Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective
Curated by Jock Reynolds. At MASS MoCA, North Adams, Mass., through 2033. www.massmoca.org/lewitt
Retrospectives, by their very name, entail a lengthy and reflective look back at the entirety of an artist’s career. But Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective, which was originally conceived by the Yale University Art Gallery and opened to the public on November 16 at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) in North Adams, is looking forward—specifically, twenty-five years forward. This ambitious semipermanent exhibition is scheduled to remain on view for at least that long, establishing a landmark presence in the contemporary art landscape.
“Given the logistical effort that went into putting this show together,” MASS MoCA director Joseph Thompson points out, reflecting on the sheer scale of the undertaking, “we wanted it up for a long time so that generations will benefit.”
The late conceptual artist, whose monumental body of 1,254 wall drawings was typically executed within precise, predetermined sets of conditions and instructions, was closely involved in designing the installation of 105 distinct works for this venue. Among them are some of his final scribble drawings, which had never been seen publicly before. These works are meticulously installed across freestanding partitions spanning three entire floors of a sprawling, 27,000-square-foot building that LeWitt himself selected at the very center of MASS MoCA’s expansive, 13-acre campus.
In designing the space, LeWitt chose to leave all but one of the building’s original brick walls entirely exposed, allowing the layered remnants of old paint to reveal the fascinating historical use and industrial heritage of the former factory structure. The single exception is a complicated, large-scale drawing that connects all architectural points by straight blue snap lines, which was executed directly onto a nearly 90-foot-long ground-floor wall heavily punctuated by existing structural beams, doors, windows, exit signs, grilles, and fire alarms. Elsewhere, new, two-foot-thick partitions were constructed to conceal supporting columns and mechanical infrastructure, successfully providing clean, uninterrupted sight lines for the lively and continuous sequence of drawings.
“The challenge was to avoid creating a rabbit warren of mazelike spaces,” recalls architect Simeon Bruner of Bruner/Cott & Associates of Cambridge, Massachusetts. His firm served as the architect for this major restoration as well as for the original, award-winning project that successfully converted the abandoned mill complex into a fledgling art institution—subsequently growing into the largest contemporary art museum in the United States—back in 1999. Prior to his passing in 2007, LeWitt worked in close collaboration with Bruner to produce a display layout that would make immediate sense both to the casual gallery visitor and to the serious academic art student.
Spanning forty years of artistic exploration and covering nearly an acre of total wall surface, the drawings are arranged in a roughly chronological progression. Earlier works, executed mostly in hard, black pencil, are located predominantly on the lower level, while later, highly colorful works created using ink washes, vibrant crayon, markers, and acrylic paint are displayed on the upper floors. The comprehensive collection includes deceptively simple, geometrical compositions such as the 1980s Wall Drawing 340, alongside curvy, sweeping abstractions like the Loopy Doopy series and the striking black-and-white Wall Drawing 999, which was originally designed for Lever House in New York City.
“Sol had an uncanny sense of how to site things architecturally,” says curator Jock Reynolds. “I love the processional aspect of walking, both kinesthetically and visually.” As visitors move through the vast, three-dimensional space, they are subtly guided by a thoughtfully placed succession of large, two-dimensional panels, which serves to heighten their personal experience of the profound interaction between art and architecture.
Reynolds, who serves as the director of the Yale University Art Gallery, originally suggested MASS MoCA as the ideal home for this landmark exhibition because of its unique and underexploited real estate. To further enrich the cultural impact of the exhibition, the nearby Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts, has committed to annually creating a series of companion teaching exhibitions tied to the retrospective. “I hope this collaboration serves as a model for other institutions,” Reynolds says.
Bringing the exhibition to life was also a passionate labor of love for the many individuals involved. LeWitt’s longtime master draftsmen, including Anthony Sansotta, Jo Watanabe, Chris Cobb, and John Hogan, personally oversaw the meticulous application of the drawings. The physical execution was carried out by a dedicated team of some twenty studio professionals, twelve apprentices, and thirty undergraduate art students over an intense six-month period beginning in April 2008. This collaborative process served as a fitting and direct tribute to an artist who famously stressed the conceptual idea behind his work far above its physical execution. For those interested in the behind-the-scenes creation, a time-lapse video hosted on the museum’s website documents the work in progress, alongside detailed historical records and explanations for each of the individual drawings.
The realization of the architectural environment was aided significantly by a personal contribution: Bruner’s late wife, Leslie Gould, generously donated the architectural fees for the project. “An artist herself, she understood that Sol was one of the important conceptual artists of the 20th century,” Bruner notes. “She was pleased to help build a place to remember his contribution.”
