Shadow Shot Sunday

A little Note: I created a photo blog a while back called The Pagan's Eye, where I posted photos I've taken: a slight nod to my creative side and a wink to my flirtation with  digital polaroids.  I haven't been taking many in recent months due to busy-ness with work, school and family. I just noticed that the last photo I posted at The Pagan's Eye was from November 11. The space from that past-time has given me time to think about whether I want to keep a photo blog just for those photo themes (or memes).

It got to be addicting with a different theme for every day of the week:  Ruby Tuesday, Mellow Yellow Monday, SkyWatch Friday, etc. (My apologies for not linking to the bloggers who host them weekly.)  I think I am going to leave up that blog as a diary of what has caught my eye but resume posting entries to the photo memes on this blog. Only less of them. Mary the Teach's two memes - Ruby Tuesday and Window Views and Doorways, are really fun and Mary is a very cool lady. And SkyWatch Friday because it is just as vast as its name-sake, with skies from all over the globe, represented. And last but not least, Shadow Shot Sunday, which is hosted by Hey Harriet - the Photo Surrealist of the blog universe!  Thanks Tracie!

Contemporary Art Shadow Shots
taken at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art
Mass MoCA
the wall drawings are by American artist Sol Lewitt

for Shadow Shot Sunday

 

Annual Winter Visit to Mass MoCA

WP and I headed west to the Berkshires, with my mother and Lovely Stepdaughter #1 along for the cold, sunny ride over the mountain (which was hazy) and into the hamlet of North Adams, Massachusetts. We walked into the factory buildings turned large museum spaces...and into several other planets and universes and galaxies of the creative and neurotic contemporary mind...

 Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams

Mass MoCA

This is Killing Me 

exhibit of eight artists; a few of whose works I photographed and noted 

 

(pagan sphinx photo 2009)

detail from a text work by

Sean Landers

(pagan sphinx photo 2009)


Whitney Bedford

My mother standing in front of Whitney Bedford's "broken hands", her favorite art pieces at MoCA.  I was impressed by her ability to grasp the cutting-edge art, ask lots of questions about it and be okay with not having exact answers. It blew me away.

(Pagan Sphinx photo 2009)

House
Shana Lutker 

(Pagan Sphinx photo 2009)


House 
(interior detail)

Shana Lutker’s works in various media mine her
unconscious and psychoanalytic theory. In House
(1986–1996) with Art That I Dreamt That I Made
Lutker fabricated a scale-model of her childhood
home. The house is then filled with miniature
versions of the art that Lutker dreams she has
made. Lutker often reworks these miniatures
into drawings and large sculptures—making real
works from those she has literally “dreamed up.”

House
(interior detail, #2) 

(Pagan Sphinx photo 2009)


Untitled #3

from the "Disruption" Series

Marco Rios

 Untitled, #3

Detail

Lovely Stepdaughter #1 contemplating the slaughter of a manatee??
This exhibit included eyeballs on the ceiling that rained cold tears on museum-mers. I was getting rather wet and ducked out of there fairly quickly after taking this picture.

Lastly, some new additions to the Sol Lewitt wall drawings, which will be on exhibition at the museum for the next two decades

                                                     

Artist of the Week: Sol LeWitt

September 9, 1928 - April 8, 2007

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about my visit to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art - MoCA, here. and here, where I promised a post about the work of Sol LeWitt, whose wall paintings recently went on exhibit there.

Following is a brief biography of the artist.

Sol LeWitt was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1928, and attended Syracuse University. After serving in the Korean War as a graphic artist, he moved, in 1953, to New York, where he worked as a draftsman for the architect I. M. Pei. LeWitt had his first solo exhibition at the Daniels Gallery, New York, in 1965, and the following year Dwan Gallery, New York, mounted the first in a series of solo exhibitions. He participated, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, in several significant group exhibitions of Minimalist and Conceptual art, including "Primary Structures," at the Jewish Museum, New York, in 1966, and "When Attitude Becomes Form," at the Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, in 1969. His renowned text "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art" was published in 1967. LeWitt's work was included in Documentas 6 (1977) and 7 (1982) in Kassel, as well as the 1987 Skulptur Projekte in Münster and the 1989 Istanbul Biennial. Major retrospectives of his works were organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1978, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in 2000. "Drawing Series..." a presentation of LeWitt's early wall drawings was installed at Dia:Beacon in 2006. Sol LeWitt died on April 8, 2007 in New York City.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Mass MoCA exhibit is a retrospective of the artist's famous wall drawings. The project was a collaboration between Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, in collaboration with the artist before his death in April 2007, and undertaken by the Gallery, MASS MoCA, and the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts.

The retrospective spans 105 works by the artist from 1969 to 2007. The walls are installed in Studio 7, which is a 27,000 foot structure within the factory complex turned museum, and take up three stories. Designed specifically to accommodate the LeWitt art works and with input from the artist, the space will feature the exhibit for twenty-five years. New interior wall, stairways and walkways were built to facilitate the viewing of the exhibition between spaces and floors where the walls are displayed.

Mass MoCA is the perfect space for this multi-level exhibition. Previously, there was no place available that could accommodate so many wall drawings at once. If students and art lovers wanted to see LeWitts, they had to travel to many different museums and galleries, far apart from one another.

stairwell (above) and walkway (below) between levels of the exhibition

One of the most interesting aspects of LeWitt's work is that he drafted plans in the form of instructions and diagram for his wall drawings which were themselves the chief representations of his work, to be executed by others. In essense, the concept of the art over the actual process of it, dominates the work of Sol LeWitt. In 1968, when LeWitt began his wall drawings, this was considered radical in the art world.

In this collaboration the executors of the drawings themselves were done over a six month period and included twenty-two of LeWitt's senior assistants and thirty-three college students from Yale University, the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (a state college) in North Adams, Williams College, several local artists and graduate students from several colleges and universities around the country.

The black and white circular patterns were among my favorites

The exhibition was so rich with bold colors and patterns at times juxtaposed at varying angles.
Above is one of my favorites. I've looked at this photo again and agains since my visit. It's wonderful that these installations will be there for so long, as there is still much to discover in them on subsequent visits.

Detail of wall drawing