I came to my appreciation of Sol LeWitt's work late in my career as an artist. To be sure, I had known about his work for many years, but it just never resonated with my the way some other artists had. But that changed one day in winter of 1994 when I stepped into Pace Wildenstein's downtown space on Greene Street. I had probably been more fully alerted to LeWitt's work by my time spent at the Addison Gallery of American Art, and by Jock Reynold's unabashed enthusiasm for LeWitt's work. Reynolds was director of the Addison at the time, and had overseen a huge project, executing several of LeWitt's wall drawings at that institution. LeWitt had done a large show spanning twenty-years of his wall drawings at the Addison the year before, and --from the evidence of the one drawing that remained in place in the large upstairs gallery (Wall Drawing #713), and the reproductions I saw which documented the process of making the others--it was a display of bombastic, sustained, expressive activity the likes of which I had never quite seen before. LeWitt's wall drawings had actually covered almost every surface of the Addison's classical interior, infusing it with a newly transformed and dynamic life. The wall drawings had been executed, following LeWitt's detailed instructions, by the students of Phillips Academy, the prep school of which the Addison Gallery is the teaching museum.

One of LeWitt's dictums as an artist was that the work was indeed the idea. In his "Sentences on Conceptual Art" sentences numbers 32 and 33 read: "Banal ideas cannot be rescued by beautiful execution." and "It is difficult to bungle a good idea." In the case of his large wall drawings the execution, and thus the exact rendering and interpretation of his instructions, were left to the individuals doing the executing. Thus the same instructions could yield variably nuanced interpretations. His willingness to open his work up in this way belied a freedom and generosity that few ever achieve. In executing the instructions, the drawing belonged as much to those group of individuals making it as it did to LeWitt. It became a kind of gift: not my work, but yours...ours. This willingness to share his work, as it were, and to create a collaborative space for its execution began to give me a fuller sense of both the man and the artist.

As it was, that day I stepped into Pace downtown became a transformative one for me. There was one piece in particular, a large blue wall drawing of the deepest, deepest blue I had ever seen. It appeared that one could literally step into the wall and disappear into some other dimension, so deep and inviting was the piece. I left the gallery that day with a new appreciation for the man and his work. Apparently around that same time LeWitt encountered my work, because shortly after that experience in the gallery different people who knew Sol started telling me he was looking for me. Jock Reynolds: "Sol wants you to get in touch with him." Rhona Hoffman: "Sol said if I saw you to tell you he wants to meet you." And so it went for a few months. Transformed as I had been by his work, I wondered what he had responded to in mine. After all, evocative though it may have been, the human subject didn't figure centrally in his practice as it did in mine...or so I thought. In 1996 I was due to have an exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT, and would be doing a residency there in 1995 to make the work for the show. As fate would have it Sol's wife Carol was the Atheneum's board chairperson at that time. On the day I came to begin work at the museum, almost one year after my encounter with LeWitt's work at Pace, I met Carol at the museum, and the first thing she said was, "My husband wants to meet you."

As a very young artist LeWitt had studied at the Wadsworth Atheneum, and he had indeed been born in Hartford. A large wall drawing by LeWitt today graces the main entryway to the museum. He and Carol lived not too far from the museum in Chester, CT where they made their home and where LeWitt had his studio. And so it was that I finally met Sol LeWitt, driving to Chester from New Haven, CT where I was then living with my wife and young son. He had been involved in making photographs himself, gridded pictures which had been initially inspired by the sequential motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge. From this LeWitt had absorbed the notions of repetition, sequence, and an organizational schemata. At the time I was making large scale gridded, multiple image Polaroid portraits of high schoolers, which were about extending the notion of time in the still photograph and using the grid as a system for reading the multiple pictures as a single image. So LeWitt and I had much to talk about as it turned out that day in his studio and over dinner. When it was time to part, he said with a smile, "I want to trade a piece with you."

Sol LeWitt was notoriously camera shy, and of course I wanted to do a portrait of him. I was going to be in residence at the Addison Gallery of American Art after completing work at the Atheneum, and would have the 20X24 Polaroid View Camera installed in an empty room of the museum, where I would be photographing Phillips Academy and Lawrence High School students. I wondered if I could get Sol in front of the camera as well. Of course, it would have to happen without telling him in advance that it was planned, otherwise he would never do it. So I enlisted the help of my friend Jock Reynolds. The Addison has a considerable holding of LeWitt's work, and Jock came up with the idea of having LeWitt come to the museum to "look over" some of his work in the collection that they "needed to assess the condition of." This was enough to get LeWitt to make an appearance at the museum. Jock alerted me as to what day Sol would be coming, and I would "just happen" to be in the studio working that day. We let Carol know what the plan was as well, and we waited to see how it would unfold.

