Sol LeWitt’s work populates museums. It also adorns building facades, bus stops and NYC subway stations, despite his claim that he never wanted to make “public art.” Yet he did just that. Born in Hartford and raised in New Britain, LeWitt took art classes at the Wadsworth Atheneum as a child. New York City’s 1950s and ‘60s art scene assured his avant-garde stance, but he then returned to Connecticut. Here he nurtured young talent and donated large-scale artworks to local museums. LeWitt’s process was radical. He instructed workers how to make his art, but he often had no idea how the finished work would look. He proclaimed, “The artist’s will is secondary to the process he initiates from idea to completion.” For him, in other words, art is in the artist’s idea, not in the marks he himself makes. We’ll learn how this unconventional concept yielded wall drawings, wall paintings, indoor and outdoor sculptures—some austere, some bright and colorful. Hartford-area works take top billing.
Sherry Buckberrough is Emerita in Art History at the University of Hartford. She is known internationally for her scholarship on Sonia and Robert Delaunay, including two books and numerous articles and book chapters. She has also curated exhibitions and written on many modernist and contemporary women artists, among them Ana Mendieta and Carolee Schneemann. Following the career of Sol Lewitt from his emergence in the 1960s, she tracked his expanding development more closely after she moved to Hartford and became a peripheral part of his Connecticut art circle.
Tuesday, Dec. 2 | 3:30 p.m.–5 p.m. | Duncaster (off campus/Bloomfield) | $20
Made possible in part by the generosity of the Richard P. Garmany Fund at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.
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