On Sol LeWitt - a podcast by Zeit Contemporary Art

Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) was a pivotal figure in the development of minimal and conceptual art and catalytic in the relay between the two. Perhaps because of that complexity, he doesn’t figure into the public consciousness as much as many of his postwar peers, although not for lack of exposure: there is an entire building dedicated to LeWitt’s wall drawings at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, and his modular sculptures grace grounds from the National Gallery of Art to Stormking. So who was Sol LeWitt? How can we reconcile his serial structures with his delicate hand painted gouaches, his folded paper drawings with large-scale instruction-based wall drawings? What did LeWitt mean when he said that “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art” and that “Conceptual Artists are mystics rather than rationalists”? How is it that his art has been claimed to represent both a kind of impersonal logic and a mad obsessiveness?

In this episode of PERSPECTIVES, art historian Samuel Shapiro sits down with Janet Passehl and Cristina Guadalupe Galván to discuss LeWitt’s early work and the developmental arc of his career; the relationship he constructs between art, architecture, and language, LeWitt’s legacy as a collector, and his meaning for artists today.

Janet Passehl has been curator of the Sol LeWitt collection since 1991. She worked closely with LeWitt towards the end of his life and continues to oversee his art collection and archive. She has facilitated hundreds of gallery and museum exhibitions featuring LeWitt’s work, including the major retrospective organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2000. In addition to being a true authority on the artist with an intimate knowledge of his life and work, Janet is herself a practicing artist and has exhibited across the United States and Europe from Mass Moca to the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.

Cristina Guadalupe Galván is an artist and architect who writes. She is the principal at Idée Fixe, a transdisciplinary studio of art and architecture, and has worked at a number of other architectural firms, supporting such luminaries as Dan Graham and Denise Scott Brown. In addition to architecture, stage design, and exhibition design, Cristina has shown visual art from New York to Tokyo, and has written extensively on subjects from urban planning to Sol LeWitt.

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