More than 100 dazzling murals designed by conceptual art pioneer Sol LeWitt have been installed in a three-storey building on the campus of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) in North Adams, where they go on view on 16 November and will remain for at least 25 years. Most of the retrospective, which spans 1968 to 2007, comes from the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut, whose director, Jock Reynolds, conceived the project during conversations with the artist in 2004. LeWitt gave a number of drawings to Yale along with an archive documenting his entire wall-drawing oeuvre. Mr Reynolds proposed mounting a survey at MASS MoCA, a former industrial complex in western Massachusetts, whose director Joseph Thompson offered to renovate a disused building selected by LeWitt, who designed the installation before his death in April 2007. A team of 65 artists and students spent six months executing the wall drawings, which exist only as sheets of instructions until they are realised. The result is a walk-through timeline of LeWitt’s eye- and brain-teasing murals that range from black-and-white linear patterns to brightly coloured, hard-edged geometries. Yale and MASS MoCA have raised more than $10m to fund the project and Yale has endowed a conservator post to oversee the LeWitt archives and works on paper. A companion volume of 100 essays by Chrissie Iles, Lucy Lippard, Robert Storr, Chuck Close, Mel Bochner, Steve Reich, Lucinda Childs and others will be published early next year by Yale University Press, and a three-volume catalogue raisonné of LeWitt’s 1,254 wall drawings will be released in 2010. Williams College Museum of Art in nearby Williamstown has mounted “The ABCDs of Sol LeWitt”, a selection of the artist’s works from his private collection (14 November-17 May 2009).
THE ART NEWSPAPER
