Big Bling

North Adams, Massachusetts, United States

Public art

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Listed, not yet checked · Oct 2026

This Big Thing is recorded as still being here.

Big Bling is Martin Puryear’s 40-foot sculpture of laminated wood and plywood wrapped in chain-link fence, with a gold-leafed shackle near the top. Made for New York’s Madison Square Park, it now stands at the southern edge of MASS MoCA in downtown North Adams, Massachusetts.

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Big Bling

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Site-level location · 42.7013° N, 73.1159° W

FIELD GUIDE

The story

A forty-foot sculpture wrapped in chain-link fence and crowned with a gold shackle stands at the southern edge of MASS MoCA in downtown North Adams, where it links the museum's 16-acre campus to Main Street. It is Martin Puryear's Big Bling, made for New York and now in North Adams.

Madison Square Park Conservancy commissioned it and showed it from 16 May 2016 to 2 April 2017, calling it the largest temporary outdoor sculpture Puryear had constructed. It is built of curved laminated wooden beams and exterior-grade plywood, materials MASS MoCA describes as suitable for outdoor building, wrapped in chain-link fencing, with a gold-leafed shackle anchored near the top. MASS MoCA calls it "part animal form, part abstract sculpture, and part intellectual meditation".

Puryear wrote of the work: "I see you New York. I see how you grow and compartmentalize and stratify. I see how you beckon and promise (and also how you exclude)." MASS MoCA says the title's slang term "bling" is rooted in the urban youth, hip-hop and rap culture of the 1990s, and that the multi-tiered form suggests a structure that might be climbed but is blocked by a barrier fence.

In September 2019 iBerkshires reported that the North Adams Planning Board approved MASS MoCA's plan to turn a Marshall Street parking lot into a green space, with the sculpture planned for the corner of Main and Marshall streets. MASS MoCA says the pocket park was designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates. iBerkshires reported the planning approval in September 2019, when the work was expected to stay for three to five years; MASS MoCA now lists it as on view.

MASS MoCA lists it as on view now; it is worth checking the museum's long-term exhibitions page before travelling a long way to see it.

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WHAT TO EXPECT

An outdoor sculpture in a pocket park at the southern edge of the MASS MoCA campus, at the Main and Marshall streets corner of downtown North Adams according to the 2019 plan. MASS MoCA lists it as on view now (long-term exhibitions page).

ACCESS

MASS MoCA’s southern perimeter, downtown North Adams, Massachusetts, at the Main and Marshall streets corner per the 2019 plan. The museum lists the sculpture as on view now.

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