Sol LeWitt Exhibition Continues MCC Partnership with NBMAA

Manchester Community College continues its collaboration with the New Britain Museum of American Art (NBMAA) to give east-of-the-river exposure to world-class art collections with an exhibition of artwork by Sol LeWitt.

The show will hang in the Hans Weiss Newspace Gallery on the MCC campus. It opens with a reception Thursday, February 19, at 6 p.m., where Dr. Douglas Hyland, NBMAA director, will speak. The show runs through April 29.

“Sol LeWitt, now passed, was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century,” said MCC Professor Susan Classen-Sullivan, who is curator of the gallery.  “He was responsible for some of the most major innovations in contemporary art. The show is composed of works on paper generously loaned to us by NBMAA, to whom we are very grateful.”

Dr. Gena Glickman, MCC president, and Hyland first broached the idea of an east-of-the-river collaboration last year. The first exhibition on loan was “Planet Pulp,” which debuted September 19 through November 1 in the Adolph & Virginia Dehn Gallery in the Manchester Community College Arts and Education Center, MCC on Main, at 903 Main Street.

LeWitt’s work has been the subject of hundreds of solo exhibitions in museums and galleries and is represented in the collections of major museums worldwide. Retrospective exhibitions have been held at numerous venues, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1978); the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1984), the Tate Gallery, London (1986); and the Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (1989). The most recent retrospective of LeWitt’s work was organized in 2000 by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California, and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Other solo exhibitions have been held recently at Metropol Kunstraum, Munich (2007); the Wadsworth Antheneum Museum of Art, Hartford (2010); MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts (2011); Museum Wiesbaden, Germany (2012).

His wall drawings were installed in the Riggio Galleries at Dia in Beacon, New York, in 2006. In 2008, a wall drawing retrospective was installed at MASS MoCA in partnership with the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven and the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts; this installation will remain on view for 25 years.

“Our plan with NBMAA is to continue to feature artwork at the Newspace and Dehn Galleries,” Dr. Glickman said. “Adding more exhibitions of the caliber of ‘Planet Pulp’ and the Sol LeWitt exhibition on loan from NBMAA is an exciting honor.”