Loopy Doopy

As you may know, Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective recently opened at MASS MOCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. Organized by the Yale University Art Gallery, MASS MOCA, and the Williams College Museum of Art, the exhibition includes 105 of LeWitt’s large-scale wall drawings, spanning the artist’s career from 1969 to 2007, and also includes the Addison’s Wall Drawing 880 (Loopy Doopy).

From 1968 to 2007, LeWitt realized 1,261 wall drawings, ten of which are in the Addison’s permanent collection. In a 1981 interview with independent curator Andrea Miller-Keller, LeWitt said:

A blind man can make art if what is in his mind can be passed to another mind in some tangible form.

Created by taping two pencils together and twisting them across the paper to form an undulating pattern, Loopy Doopy took just under two months, from June 13th to August 11th, 2008, to finish. The resulting curvy lines in orange and green offer a psychedelic experience of color, line, and two-dimensionality. MASS MOCA went to great lengths to record this process as seen in the hourly video footage for wall drawing on their website. Click here: http://www.massmoca.org/lewitt/timelapse.php?id=9

And to think, this meticulous amount of artistic creation (and documentation) went into another 104 wall drawings!

Wall Drawing 880 (Loopy Doopy) was first exhibited in a wall drawings show at PaceWildenstein in 1998 and later in Sol LeWitt: Recent Acquistions at the Addison in 2003 (as seen below).



Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective will be on view at MASS MOCA through 2033! Put this exhibition on the top of your list to visit…you will not be disappointed. Multiple visits will definitely be necessary to fully digest its artistic depth and physical scale of this multi-floor installation as well as Sol LeWitt’s contribution to art history.

Posted by Jaime DeSimone, Charles H. Sawyer Curatorial Fellow