Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing #999
We have been delighted to see so many glowing reviews of the Sol LeWitt Retrospective since we opened the new building last month. My Google Alert has been filled to the brim with reviews from bloggers and websites and we have amassed a collection of reviews from newspapers and magazines around the country.
Check out what the critics have to say about the installation:
Included here are links to some of our favorite reviews including Sebastian Smee’s review for The Boston Globe, the review on art/design blog Cool Hunting, Holland Cotter’s review for The New York Times, and Richard Lacayo in Time, Andrea Shea’s piece on NPR, and Roger Catlin in The Hartford Courant.
We’d love to hear what you think of LeWitt.
Posted December 9, 2008 by Brittany Bishop
Filed under Exhibitions, LeWitt, Openings
3 Comments »
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January 12th, 2009 at 8:30 pm
http://lowerwestside.tumblr.com/post/68410291/sol-lewitt-at-mass-moca
Text Sol LeWitt at Mass Moca
A quick 1.5 hour drive from Saratoga, New York, through curving Adirondack mountain roads, brought us to the gates of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. The building was the type of industrial campus that felt custom-made for stories to be told. Ashley put it best: “If this building were anywhere else they would have turned it into something like a J. Crew by now.”
Three floors of Sol LeWitt wall drawings lay ahead of us. I was only mildly familiar with LeWitt’s work. I know he has some sculptures in Madison Square Park and that there was work of his on the roof of the Met one summer. I had discovered the wall drawings a few weeks earlier when drifting into a gallery at the Whitney museum—where two gradients of scribbles merged into a “beam” of white. The piece was a perfect square, but it was all scribbles! I asked the dossant, whose smile rivaled mine, “This was all written by a person?” “Two,” he said, “They had ladders and lots of pencils. It took them a few days.” I was intrigued. Soooo… the artist didn’t do these himself?
From the exhibition brochure: “Sol Lewitt is perhaps best known for separating the act of conceiving a work of art from the act of executing it, an approach to art-making he outlined most concisely in his 1967 statement: ‘The idea becomes the machine that makes art.’ If you are not familiar with Sol LeWitt’s work and the conceptually based approach to art-making that he and other artists pioneered in the 1960s, you might enjoy knowing how LeWitt came to make his wall drawings, which were first described with distinct language and clear diagrams that he and/or others could apply directly to specific walls in any given location.”
This location, in particular, was renovated specifically for this show. It is a playground for the bright colors, simple textures, and complex patterns that stand floor to ceiling wall to wall. The drawings are divided into three periods “Early,” “Mid-Career,” and “Late LeWitt.” They build on each other. On each floor you bear witness to the evolution of an artist who continued to find how far he could push himself.
We left MoCA under moonlight—promising each other to return and bring others! Here, I write to you. No rush though- The work will be on display for another 25 years. Here’s a taste of what’s waiting for you:
The Video: http://vimeo.com/2722671 and http://vimeo.com/2722561
The Pictures: http://flickr.com/photos/lowerwestsidenyc/sets/72157612119820443/
The Tweets: http://twitter.com/jcap.design
ALSO ON DISPLAY: An Installation by the Miss Rockaway Armada:
http://www.massmoca.org/event_details.php?id=370
May 31st, 2009 at 10:26 am
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June 13th, 2009 at 9:28 pm
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