Live and Zoom

Registration for Zoom Link Here
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In conjunction with Strict Beauty: Sol LeWitt Prints at Williams College Museum of Art, exhibition curator David Areford’s lecture explores the Jewish dimensions of Sol LeWitt’s art through five projects - two structures, two wall drawings, a work of architecture, and a site-specific installation - which together represent the most socially and historically contingent of LeWitt’s career.

Although LeWitt was not a religious man he was clearly interested in Jewish culture; and there is no doubt that these projects are deeply personal and, in some cases, overtly religious in nature. They allowed the artist to apply his abstract, minimal, and geometric visual languages in surprisingly significant ways.

David S. Areford is a professor of art history at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He is the author of Strict Beauty: Sol LeWitt Prints (Yale University Press, Williams College Museum of Art, and New Britain Museum of American Art, 2020) and editor of Locating Sol LeWitt (Yale University Press, 2021), a volume of nine essays that reveal the full scope of the artist’s wide-ranging practice and reassess his singular contributions to 20th-century art (selected by Bookforum and ARTnews as one of the best art books of 2021). In addition, he is the author of articles and books about late medieval European devotional art and printmaking, including The Art of Empathy: The Mother of Sorrows in Northern Renaissance Art and Devotion (2013), The Viewer and the Printed Image in Late Medieval Europe(2010), and Origins of European Printmaking: Fifteenth-Century Viewers and Their Public (2005). His current book project is tentatively titled Sol LeWitt: Painting.

This in-person program will be offered on Zoom as well as live-streamed to WCMA’s YouTube channel.

All in-person visitors/attendees must show proof of vaccination and be masked.

The lecture is co-sponsored by the Williams College Art Department and the Jewish Federation of the Berkshires

IMAGE: Shul Print (Six-Pointed Star), 2005. Color linocut. New Britain Museum of American Art, Gift of Sol LeWitt. 2007.136.351SL