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“LeWitt wanted materials that were accessible, affordable, practical and ubiquitous across the world,” he adds.

Environmental factors in the museum’s sun-drenched galleries present one set of challenges, and the lead and graphite used in the original drawings were “not of adequate calibre”, according to John Hogan, a principal draftsperson for the artist since 1982 and the installation director and archivist for LeWitt’s wall drawings at Yale University Art Gallery. The retrospective is on view until 2043, but conservation issues have emerged over the last 14 years. Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing 692 (1991) © Estate of Sol LeWitt/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. It was curated by LeWitt in collaboration with Joe Thompson, the former director of the museum, and Jock Reynolds, then the director of the Yale University Art Gallery. Mass Moca’s wall drawings were completed posthumously in 2008 as part of a collaboration between the museum, the LeWitt estate, more than 60 artists, the Williams College Museum of Art and the Yale University Art Gallery. “One of the things that we believe perpetuated the wall drawings was LeWitt’s contribution to Seth Siegelaub’s Xerox Book (1968) and the idea of this democratic effort to endlessly disperse the works,” says Susan Cross, the senior curator of the museum, who has helped steward the retrospective since 2008 and is overseeing the restoration with the LeWitt studio. LeWitt was working in sculpture and other media before starting to create wall drawings in the late 1960s, unveiling the first in Paula Cooper Gallery’s inaugural exhibition in New York in 1968, a show benefitting anti-Vietnam War causes that also featured minimal abstract works by Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre and others.Īfter conceiving the wall drawings, LeWitt contracted other artists to execute the works, which are translated onto the wall from specific geometric combinations the artist described through precise but simple instructions. The panoramic installation of 105 large-scale drawings that the artist devised as diagrams between 19 spans nearly an acre and three storeys of a 19th-century mill on the museum’s campus in North Adams, Massachusetts.

The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass Moca) has embarked on a major conservation project to rejuvenate wall drawings in its long-term retrospective devoted to the late conceptual artist Sol LeWitt.