Saturday, December 6th, 2008
8:30 am – Bus departure Amherst,
9:00 am – departure Northampton
10:15 am – Tadao Ando: Clark’s Stone Hill Center
Built on a grassy hillside a short hike through the woods from the Clark’s main buildings, it is a two-story, 32,000-square-foot gray box of steel, cedar and glass. Outside, angled concrete walls imprinted with wood-grain textures visually break up the monolithic boxcar form of the main structure and support a triangular porch that juts out over the hill. Because the building is set into the hill — its lower half buried on one side and fully exposed to northern light on the other — and because of its low profile, it seems gently integrated into the landscape. It is a blessed departure from the kind of showy architectural statements many art museums have been prone to in recent years.
12:00 noon – leave for North Adams
sign up for a box lunch for additional $$$ at Lickety Splits or bring your own.
1:30 pm – MASS MoCA tour of Sol LeWitt exhibition with expert Kim Carlino, University Gallery’s Education assistant/coordinator
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 came into prominence in the 1960s, termed his work conceptual art, emphasizing that the idea or concept that animates each work is its most important aspect. He is probably the artist most often linked with the conceptual art movement. Reflecting his study of mathematics, LeWitt reduced the contents of his art to the most basic shapes, colors, and lines, creating modular cubes and grid structures, geometric “wall drawings,” and serial graphics. Sol LeWitt, one of the most prominent American artists of the later 20th century, died on April 8, 2007 in New York City.
Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective consists of one hundred works—covering nearly an acre of wall surface—that LeWitt created from 1968 to 2007. The works in the retrospective are on loan from numerous private and public collections worldwide, including the Yale University Art Gallery, to which LeWitt donated a number of wall drawings.
Conceived by the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, in collaboration with the artist before his death in April 2007, the project has been undertaken by the Gallery, MASS MoCA, and the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts. The installation remains on view for twenty-five years, occupying a 27,000-square-foot historic mill building in the heart of MASS MoCA’s campus. The three-story building has been extensively reworked for this exhibition by architects Bruner/Cott and Associates including a complex sequence of new interior walls designed in close collaboration with LeWitt himself.
3:30 pm – docent guided tour of MASS MoCA’s exhibitions
Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape
Anselm Kiefer: Sculpture and Paintings
Eastern Standard: Western Artists in China
5:00 pm – departure from North Adams
Approx arrival time in Northampton 6:00 pm; in Amherst 6:30 pm