Recently, I visited, MASS MoCA, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts, on a day trip with my best friend from high school and her little sister (now very much an adult but always little to me). We went to see a performance by the Bang On a Can contemporary music festival. Another high school friend, contemporary music composer Nomi Epstein premiered a lovely, haunting, subtle piece of music while we sat amongst the artwork of the Ahistoric Occasion exhibit. This exhibit featured artists whose work redefines and calls into question normative ideas of "history" and the "historic." In the gallery where I listened, taken in by soft piano dissonance and straight toned vocalisms, I'd occasionally glance upwards to a recreated, reenacted sculpture version of the famous black and white photograph of space walkers from the 1960s. Two bodies dangling, floating out of a cylindrical spacecraft, connected by umbilical cord-like tubes, loomed above my heads. A perfect reproduction; only in this version, the space uniforms had a more colorful quality, made from textiles that looked hand-painted. This same artist designed striking colonial style costumes displayed behind me, again the fabric more colorful and textured. A closer look revealed that these colonial gowns had been redefined using African textiles: a call to attention, very clear and loud, to the lives and cultures on which colonialism depended for its very existence.

"I want to live here," I commented to my friends almost as soon as we entered the first gallery. I am most at home in places in which art lives, most especially this kind of art, which questions normative structures of history and the "real" or the "true" and where living and breathing artists come together to live and breathe their work publicly. Just being in such spaces makes me more creative. A hero of mine, performance artist Deb Margolin, said in a class I took, "the moment you see or hear or smell something that strikes you, you become an artist." I believe that, but sometimes my senses seem dulled. And then sometimes I enter a space that sharpens my sensitivity. Those moments of walking alone through an exhibit, finding the places where I fit, where my mind curves and melts around another artist's corners and lines, are creative moments.

When I imagine myself dancing through a gallery, I create. When I sit in a performance and, listening to music that forms another world, I glance up to see a body floating over my head, something begins.

For more information about the MASS MoCA, check out: www.massmoca.org