Word: lewitt
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...LeWitt retrospective grew out of conversations that began five years ago between the artist and Jock Reynolds, director of the Yale University Art Gallery. Thinking over ways to preserve LeWitt's work, Reynolds suggested a long-term installation of his wall drawings at Mass MoCA, which had opened in 1996 in a complex of almost two dozen derelict industrial buildings, most of them still unused by the museum. "I think Jock described me to Sol as a poor dirt farmer of a museum director," says mass moca director Joe Thompson. "Cash poor but rich in buildings and land...
...LeWitt visited Mass MoCA, where he settled on Building Seven. Though he never returned to the site, he designed the installation himself, working with a scale model at his studio in Grafton, Conn. Mass MoCA engaged the architecture firm Bruner/Cott & Associates to produce a clean-lined renovation. Then the drawings were painstakingly executed over a six-month period by a combination of veteran LeWitt studio assistants, college students and local artists, about 70 people in all. The entire project, which also involves the nearby Williams College Museum of Art, cost $7.3 million...
...roughly chronological installation shows how LeWitt's work evolved over the years. Some drawings from the late '60s and early '70s are black pencil lines transecting penciled grids, things so delicate they seem to weigh little more than the thoughts they began as. Again and again, LeWitt introduced a human factor into what could otherwise have been a mechanical process. His instructions might call for one person to draw an irregular line and for others to attempt to imitate it. Early on, he brought color into the mix to produce agitated chromatic force fields. And in the '80s, after...
...installation ends with a return to black, densely scribbled drawings in which pulsing fields of darkness engage in feathery interactions with white walls. Conceived by LeWitt toward the end of his life, they have the look of misty thresholds. "I thought he was heading into the light," says Reynolds. "There's something very moving about those last drawings...
Moving? Conceptual art? You don't ordinarily think of it that way, but with LeWitt, it's true. He took a dry working method and humanized it. Now there's a beautiful concept...