Tag Archive for Connecticut Artists

Happy Birthday to Mary Rogers Williams!

by mkolson • September 30, 2020

Today, September 30th, 2020, would have been Mary Rogers Williams’ 163rd birthday. The obscure, often forgotten American tonalist and Impressionist artist was most well known for her stunning pastel and oil portraits and landscapes. Born and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, as a baker’s daughter, Williams travelled widely throughout Europe when she wasn’t teaching in the art department at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. An incredibly active woman, she hiked and biked across Europe, while chafing against art world rules that favored men, and writing thousands of pages that record her travels and work. Her paintings offer remarkable horizon views of ancient ruins, medieval towns, country meadows, and calm waters. Her work was exhibited at various venues in the United States and France while she was still living. Much of her work has stayed in Connecticut and the Northeast, held by institutions including the Smith College Museum of Art, Connecticut Landmarks, and the Connecticut Historical Society.

Forever Seeing New Beauties: The Forgotten Impressionist Mary Rogers Williams, 1857–1907, by Eve Kahn is a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award. The book is up for the Bruce Fraser “Spirit of Connecticut” Award. Bruce Fraser, director of Connecticut Humanities for 28 years, was a proponent of Connecticut’s sense of place. He was interested in how places evoke memory and emotions from people, how people have such ferocious identification and loyalty to their surroundings and how the very landscape influences people. Mary Rogers Williams’ life and legacy embody the values of this award—Williams was deeply tied to, influenced by, and involved with her roots in Connecticut.

Green Landscape—Hills in the Distance (probably Connecticut
River Valley), 1903 pastel, 12 ½ x 22 in. Smith College Museum of Art,
Northampton, MA, gift of the sisters of Mary Rogers
Williams

Until recently, little was known or remembered about Williams. But in 2012, the artist’s confessional letters as well as hundreds of her paintings and sketches turned up in storage at a Connecticut family’s home. The resulting book reveals her as strong, funny, self-deprecating, caustically critical of mainstream art, and observant of everything from soldiers’ epaulettes to colorful produce layered on delivery trucks. She was determined to paint portraits and landscapes in her distinctive style—and so she did. The book reproduces her unpublished artworks that capture pensive gowned women, Norwegian slopes reflected in icy waters, saw-tooth rooflines on French chateaus, and incense hazes in Italian chapels. Forever Seeing New Beauties offers a vivid portrayal of an adventurer, defying her era’s expectations on a tight budget. Today we remember Mary Rogers Williams for her standout style, adventurous personality, and bold wit.

The author, Eve Kahn, will be lecturing on the book for Boston Design Week, on October 14th, in remote event. Learn more and register here.

Some of Mary Rogers Williams’ letters and papers. Photo by Eve Kahn.

A Day with Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawings at Mass MoCA

by mkolson • September 15, 2020

Wall Drawing 793B by Sol LeWitt

Wall Drawing 579 by Sol LeWitt

Wall Drawings 439 and 527 by Sol LeWitt

Wesleyan University Press is pleased to announce that Sol LeWitt: A Life of Ideas by Lary Bloom has been named a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award in the nonfiction category. Check out Sol LeWitt: A Life of Ideas by Lary Bloom, available from HFSbooks.com.

In spring of 2019, Wesleyan University Press published the first ever LeWitt biography entitled Sol LeWitt: A Life of Ideas by Lary Bloom. Bloom’s biography of LeWitt draws on personal recollections of LeWitt, whom he knew in the last years of the artist’s life, as well as LeWitt’s letters and papers and over one hundred original interviews with his friends and colleagues, including Chuck Close, Ingrid Sischy, Philip Glass, Adrian Piper, Jan Dibbets, and Carl Andre. The absorbing chronicle brings new information to our understanding of this important artist, linking the extraordinary arc of his life to his iconic work. Plus, it includes 28 beautiful illustrations of the artist’s work. Pick up this title to read more about Sol LWwitt and his “ideas.”

Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (commonly known as Mass MoCA) draws visitors both near and far to the city of North Adams in the Berkshire Hills. A mill town for much of its history, North Adams stands out for its industrial brick architecture all along the small but mighty Hoosic River. Mass MoCA’s campus finds its home in one of these old mill buildings—collections, exhibits, offices, event venues, and commercially rented space now occupy the converted Arnold Print Works factory building complex. The Sprague Electric Company occupied the building most recently, prior to Mass MoCA’s arrival.

Mass MoCA’s industrial roots shine during any visit. The space is immense and allows for large works—particularly sculpture and installation pieces—to be viewed in their incredible totality. Light shines from floor to ceiling windows that line all external walls. Bridges and ramps bring separate buildings together in a maze of levels. Situated in one of these buildings, occupying three floors, we find “Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective.” The bright colors, precise lines and angles, and massive scale that define Sol LeWitt’s most famous pieces suit the space perfectly. See the pictures included at the end of this post for a look at some of the works featured in the exhibit!

Sol LeWitt came to fame in the 1960s for his wall drawings and structures, though he was accomplished with many other artistic forms too (including drawing, printmaking, photography, and artist’s books). While Mass MoCA’s LeWitt exhibit is focused mainly on wall drawings, it is organized chronologically, so if you work your way up from the first floor to the third, you will see how his work developed throughout his career. From subtle pencil drawings to complex colored illustrations, Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings offer a great scope of the artist’s influence, theory, and practice. LeWitt is regarded as a founder of both Minimal and Conceptual art. His work is defined by three-dimensional qualities whether those are physical or representative. From his “structure” sculptures made from wood, metal, and cinder blocks, to his wall drawings of graphite, crayon, colored pencil, India ink, or and/or acrylic paint, LeWitt’s artwork masters the strategic, systematic organization of lines and shapes.

According to LeWitt’s artistic and conceptual principles, his wall drawings were not usually assembled by the artist personally. LeWitt sold the instructions and the rights to individual works, allowing for distinct teams to interpret and execute his plans. In 1971 LeWitt explained that “each person draws a line differently and each person understands words differently”– his certificates of authenticity, along with his instructions (which vary in length, specificity, and use of text and design), LeWitt believed that art can have both a conceptual creator and a collective, experiential maker. His wall drawings are constructed on site and can be taken down, moved, or re-constructed at any time; in this way, LeWitt incorporates a transient dynamic directly into the physical forms taken on by his art.

Wall Drawing 289 by Sol Lewitt	Sol Lewitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective at Mass MoCA	Wall Drawings 1247 and 1260 by Sol Lewitt
Wall Drawings 821, 852, and 853 by Sol LeWitt	Sol LeWitt: A Life of Ideas by Lary Bloom in the Mass MoCA Gift Shop	Wall Drawing 915 by Sol LeWitt

NYC panel on the artwork and life of Sol LeWitt, May 5th

by selliott • May 3, 2019

Please join biographer and friend to the author, Sol LeWitt; artist, author, and curator Pablo Helguera; and Karen Gunderson artist and colleague of Lewitt, at McNally Jackson bookstore (Prince Street), March 6, at 6PM. Read more about the event here.

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An excerpt relating to Gunderson’s relationship with LeWitt.

During the 1970s, LeWitt split his time between New York and Spoleto. And when he went to Italy it was often with his female companion at the time. The first to follow Wheeler and Conrad-Eybesfeld was a young artist (again, much younger than LeWitt).

Karen Gunderson—like Gene Beery, a native of Racine, Wisconsin—had earned a master’s degree at the University of Iowa and was teaching at Ohio State University (OSU), in Columbus, when she met LeWitt. Her classes included intermedia (she was a pioneer scholar in this new field), art history, and sculpture. As she recalled in an interview in 2014, “It was me and forty men at OSU. I got patted on top of my head or on my ass every day.”

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