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MassMOCA
87 Marshall Street
North Adams
413-662-2111
Galleries
Sol LeWitt:
A Wall Drawing
Retrospective
Slated to open
October 2008

Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG) will partner MASS MoCA to convert a three-story 27,000 square foot building in the heart of MASS MoCA's factory campus into a long-term exhibition titled Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective, which will feature 50 monumental wall drawings created by the artist from 1968-2007. The building and exhibition are scheduled to open in Fall 2008.

Jock Reynolds, Director of Yale University Art Gallery, who in 1993 worked closely with Sol LeWitt to produce an earlier retrospective of his wall drawings for Phillips Academy Andover's Addison Gallery of American Art, recently said, "I've seen firsthand how inspirational Sol's wall drawings are to those who encounter them, especially young people who have had the opportunity to help install his works. There is no artist I know who has generated such an imaginative range of ideas from the basic artistic elements of line, color, language, and geometric figures, and then sited them in stunning architectural settings."

“For MASS MoCA, the opportunity to anchor our program of changing exhibitions with a long-term installation of Sol's work is tremendously compelling: his immersive wall drawings, which ply the edges between painting, architecture, design, and conceptual art, have directly informed the work of many of the artists we present in our program of changing exhibitions," said Joseph Thompson, Director of MASS MoCA. “By inhabiting Building 7 at the heart of our complex, Sol will generate added dividends by activating vast areas of this historic site that were previously unavailable to our visitors, while simultaneously linking our entire sequence of exhibition spaces in one elegant loop. Yale's wonderful commitment to put in place the mechanisms, scholarship and resources to care for and conserve Sol's artistic practices and methods will make this a living archive, and fits well with MASS MoCA's strong tradition of fabricating new work."

“For North Adams, this is a great announcement," said Mayor John Barrett III. “I am delighted to welcome Mr. LeWitt, Yale University, and its Art Gallery to our city and to MASS MoCA; I look forward to the many educational opportunities and other exciting endeavors a project of this quality and magnitude will generate. This 'museum within a museum' is full of color and visual excitement, and will greatly increase visitation to our city, and further enhance the economic impact of MASS MoCA on North Adams. The LeWitt project also points the way to future development at MASS MoCA."

The impetus for this project arose in 2004, when Reynolds and LeWitt began a conversation that led to the artist committing a substantial number of his wall drawings and his wall drawings archive to Yale's teaching museum (which already owns an extensive holding of LeWitt's work in multiple media). Realizing that YUAG would never be able to simultaneously install and maintain a large number of LeWitt's wall drawings at any given time, Reynolds suggested to LeWitt that MASS MoCA might be an institution that could offer significant space within its historic North Adams mill complex to house a retrospective of his wall drawings (borrowed from YUAG and other collections throughout the world), one that could also be maintained for a substantial period of time. When Thompson toured LeWitt through the North Adams museum campus of industrial buildings, Building 7 — situated in the middle of the multi- building complex, and featuring large windows that open on to two flanking courtyards — appealed to LeWitt as an ideal site for a multi-floor installation of his work.

Sol LeWitt, wall drawing installation.

Sol LeWitt, wall drawing installation.

LeWitt assistants at work on wall drawing.

Strategic planning for the LeWitt wall drawing retrospective began in 2005 when the architectural firm of Bruner/Cott and Associates, which had earlier helped design and carry forth the first phase of MASS MoCA's master plan, built a scaled model of Building 7 for LeWitt that he then worked with to devise a specific selection, sequence, and spatial orientation for some 50 of his wall drawings (created from 1968 to the present).

The exhibition is slated to open in late 2008, and will remain installed at MASS MoCA for a minimum of twenty-five years, through 2033.

Reynolds has secured an agreement between YUAG and the Yale University Press to co-publish a three-volume catalogue raisonné of LeWitt's wall drawings, a project now under way and also scheduled for completion in late 2008. He has since raised the funds needed to support the installation of LeWitt's art at MASS MoCA and an endowed drawings conservator for YUAG, one whose primary responsibility will be to help conserve and maintain LeWitt's wall drawings worldwide beyond the artist's lifetime. Simultaneously, Thompson launched a major fundraising effort to secure construction funds and a maintenance endowment needed to support the additional annual operating costs of Building 7.

The installation of the LeWitt wall drawings will employ the artist's professional assistants along with a cadre of paid student interns who will be recruited from Yale, Williams College in Williamstown, Mass; and Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA) in North Adams, as well as other colleges and universities around the country. YUAG and MASS MoCA have begun exploratory discussions with other institutions to join the collaboration, including the Williams College Museum of Art. All three institutions play a leadership roll in the training and support of many living artists, curators, scholars, and museum directors active in America, and the opportunity to study and work directly with some of LeWitt's finest works and his vast archives has stimulated a discussion of a potential collaboration entirely consistent with their central missions as teaching museums. Among the programs being discussed are: a rotating a sequence of YUAG-owned LeWitt wall drawings in their entry lobbies in the years ahead; teaching exhibitions at the Williams College Museum of Art and MASS MoCA centered on LeWitt and other contemporary artists of his era and curated by museum staff, faculty, and students; and educational programs organized in the MASS MoCA galleries expanding understanding of the works of art in the retrospective such as lectures and symposia developed by the Williams College Museum of Art in concert with undergraduate and graduate faculty members of art and art history.

Among the most influential artists of our time, LeWitt was regarded as one of the founders of both Minimal and Conceptual art. In the mid-1960s LeWitt began concentrating on three-dimensional works based on the cube. For these he used precise, measured formats, and his methods were mathematically based, defined by language, or created through random processes. He took up similar approaches in works on paper.

LeWitt began making wall drawings in 1968. The earliest consisted of pencil lines — in systematized arrangements of verticals, horizontals, and diagonals on a 45-degree angle drawn directly on the walls. Later wall drawings included circles and arcs and colored pencil. LeWitt would eventually use teams of assistants to create such works. Bernice Rose, Curator of Drawings at New York's Museum of Modern Art, has said, "[LeWitt's method of drawing on walls] was as important for drawing as Pollock''s use of the drip technique had been for painting in the 1950s." Peter Schjedahl, writing in The New Yorker, said, “LeWitt's wall drawings belong in a hall of fame for parsimonious, incredibly potent inventions, like the lever and the wheel … It isn't just the physical scale of a museum wall that LeWitt's elegantly adaptable art matches, but the social and spiritual scale of our relations with museums themselves."