Hugonnier, Paul Jacobsen, Mitchell Joachim, Jane Marsching, Alexis Rockman, Edward Ruscha, Yutaka Sone and Jennifer Steinkamp.

Simon Starling's The Nanjing Particles was based on small stereoscopic photograph depicting a large group of Chinese workers in front of Sampson Shoe Factory.

Sampson had brought them east from California to break a strike, making the largest population of Chinese workers this side of the Mississippi RIver.

Starling viewed the stereograph image underneath an electron microscope, allowing him to see individual metal particles that compose the photograph, propelling him towards the creation of two large-scale sculptures that were manufactured by hand in Nanjing, China.

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle's Gravity is a Force to be Reckoned With opened with an upside-down Mies van der Rohe glass house in MASS MoCA's large Building 5 gallery space.

Working in a range of industrially produced materials—from plastic sheeting to fishing line—Michael Beutler, Orly Genger, Tobias Putrih, Alyson Shotz, Dan Steinhilber, and collaborators Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen engage the former factory spaces of the museum's second and third floors.

Shooting in nearby Northampton, Massachusetts, Nimoy recruited volunteers from the community with an open call for portrait models willing to be photographed posed and dressed as their true or imagined "secret selves".

Ali's comic book-like figures, genderless with bulbous green heads and a variety of pared-down uniforms, are depicted in the midst of mysterious unfolding dramas.

Ali's enigmatic narratives, with so many details left unarticulated, are each easily applied to any number of historical time periods worldwide.

From Nazi Germany, to the Salem witch trials, to domestic and school violence, Ali's cartoonish figures offer not just oddly timeless pictures of history, but also mirrors of the present and foreboding visions of the future.

)[24] In 2006, Ali exhibited the work figures on a field at MASS MoCA, a collaborative performance with Dean Moss (debuted in 2005 at The Kitchen).

The museum had commissioned Büchel to create a massive installation, "Training Ground for Democracy", the exhibit was to include a rebuilt movie theater, nine shipping containers, a full-size Cape Cod–style house, a mobile home, a bus, and a truck.

[27] On September 21, 2007, Judge Ponsor of the Federal District Court for Massachusetts in Springfield ruled that there was no copyright violations and no distortion inherent in showing an unfinished work as long as it was clearly labeled as such.

Büchel appealed the district court's ruling, and in January 2010 the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit overruled Judge Ponsor, finding that the Visual Artists Rights Act applies to unfinished works of art, and that Büchel asserted a viable claim under the Copyright Act that MASS MoCA violated his exclusive right to display his work publicly.