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.
Showing his work in Paris “feels amazing,” Pinero told the Globe. “Every time I post it on my story, I have a bunch of people texting me like, ‘You’re gonna make it, I really believe in you.’”
FR MoCA started out as a pandemic-era pop-up show in a working textile mill. Since then, the Harveys made it a nonprofit with free admission and moved to a renovated space, signing a five-year lease. They organize three shows a year. Up now: “Acorn Reality,” which examines perception and misunderstanding.
Harry, the artistic director, curated the show, about “transforming FR MoCA into a collaborative space where the boundaries between artist, curator, and institution are deliberately blurred,” according to the website. That sounds like what the organization itself is doing: Breaking down hierarchies of class and access. It’s not your typical museum in many ways. For instance, there’s no endowment.
“If Brittni and I don’t go out and seek funding for this nonprofit, the nonprofit doesn’t persist in any way,” Harry said.
The two, who are the only employees, share a single salary. But they’re also professional artists with international careers. Harry had a multimedia exhibition last year at Bard College, in which he mined Fall River history to reflect on utopian communities. Brittni’s sculptures combine gritty materiality and mysticism. Last spring, they had a two-person show at MIT List Visual Art Center. Next month, they’ll be in a show in Shanghai presented by the collective Stilllife.
Having one foot in the art world and one in Fall River, the Harveys have found supporters with ties to the area. Mega-collector Marty Eisenberg grew up in New Bedford, and his wife’s family is from Fall River.
“When I heard there was a place called Fall River MoCA, I thought it was a joke,” Eisenberg said over the phone from New York. “Then I saw Harry’s name attached.”
He and his son went to the first exhibition after the museum opened in 2020. “I thought they did a very credible job,” Eisenberg said.
Eisenberg sees FR MoCA as a “kunsthalle” — the German word for a non-collecting art institution. “You couldn’t build a collection and survive in Fall River,” Eisenberg said. “They keep the cost down, and at the same time bring good art and thoughtful shows. They’re playing it by different rules.”
Part of the Harveys’ museum-as-art project questions the meaning of “museum.”
“‘Museum’ in my mind means a collecting institution,” said Kate McNamara, founder and director of ODD-KIN, a project space in nearby East Providence.
It’s a word, she said, that has “clout.”
“I like that their word ‘museum’ expands on what a museum can mean, and it expands on what it can do and for whom,” she said.
The Harveys are natives to the area. Brittni’s parents worked as a truck driver and a bartender. Harry dropped out of high school. Building a pipeline from Fall River to an art world many find exclusionary and far off is personal for them.
“Because this project is such a grass-roots effort, it’s artist-run, from two individuals who come from working-class backgrounds and working-class families without any excess capital ourselves,” Brittni said, “it just felt very necessary to preserve this type of space for art within the city.”
Two years ago, the museum launched an education initiative, with the artists teaching college-level social practice courses at New Bedford High School and B.M.C. Durfee High School as part of University of Massachusetts Dartmouth’s Commonwealth Collegiate Academy. This past summer, they introduced an intensive program at the museum two days a week over three months — an artists’ residency for five high school students, including Pinero.
“We saw a real need for more hands-on studio time with the students,” Brittni said.
“These students work five days a week, go to school five days a week, and on the weekends they’re taking care of their family,” Harry said. “In terms of equitability, time and space becomes a luxury in a place like Fall River.”
“It’s almost invisible how universal the need for self-expression is,” he added. “It’s not something we provide space for in a market economy unless we can market it and make a product out of it.”
Pinero, a senior at Durfee High School who works at Walmart, loved it. “Things were just coming out of nowhere,” he said. “Ideas were just flowing.”
FR MoCA partnered with Gregory Molinar, community and growth director at Fall River-based Vanson Leathers, to offer the summer students onsite instruction about the fashion business, long a prominent industry in the city. They worked with mentors and designed their own garments. At the end of the summer, Molinar separately staged a fashion show, and invited the young designers to model their work.
Molinar grew up in Fall River. He knows kids can lose interest and incentive unless they have a focus, he said. “What Brittni and Harry are doing, and what we’re doing, goes to bringing the hope and the opportunity back to them.”
In Paris, FR MoCA sold Pinero’s denim jacket fashioned from reconstructed pants and lace for $350.
Pinero now plans to study fashion design in college. In the midst of the summer program, Brittni said, “One day he comes in and he asks me … ”
She looked over at Pinero, who finished the story: “‘Are we doing this next summer?’”