Curated by Associate Director of Visual Arts Benjamin Chaffee ’00.

This exhibition brings together works by Renée Green ’81 and Sol LeWitt (1928–2007). As a student at Wesleyan, Green participated in a seminar taught by John Paoletti, Professor of Art History, Emeritus; the seminar focused on LeWitt’s art collection, and resulted in the exhibition No Title: The Collection of Sol LeWitt in the Davison Art Center (October 21 – December 20, 1981). Edited by Paoletti, a catalog was published, including Green’s first published writings.

Describing this experience as a significant moment in her formation as an artist, Green is also interested in what similar acts of aesthetic exchange and critical thinking could be offered to younger artists today, thereby relaying the transmission of historical conceptual art into new directions. 

No Title: Relays and Relations features works from across Green’s career: a newly created work for the exhibition, Space Poem #9 (Today), a video installation, a gouache, a collage, sound works, and two films. LeWitt’s work is represented by a gouache, a drawing, and three wall drawings, installed by a LeWitt studio draftsperson and by current Wesleyan students. 

A dispersed exhibition, Green and LeWitt’s works are also on display in the second-floor lobby of the gallery and in the adjacent entrance to the office of the Center for the Arts, on the Olin Library’s second-floor balcony, and on the Center for the Arts’ website.

Two of the banners from Green’s Space Poem #9 (Today) are reproduced in a modified form in the displays in the gallery lobby. “Sentences” and “Paragraphs” are basic building blocks of writing. Writing and publishing are fundamental aspects of Renée Green’s practice, and while Sol LeWitt rarely published writing, two of his early texts were foundational for what has been historically designated as conceptual art: “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” (1967) and “Sentences on Conceptual Art” (1968). Conceptual art expanded the material of an artwork to include the concepts, ideas, and potentially, even the systems that generated them. Though historic in nature, this way of perceiving art continues to affect the way artworks are created and continue to operate today, even works that appear entirely different from those produced during the 1960s and 1970s. Amongst its original practitioners, conceptualism represented a radical shift towards accessibility, a rethinking of how art can circulate through different circuits. 

By juxtaposing works by Green and LeWitt, No Title: Relays and Relations might seem to exemplify LeWitt’s twenty first “sentence,” which states: “Perception of new ideas leads to new ideas.”

The exhibition and its related programming are part of the 50th anniversary season of the Center for the Arts at Wesleyan University.

ABOVE: Renée Green. Space Poem #2 (Laura's Words), 2011/2020. Detail. Silkscreen on paper, thirty-three prints, each 26 5/8 x 21 inches. Courtesy of the artist, Free Agent Media, and Bortolami Gallery, New York. Image: Kristian Landrup; Guang Xu