MassArt Art Museum

This guide to the MassArt Art Museum in Boston traces how tearing down a drop ceiling in a cramped 1920s gallery uncovered a hidden skeleton of century-old terracotta vaulting and steel trusses that became the whole basis for the renovation. It follows the building's earlier life as two galleries with no elevator, no bathrooms and no way to stay open through the summer heat, and the museum director's reasoning about who a museum is really for. Stand beneath the exposed trusses to see what decades of dropped ceiling had hidden.