July 8: An Evening of Sol LeWitt Readings
Presented by Paula Cooper Gallery and Artifex Press, the live event features readings by Laurie Anderson, Nicholas Baume, Lucinda Childs, Gary Garrels, and Zoe Leonard.
The live event will stream directly on this page on Wednesday, July 8 at 6pm ET. There is no login or rsvp required. A recording will be posted shortly afterwards.
Artifex Press and Paula Cooper Gallery invite you to a virtual reading of texts by Sol LeWitt, in celebration of the publication of Sol LeWitt Writings and Sol LeWitt Interviews by Artifex Press. The event features five readers, all of whom have a close personal history with LeWitt, including two whose interviews with LeWitt are included in the volumes. Laurie Anderson, Lucinda Childs, Zoe Leonard, and Gary Garrels will each be reading interviews live, while Nicholas Baume has contributed a recorded reading of LeWitt’s writing.
Sol LeWitt in his studio, late 1960s. Courtesy Estate of Sol LeWitt.
Sol LeWitt Writings and Sol LeWitt Interviews collectively chart how LeWitt's artistic practice evolved over time, but also underscore the consistency of his thinking about his art and his conception of authorship. The texts cover a range of topics, from his teaching and relationship to the art world, to his theories of artmaking and of specific groups of work, most notably his wall drawings. The volumes were edited by Lindsay Aveilhé and Chris Vacchio and have been incorporated into the Sol LeWitt Wall Drawings Catalogue Raisonné (Artifex Press, 2018). Sol LeWitt Wall Drawings is available free for registered users through the end of July 2020, as part of Artifex Press’s effort to provide access to its catalogues during the COVID-19 pandemic.
To access the free volumes, register at www.artifexpress.com.
Laurie Anderson is a visual artist, composer, poet, photographer, filmmaker, electronics whiz, vocalist, and instrumentalist, who studied with Sol LeWitt at the School of Visual Arts. From 1972 to 1977, Anderson composed and revised Quartet for Sol, based on Sol LeWitt’s Drawing Series. In 2016, she returned to the piece, which was recorded live in several sessions at Paula Cooper Gallery in 2018 and 2019. In June 2020, she launched a new radio show, Party in the Bardo: Conversations with Laurie Anderson, on WESU Middletown.
Nicholas Baume is Director and Chief Curator of the Public Art Fund, New York. He has curated numerous exhibitions of LeWitt’s work, including Sol LeWitt: Wall Pieces for John Kaldor Public Art Projects at the Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney in 1998, Sol LeWitt: Incomplete Open Cubes, which traveled from the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut from 2001-2002, and Sol LeWitt: Structures, 1965-2006, the first outdoor retrospective of LeWitt’s work, in 2011.
Lucinda Childs is a renowned dancer and choreographer. She began her career at the Judson Dance Theater before founding the Lucinda Childs Dance Company in 1973. In 1979, she choreographed Dance, a collaboration composed by Phillip Glass and with film design by Sol LeWitt. In 2017, she was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Dance Biennial, and in 2018 was inducted into the Hall of Fame at the National Museum of Dance.
Gary Garrels is the Elise S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, a position he has held since 2008, having previously worked at the museum from 1993 to 2000. Prior to rejoining SFMOMA, Garrels was chief curator and director of exhibitions and public programs at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and chief curator in the department of drawings and curator in the department of painting and sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. He was the curator of Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective, which traveled from SFMOMA to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, from 2000-2001, and also edited and contributed to the exhibition’s catalogue.
Zoe Leonard is an artist whose work merges photography sculpture, and installation, highlighting and questioning the politics of image-making and display. In 1992, she wrote I want a president, which was installed at the High Line in New York from 2016-2017. She was the winner of the Bucksbaum Award at the 2014 Whitney Biennial in advance of her one-person exhibition there in 2018, and is a 2020 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow.
Image: Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing #1002 Splat, (detail), Acrylic paint, First drawn by: Myra Berry, Brian Elling, Dirk Lee, Toni Matlock, Noellynn Pepos, Caroline Peters, David Pledge, Jennifer Reifsneider, Emily Ripley, Edgar Smith, Kaya Wielopolski, First installation: Roy and Susan O’Connor residence, Clinton, Montana October 2001.
Image: Sol LeWitt in his studio, late 1960s. Courtesy Estate of Sol LeWitt.
All images © 2020 The LeWitt Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.