On the appointed day Sol and Carol drove up from Connecticut to Andover to supposedly take a look at some condition issues with some of his earlier work in the Addison's collection storage that needed tending to. Jock had probably told him that I would be there as well, but nothing more, so he wasn't surprised to see me there when they got to the museum. After supposedly taking care of business downstairs in the collection storage vault, the three of them came back upstairs and entered my studio. Well, actually Jock and Carol entered the studio, and Sol stood at the entry to the gallery peering in, craning his neck to look around at the work I had already made which I had pinned up around the space. I suspect it was the sight of the big 235 lb. camera sitting in the middle of the floor that kept him from coming right in. As I walked over to where he stood and began talking with him, he asked how the work had been going, at which point I invited him in to take a closer look around. He eventually turned his attention to the camera, asking me how it worked. I had instructed John Reuter, the Polaroid technician who operated the camera with me, to have the lens opened and cocked, so I could work quickly. I told Sol that if he would just sit in front of the camera I would gladly show him "how it worked." I instructed Carol to sit next to him. I had in mind to do a diptych portrait of the two of them. I gingerly set the two of them up, turned the room lights out and the studio lights on and casually went around to the back of the camera to compose and focus, directing Sol to look at Carol and asking Carol to lay her hand on Sol's, I made the first exposure and then quickly a second before he had time to get nervous or move. We then shifted the camera and did two exposures of Carol, also in fairly rapid succession. By then Sol was quite relaxed and somewhat enthralled by the giant camera. In a few minutes we all looked at the pictures that had resulted. He loved them, and I told him this would be my part of the trade; I would give him and Carol one of the two versions of the diptych.

As it turned out, the occasion was even more momentous than I had first thought. Since Sol was so camera averse, Carol didn't even have any personal pictures of the two of them from the past thirteen years! Several weeks later, when my residency was done, we drove to the LeWitt's home to visit and deliver the portrait. He said he would send something my way as soon as he picked it out. We passed the day in their home and in Sol's studio, and then went out to a very pleasant and filling dinner afterwards. The evening had ended, and my family and I returning to New Haven where we were living at the time, and Sol promised to be in touch. Within a few weeks I got a call from an art handler saying they were confirming a delivery from the LeWitt studio. On the designated day and time, a truck pulled up in from of the house, and the bell rung. I went downstairs and watched speechlessly as the two handlers unloaded a six by three foot heavy box. Unpacking it once they got it upstairs, it turned out to be one of LeWitt's fabulous Wavy Brushstrokes gouaches, beautifully framed. It remains a constant reminder of his genius and generosity.

I found out from Carol LeWitt after Sol passed away last year that Sol had indeed turned down requests to sit in front of the camera for Richard Avedon, Annie Liebovitz, and even his dear friend Chuck Close, such was his aversion to being photographed. This, of course, touched me very deeply, and made the occasion of his even reluctantly sitting for me and the memories of that time even more cherished.

Photograph: Sol LeWitt, Installation at the Whitney Museum (2000) by Librado Romero, the New York Times
Posted by
4

View comments

Birmingham on My Mind

September 15, 1963 - Fifty Years Later

One night, many years ago, a book appeared in my suburban Jamaica, NY home. My parents had attended a lecture that James Baldwin had given at our church, Calvary Baptist Church, and had returned with the book in hand. While the church never struck me as a particularly activist one, our minister, Rev. Walter S. Pinn, had let it be known on more than one occasion that he had marched besides Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. There was a small black and white photograph hanging in the church vestibule that proudly and permanently testified to that fact. Most likely my folks purchased the book after Baldwin's talk as part of SNCC's fundraising efforts.
3

On The Passing of Two Giants

This has been a difficult month, what with the loss of poet and activist Louis Reyes Rivera, and even more recently the esteemed artist Elizabeth Catlett. Both Rivera and Catlett were artists who were unabashedly forthright in their adherence to the cause of social justice, and equally as forthright in their adherence to practicing at the highest level of of their respective art forms.
4

Reshaping The Art/Museum/Public Experience

The past few months have been interesting ones for those interested in the ways in which art practice, public institutional practice and their various audiences interact. As the economy has taken a downturn lately public institutions have begun to think about the ways in which they do or do not engage that larger audience that their very survival depends upon.
6

