Sol LeWitt

Sol LeWitt earned a BFA from Syracuse University in 1949 and then served in the U.S. Army. LeWitt moved to New York in 1953 and attended the School of Visual Arts. In 1955–56, he worked as a graphic artist for architect I.M. Pei, followed by jobs at the Museum of Modern Art in the bookshop and as a security guard. While concentrating on his own work, LeWitt also began taking occasional teaching positions at a succession of New York art schools, including the Museum of Modern Art School, Cooper Union, the School of Visual Arts, and New York University.

LeWitt’s work was first exhibited publicly at St. Mark’s Church in New York in 1963, followed by his first solo exhibition at the John Daniels Gallery in 1965. His influential Paragraphs on Conceptual Art was published in ArtForum magazine in June 1967 . LeWitt exhibited his first wall drawing at the Paula Cooper Gallery in 1968. Additionally, his work was included in several of the early and consequential group exhibitions of Minimalist and Conceptual art, including Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1966 and When Attitude Becomes Form at the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland in 1969.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York presented LeWitt’s first museum retrospective in 1978. His work has been shown in hundreds of exhibitions around the world and is part of the permanent collections of every major art museum. A forty-year retrospective exhibition of LeWitt’s voluminous work—which encompasses wall drawings, works on paper, sculpture, photography, books, posters, and other objects—was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2000, and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.