No Title: Relays and Relations, Works by Renée Green and Sol LeWitt

The exhibition No Title: Relays and Relations brings together works by Renée Green and Sol LeWitt (1928–2007). As a student at Wesleyan University, Green participated in a seminar focused on LeWitt’s art collection taught by John T. Paoletti, Professor of Art History, Emeritus. LeWitt had recently loaned a large number of artworks to the Wadsworth Atheneum with the intention to make the works more available for viewing and for study. The seminar, built around these works from LeWitt’s collection, resulted in the exhibition No Title: The Collection of Sol LeWitt at Wesleyan’s Davison Art Center in 1981. The resulting catalog featured Green’s first published writings, with catalog entries on works by Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Adrian Piper, and Lawrence Weiner. Describing this experience as a significant moment in her formation as an artist, Green is 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 together with current Wesleyan students. A dispersed exhibition, artworks are on display around different parts of the campus, as well as on the Center for the Arts website. 

Two of the banners from Green’s Space Poem #9 (Today), “Sentences” and “Paragraphs,” are reproduced in a modified form in the displays in the gallery lobby. Writing and publishing are fundamental aspects of Green’s practice and these banners/displays make reference to basic building blocks of writing and also to LeWitt. Though he rarely published writing, two of LeWitt’s 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. Among its original practitioners, conceptualism represented a radical shift towards accessibility, a rethinking of how art can circulate. Though historic in nature, this way of perceiving art continues to affect the way artworks are created and operate today—even works that appear formally different from those produced during the 1960s and 1970s.

The exhibition and its related programming are part of the 50th anniversary season of the Center for the Arts at Wesleyan University. To explore the full anniversary season of events, please visit the Center for the Arts website.

Join a conversation with artist Renée Green and curator Benjamin Chaffee following a screening of Green’s ED/HF (2017) on Saturday, October 28, 2023 at 1pm in Ring Family Performing Arts Hall. The talk will be followed by a reception in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery. This event is part of Wesleyan University’s Homecoming + Family Weekend.

Gallery hours are Tuesday through Sunday from noon to 5pm. The exhibition is curated by Associate Director of Visual Arts Benjamin Chaffee with exhibition management by Exhibitions Manager Rosemary Lennox and installation by Art Preparator Paul Theriault. Follow the gallery on Instagram for exhibition and programming updates.