The recent passing of Dr. Billy Taylor was marked by notices of his contribution to jazz music as both musician and advocate. Taylor, in addition to being a seminal jazz pianist, had sustained for over four decades a position as one of the music's most visible and preeminent spokespersons, having taken on the role of educator and institution builder among his numerous other accomplishments in the field.
2

Recent Censorship Recalls Spirit of an Earlier Era

In 1936 Adolf Hitler, German Chancellor, instructed Adolf Ziegler, president of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, to put together an “exhibition of shame”, depicting the “deterioration of art since 1910”. Ziegler gathered a group of what were called “art inspectors” to trawl through the public museums and galleries. The committee compiled everything from some 100 art collections they considered useful for defaming the Modernist movement.
7

John Boehner Fires the Opening Salvo

I had the rather auspicious fortune to be in Washington, DC for several days this past week when the opening salvo of a new round in the Culture Wars was fired by Congressman John Boehner.
6

A Different Kind of MoMA?

On a recent trip to New York I had one of those rare epiphany like moments where I found myself standing in front of a group of works that spoke clearly to how the work we do as artists might actually matter in the world. Such was the impact of this show on me that almost every other exhibition I saw both before and after in those three days came to feel almost meaningless, like so much empty, aestheticized and useless decoration.

National Endowment for the Arts chair Rocco Landesman was in Chicago recently, holding a series of meetings, gatherings, and conversations with various institutions and the arts community.

I was the speaker at the Yale University School of Art Commencement this past Monday. The School of Art ceremony followed the school wide ceremony on the Old Campus where, among others, Aretha Franklin fittingly received an honorary Doctor of Music degree. The feeling of well earned and shared accomplishment was palpable walking amongst the families of the graduates, and I was reminded yet again of the hard work and sacrifice that these moments are invested with.
4
Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey
Photo © by Jason Smikle
About Me
About Me
Chicago, IL, United States
I began making photographs in 1969 after seeing the "Harlem On My Mind" exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I had inherited my first camera the year before from my godfather Artie Miller when I was fifteen years old. I began my first project "Harlem, USA" as a direct result of that exhibition and my own family's history in the Harlem community. Born in Queens, NY my formal training began by apprenticing to local commercial and fashion photographer Levy J. Smith and then later studying at the School of Visual Arts with Larry Siegel, William Broecker, Shelley Rice and Sid Kaplan. I completed my undergraduate work at Empire State College under the guidance of Mel Rosenthal and Joe Goldberg and did my MFA at Yale University in the graduate photography program under the watchful and rigorous eyes of Tod Papageorge and Richard Benson, along with Lois Conner, Frank Gohlke, Susan Kismaric and Joel Sternfeld. Classes with Robert Farris Thompson and Michael Romer significantly rounded out my graduate work. A former Guggenheim and NEA fellow, I am currently Professor of Art and Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago, where I have taught since 1998.
"What's Going On?"
"What's Going On?"
Marvin Gaye's signature song "What's Going On?"--a musical critique of a world gone off track--provides an apt framework for looking at the role of art and cultural production in the larger society.

With so much art being made at all ends of the market, it's always a good thing for artists to look both forward and back in trying to access the role that art can play in a larger society, a society that actually exists largely outside of the distorting bubble of the Art World. When one of my students recently answered the question of why she was in school in an MFA program with, "So I can be a part of the system," I knew it was time for a reassessment and a forum from which to look at the various histories in my own little corner of the art and "real" world.

Artists used to be the ones who led the charge to challenge the system; they were the proverbial "fly in the buttermilk," the monkey wrench that mucked up the system and made it act, function, and exist in new ways. Artists were the ones who created paradigms of everything the system was not. James Baldwin once said, "Artists are here to disturb the peace."

This blog will range freely over a range of issues, highlighting individuals, events, and ideas that provide a catalyst for thought and reflection. Hopefully for younger artists it might provide a sense of a world both in and outside of the so-called art world, and hopefully provoke a conversation about the relationship between the two while offering a thought or two about just what ones work might be about as one attempts to engage both history and the contemporary moment.

For others this blog might serve as a window into how one particular artist, after three decades of practice, sees and thinks about the vast world of human social and aesthetic experience. Consider this my own small commentary or my brain periodically laid bare for your perusal and consideration.

Feel free to use the "Comments" button to share your thoughts and responses if so provoked.
OTHER BLOGS / OTHER SITES
OTHER BLOGS / OTHER SITES
Blog Archive
Blog Archive
Loading