One of the pioneers of Conceptual Art in the 1960s, LeWitt emphasized the idea behind an artwork over its material realization and was famous for his simple geometric structures and architecturally scaled wall drawings. Lewitt died last year at the age of 78.
Huge wall drawings at Mass MoCA
On Nov. 16, LeWitt's "last" masterpiece was unveiled at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA), a contemporary art museum located in North Adams, Massachusetts. The installation was conceived by LeWitt before he died, in partnership with the Yale University Art Gallery and created at Mass MoCA through months of painting work by a team of 65 artists and art students.
Titled A Wall Drawing Retrospective, the 27,000 square-foot installation is in a historic mill building that was renovated to LeWitt's specifications. It consists of more than 100 large-scale drawings covering three floors, spanning the artist's career from 1969 to 2007.
The works in the exhibition are on loan from numerous private and public collections worldwide, including the Yale University Art Gallery, to which LeWitt designated the gift of a major representation of his wall drawings, as well as his wall-drawing archive. It will run for 25 years.
Special Feature at MoMA
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York is featuring LeWitt's Wall Drawing #260: On Black Walls, All Two-Part Combinations of White Arcs from Corners and Sides, and White Straight, Not-Straight, and Broken Lines (1975). Last shown at MoMA in the Museum’s 1978 LeWitt retrospective, this wall drawing, composed of white lines on black walls and measuring in this installation approximately 1,500 square feet, was carried out by a team of trained assistants based upon LeWitt’s written directions. The installation will be on view until June 29, 2009.
The museum also has a couple other LeWitt pieces: a large, three-dimensional structure Serial Project, I (ABCD) (1966), based on squares and cubes, is on view in the Museum’s fourth floor galleries. Another six-color Wall Drawing #1144: Broken Bands of Color in Four Directions, is in the lobby of the museum’s Ronald S. and Jo Carole Lauder Building.
Works of Smaller Scale
In collaboration with the Mass MoCA exhibition, the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts is showing The ABCDs of Sol LeWitt-- featuring work from the private collection of the artist and exploring the underlying grammar of LeWitt’s art and ideas. This exhibit features smaller pencil drawings and sculptures and will run until May 17, 2009.
LeWitt's Photography Portrayed in Books
The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute is presenting Library Installation: Sol LeWitt, Representation, and an Audience of One. This exhibit features the artist's books.
LeWitt recognized early the potential benefits in distributing artistic production through low-cost publications: books offer permanence to the artistic moment that is lacking in a scheduled gallery setting and are very intimate to the individual viewer holding the object in his hand. Lewitt was also a founder in the early 1970s of Printed Matter, a bookstore devoted entirely to artists’ books.
Autobiography Sol LeWitt 1980 is one example of LeWitt's photographic books. Repeating the familiar format of nine uniformly sized photographs per page, the images are grouped thematically. A sense of the artist comes through, despite the total absence of text. This book exhibit runs until January 15, 2009.
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