Collection of portraits of Sol LeWitt wall drawing installers, with images of the wall drawings themselves, photographed over the course of the 6-month installation of the Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing Retrospective at MASS MoCA. By artist and writer Chris Cobb, himself one of the installers for the exhibition. From his included description: “These were made as tests for the final portfolios made for the museum & for Sol’s widow Carol LeWitt. The portraits haven’t been published, only shown at Mass MoCA.” Portrait subjects are identified on versos by first name and position title; of the several Wall Drawings visible, most are shown in progress, with a few shots of drawings #343 and #146 in a completed or nearly completed state.

As LeWitt wrote in his 1967 essay Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, “When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair.” Accordingly, his Wall Drawings were recreated each time they were exhibited, as Cobb detailed in a 2008 BELIEVER article: “Early in LeWitt’s career he made the drawings himself, but as demand for them grew it became necessary for him to rely on a small group of draftsmen who could faithfully carry out his instructions, developing techniques specific to each wall drawing…I am working, alongside my apprentice Julia, on Wall Drawing #343. By ‘working on’ I mean that I am attempting to recreate, from a brief page of written instructions, a work of conceptual art.”

A remarkable collection, documenting the process of recreating a body of artwork itself impermanent by design. And according to the photographer, the first time a Lewitt work has been allowed to be documented in process.

On Hold