Category: Away

Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawings: Bold, Bright, Beholding

The Humble Fabulist3 Comments

Second day in Mass MoCA, because it would have been impossible to absorb so much art, all at once!… (tickets were valid for two consecutive days then, this may have changed post-Covid).

…”Each wall drawing begins as a set of instructions or a simple diagram to be followed in executing the work. As the exhibition makes clear, these straightforward instructions yield an astonishing—and stunningly beautiful—variety of work that is at once simple and highly complex, rigorous, and sensual. The drawings in the exhibition range from layers of straight lines meticulously drawn in black graphite pencil lead, to rows of delicately rendered wavy lines in colored pencil; from bold black-and-white geometric forms, to bright planes in acrylic paint arranged like the panels of a folding screen; from sensuous drawings created by dozens of layers of transparent washes, to a tangle of vibratory orange lines on a green wall, and much more. Forms may appear to be flat, to recede in space, or to project into the viewer’s space, while others meld to the structure of the wall itself, like gauze.” [source]

Images of wall drawings:

793A – Irregular wavy color bands
340 – One of a Six-part drawing
396 – A black five-pointed star, a yellow six-pointed star, a red seven-pointed star, and a blue eight-pointed star
414 – Drawing Series IV (A) with India ink washes (detail of 24 drawings)
527 – Two flat-topped pyramids with color ink washes superimposed
439 – Asymmetrical pyramid with color ink washes superimposed (plus us in playful mood, trying to agree which wall would work best in our home)

Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective

On view through 2043

MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA

September 2nd, 2019

Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawings: Straight Lines, Continuous Forms

The Humble Fabulist2 Comments

It occupies nearly an acre of specially built interior walls that are installed—per LeWitt’s own specifications—over three stories of a historic mill building situated at the heart of MASS MoCA’s 19th-century, former factory campus. A landmark collaboration of MASS MoCA, Yale University Art Gallery, the Williams College Museum of Art, and the Sol Lewitt estate, over 60 artists and art students spent six months rendering 105 large-scale wall drawings spanning the artist’s storied career.

Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective

Images of wall drawings 422, 610, 681, 692

On view through 2043

MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA

September 1st, 2019

Suffering From Realness

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But, what exactly is Realness?

  • Joey Fauerso || You Destroy Every Special Thing I Make, 2017-2019 [detail], titled after a phrase that one of her sons said to the other
  • Joey Fauerso || You Destroy Every Special Thing I Make, 2017-2019 [detail], titled after a phrase that one of her sons said to the other
  • Vincent Valdez || Dream Baby Dream, 2018 [detail out 12 panels] || Oil on paper
  • Vincent Valdez || Dream Baby Dream, 2018 [detail out of 12 panels] || Oil on paper
  • Hayv Kahraman || The Appeal, 2018 || Oil on linen
  • Hayv Kahraman || Pussy Gold, 2018 || Oil on wood
  • Hayv Kahraman || Three Celebrities, 2018 || Oil on linen
  • Christopher Mir || Ghost Ship, 2018
  • Christopher Mir || Flowers, 2018
  • Christopher Mir || Short History of the Shadow, 2018
  • Christopher Mir || Teeth, 2018

From an exhibition at MASS MoCA

North Adams, MA

September 1st, 2019

Them and Us

The Humble Fabulist5 Comments
  • Jarvis Rockwell || Figures from the artist’s massive collection
  • ERRE’s iconic sculpture Toy-an Horse, a 33-foot wooden Trojan horse first installed at the San Ysidro Port of Entry in 1997, depicted the United States and Mexico as a single creature with two heads facing opposite directions
  • Twenty-two years later, the artist was exhibiting the now charred and disembodied heads nestled together, suggesting the ongoing, but damaged, connections between the tow countries that ERRE calls home
  • Cassils || Inextinguishable Fire, 2015 || Single-channel video
    Fourteen Encapsulated Breaths, 2017 || Hand-blown glass, each unique
  • ERRE || THEM AND US / ELLOS Y NOSOTROS, 2019 || Aluminum light boxes with coloured lamps
  • Just us

MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA

September 1st, 2019

Rafa Esparza: Staring at the Sun

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Then going about ”browning the white cube”.

”Traditionally made by hand with dirt and other organic material such as clay, horse dung, hay, and water, adobe is among the earliest of human building materials. Due to their remarkable strength, sundried structures were extremely durable and functioned as some of the earliest architectural foundations for indigenous communities across the Americas. Adobe construction is still prevalent across the Southwest, a source of both strong and readily available building materials and income for the skilled laborers who use it.

Esparza explores adobe as both material and politics, creating what he has termed “brown architecture:” “My interest in browning the white cube — by building with adobe bricks, making brown bodies present — is a response to entering traditional art spaces and not seeing myself reflected. This has been the case not just physically, in terms of the whiteness of those spaces, but also in terms of the histories of art they uphold” (“Rafa Esparza,” ArtForum, November 21, 2017).” 

  • …we are the mountain, 2019
  • Border Wash: Mexican immigrant labourers sprayed with DDT at processing centre in Hidalgo, Texas – after Leonard Nadel, 1956, 2019
  • Sebastian as Chalchiuhtlicue, 2019
  • Baby Boy: Beto with daughter Alexa (An epitaph for La Familia), 2019

Art by Rafa Esparza @MASS MoCA

Acrylic on adobe panel (local dirt, horse dung, hay, Hoosic River water, chain-link fence, plywood)

North Adams, MA

September 1st, 2019