Mass MoCA, Yale University Art Gallery forge pact
Defying the laws of geography, Sol LeWitt has brought together North Adams and New Haven.
Mass MoCA and the Yale University Art Gallery have announced a major project involving LeWitt, one of America's foremost artists and a founding father of Minimal and Conceptual art. The museums are collaborating on the renovation of a building at Mass MoCA for the long-term exhibition of 50 LeWitt wall drawings. This will result in a major expansion of the museum's gallery space.
The drawings, large-scale works that date from 1968 to the present, belong to Yale. They come from a bequest that LeWitt, 78, made to the university in 2004 of a substantial number of the drawings.
"I told Sol there's one place I know in America where the buildings and real estate for display of your work would be available," said Jock Reynolds, director of the Yale museum, in a telephone interview. "That's Mass MoCA." The LeWitts will be shown in Building 7, a three-story brick structure that's presently vacant in the middle of the Mass MoCA campus. The addition of its 27,000 square feet will increase by 30 percent the museum's gallery space.
"There are other institutions that have great monuments within them," said Mass MoCA's director, Joseph Thompson, by phone. "Think of the Menil Collection, in Houston, they have that really wonderful Rothko Chapel.
There's the installation of Richard Serra scultpures in the heart of Guggenheim Bilbao....
"When people think of Mass MoCA, they think, correctly, of changing exhibitions and work by young and mid-career artists. Having this anchor of wonderful work, largely fixed, by an artist of LeWitt's stature gives us a whole new dimension." The project is budgeted at $9 million. Yale and Mass MoCA have jointly raised $6.3 million, with the expectation that the remaining money will be in hand in time for the start of construction, which is scheduled for February. Installation of the drawings is expected to take place in fall 2007, with the opening of the building a year later.
Included in the project will be the publication of a three-volume catalog raisonne of LeWitt's wall drawings, internships for students participating in the installation of the works at Mass MoCA, and an endowed position at Yale for a conservator/archivist focusing on preservation of LeWitt's wall drawings worldwide.
The LeWitt drawings are scheduled to remain at Mass MoCA until at least 2033. At that time, the project can be extended by mutual agreement.
LeWitt's drawings are notable procedurally in that they consist of both the work itself and a document that comprises a diagram of it, a written description, and other pertinent information. Should the drawing be loaned to another institution, the original document is destroyed and a new one drawn up for the installation. This insures that each LeWitt wall drawing remains unique.
The origins of the project can be traced to Andover, where Reynolds was director of the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy from 1989 to '98. A highlight of his tenure was a 1993 retrospective of LeWitt's wall drawings.
"Drawings" is a somewhat misleading term. Initially, the works consisted solely of horizontal, vertical, and diagonal pencil lines. The drawings, which are mural-like, have evolved over time to include geometric shapes and rich painterly coloration. Since 1968, LeWitt has executed more than 1,100 of them.
LeWitt works figured in three other shows Reynolds did at the Addison, and the two became friends. The friendship deepened when Reynolds moved to Yale (LeWitt lives nearby, in Chester, Conn.).
When LeWitt proposed his donation to Yale, Reynolds was highly enthusiastic. "The only thing that was bothering me," Reynolds said yesterday, "was we wouldn't be able to show them in quantity." After Reynolds suggested Mass MoCA, LeWitt visited there in 2004. "We had a nice afternoon walking through spaces," Thompson recalled. "Sol became very interested in Building 7. We made a model, gave it to him, he spent about six months working on the sequencing [of artworks]." Reynolds doesn't think the distance between New Haven and North Adams will pose problems. "It's a quick 2 1/2 hours, straight up I-91, " he said.
"There's a lot of traffic between there already." Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.
