Tag Archive for Sol LeWitt

Two Wesleyan UP books finalists for Connecticut Book Awards

by selliott • September 22, 2020

We are thrilled that two Wesleyan titles are honored by the Connecticut Center for the Book as finalists for 2020 Connecticut Book Awards. Sol LeWitt: A Life of Ideas is a finalist in the nonfiction category. And Forever Seeing New Beauties: The Forgotten Impressionist Mary Roger Williams, 1957–1907 is a finalist for the 2020 Spirit of Connecticut category. Congratulations!

Connecticut Center for the Book is the state affiliate of the national Center for the Book in the Library of Congress. Our mission is to promote the written and spoken word throughout the state, and to foster a love of reading for the people of Connecticut.

As we all know, times have changed drastically, and the formerly live annual celebration hosted by the Connecticut Center for the Book will now be virtual. The ceremony will be held virtually on October 15, 2020, starting at 6:00 p.m. Winners will be announced at that time. You may register for the Connecticut Book Awards here.

We also extend our congratulations to Elizabeth Normen and David K. Leff, who are also finalists for the Spirit of Connecticut award. Normen co-edited African American Connecticut Explored and Leff authored Hidden in Plain Sight and Maple Sugaring.

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

Announcing “Sol LeWitt”

by jgagne • May 7, 2019

An intimate portrait of a renowned conceptual artist

“One of the interesting things about living through a period is you know where the recorded history and the happenstance of the moment diverge. Consequently, having known Sol LeWitt since my days as an art student in New York in the 1960s, I appreciate the clear and concise manner that Lary Bloom has scrupulously chronicled not only Sol’s artistic development, but also his personal life and his ever-changing social milieu. The results are an insightful and intimate portrait of the artist, the man and his times.”
— Saul Ostrow, Founder of Critical Practices, Inc.

Sol LeWitt (1928−2007), one of the most influential and important artists of the twentieth century, upended how art is made and marketed. As a key figure in minimalism and conceptualism, he proclaimed that for the artist the work of the mind is more important than that of the hand. (He argued, “The idea becomes the machine that makes the art.”) But even as his wall drawings and sculpture were admired around the world (installed, over time, by thousands of young artists, and marketed not as objects but as concepts), and even as he championed the work of hundreds of colleagues including many women whose efforts were spurned by the bullies of a male-dominated profession, he remained an enigmatic figure, refusing to participate in the culture of celebrity. Lary Bloom’s biography Sol LeWitt: A Life of Ideas links the extraordinary arc of his life to his iconic work. The author draws on personal recollections of LeWitt, whom he knew during the last two decades of the artist’s life, as well as letters and papers and over one hundred original interviews, including those with Chuck Close, Ingrid Sischy, Adrian Piper, Philip Glass, and Carl Andre. The result is a full and absorbing portrait of a man who, following the flashy and self-aggrandizing period of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, stripped art down to its basics and, with a band of rebellious colleagues, started over again.

Lary Bloom has authored or co-authored ten books including The Writer Within, The Test of Our Times, with Tom Ridge, and Letters from Nuremberg, with Christopher Dodd. He has taught writing at Yale University, Fairfield University, Trinity College, and Wesleyan University. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

May 7, 2019
356 pp. 28 illus., 6 x 9”
Jacketed Cloth, $35.00 978-0-8195-7868-6

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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