Reflections on art and architecture by TIME critic Richard Lacayo.

Sol's Little Acre

I swung through North Adams, Mass. yesterday to visit MASS MoCA and take a look at progress on their immense installation of 100 Sol LeWitt wall drawings that will open on November 16 and remain in place for a minimum of 25 years. In effect, what they're producing there will be a one-man LeWitt museum, with the advantage that it's part of the huge contemporary art center that is MASS MoCA, which will keep LeWitt's work in a constant dialogue with other art.

The drawings are going up on three floors of MASS Moca's 27,000 sq. ft. building #7, where there's a team of about 60 assistants setting them out. Some of them have worked on LeWitt's drawings for decades, some are students being initiated into the art. Most of the drawings are huge. As Joe Thompson, the director of MASS MoCA, likes to put it, taken together they comprise about a full acre of art.

Here's how work on the acreage looked yesterday. All photos by me.

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MASS Moca is producing this extravaganza in cooperation with the Yale University Art Gallery and the Williams College Museum of Art. There's more information here. And my post last year at the time of LeWitt's death is here.

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    I like how you included the foreground ladder and connected it to the background ladder with the light sword of the ceiling fixture.

    Then there's the stymied little orange stool, poised on the brink of panic like a child who has lost his parents at the zoo.

    It reminds me of P.D. Eastman's children's book, "Are You My Mother?" in which a baby bird leaves the nest and wanders around asking that question to a dog, a cat, a cow and other creatures, including, finally, a steam shovel.

    Obviously the tall A-framed beings are not the squat stool's kin. Meanwhile, the one being who possibly could be someone's mother, the woman on the ladder, pays him no mind.

    Did you know you created such a heart-rending picture?

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