As of this past Tuesday, a collection of 120 photographs of New York’s Lower East Side taken by Sol LeWitt in 1979 has been installed on the side of the Mondrian SoHo. It is a permanent installation, so you can take a stroll there anytime. The hotel partnered with the Paula Cooper Gallery on the project.

From the press release:

Sol LeWitt made photographs throughout his career, beginning in the 1960s
with serial works of images inspired by Edwaerd Muybridge.  Photography was
a means by which LeWitt incorporated narrative into his art, in a seeming
contradiction to the objective, conceptual rigor that define Lewitt’s wall
drawings and structures from the same period.  Beginning in the mid-1970s,
he published a series of books of photographic essays such as Brick Walls
(1975), Photo Grids (1977), and On the Walls of the Lower East Side, which
culminated in Autobiography (1980). The publications reproduce images that
are absent of people, sequenced in related groupings and arranged into grids
of uniformly sized reproductions that function like modular units with no
overt hierarchy.

On the Walls of the Lower East Side consists of 666 photographs in total,
depicting the decayed landscape of the neighborhood in lower Manhattan where
LeWitt then had his home and studio. (The door of his loft at 117 Hester
Street is included.) Graffiti covered walls were abundant in the area, and
LeWitt shoots mostly images of political scrawls, torn posters and
splattered paint in a straight-forward, almost deadpan, style that is in
essence social documentary.

Sol Lewitt believed that walls were public and large and that books were
small and private; that they each provide the same information through
extremely different formats. Sol Lewitt wrote, “When one sees a wall, it is
the impact of the whole that is understood at once-emotionally more than
intellectually. It is only by reading the wall that the viewer understands
it fully.” The installation of LeWitt¹s On the Walls of the Lower East Side
at Mondrian SoHo provides an opportunity for this work to be seen in the
context of the community that inspired it.

More images after the fold.

Now on view through September 11, 2011 at the Seattle Art Museum, Beauty & Bounty celebrates 100 works responding to the ever-expanding North American continent during the 19th and early 20th-centuries.

Painters including Sanford Gifford, Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran gave form to landscapes of once unimaginable character, as they crossed the continent on expeditions through the plains and the mountains of the Great West. Beauty and Bounty includes 45 of these majestic works—many of which are held in private collections and were previously unknown to the public. Also included in the exhibition are approximately 60 landscape photographs, including mammoth plate images by the pioneers of the western photography, including Carleton Watkins, Edward Muybridge, and Timothy O’Sullivan.

The paintings and photographs on view demonstrate that it was often these artist-explorers who were raising important questions about humankind’s place in the world and how best to respond to a continent that many at the time viewed as a divine blessing of beauty and bounty from nature.

Above: Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast, Albert Bierstadt, 1870

VNA went out to LA and bumped into street art photographer Martha Cooper setting up her installation at the Art In the Streets exhibition at MOCA.