I’ve been out of town this week seeing The Legendary Pink Dots in concert in western Mass with my husband (hence the late post) so no artwork of my own to post about this week – but plenty of other’s art to talk about.

We had a wonderful few days all around. Spent some time catching up with my husband’s cousin and his wife, a lovely couple, and topped it off with a day at the MASS Museum of Contemporary Art. I’ve been looking for an excuse to go back there for a few years ever since they undertook their Sol Lewitt Wall Drawing Retrospective Project in 2003 shortly before his death in 2007.

Sol Lewitt was a Conceptual Artist, which means simply he was more interested in the concept behind an artwork than any other aspect of the work. He wrote instructions for hundreds of wall drawings that could be carried out by himself or others at various locations at different times.

The project took many years to come together.  It is a joint project between Yale, Williams, Mass MOCA and the Lewitt estate.  In 2008 the building at Mass MOCA was prepared for the project and 62 artists who had been trained by Sol Lewitt’s assistants undertook the work on the drawings over the three floors of the building. Many of the works had never before been realized. If you are a geometry nut like I am this is a must see, but hurry up, it is only scheduled to be a 25 year run. Here are some highlights:

Wall Drawing #1180:  Within a circle draw 10,000 straight lines and 10,000 non-straight lines. All lines are randomly spaced and equally distributed.  2005 Marker

One of the more interesting things about the wall drawings is that Lewitt dated them all by their first instantiation (the first time they were ever actually drawn anywhere) so some of his works, including some of the works at Mass MOCA, have a posthumous completion date.  I unfortunately did not get the full info on all of the works that I photographed but I wanted to include the info on at least one to give you an idea on how the instructions relate to the work.

Here is a video of how they installed Sol Lewitt’s Wall Drawing #559 at the Alfond-Lunder Family Pavillion at the Colby College Museum of Art in February 2013