SOL'S PATCH

Spotlight

Ask any artist who his or her secretly favorite artist is. Chances are the answer will be Sol LeWitt, a pioneer of both minimalism and conceptual art, whose wall drawings, photographs, and sculptures (known as "structures," in a nod to the antiinstitutional movements of the 1960s) have a commonsense beauty. When LeWitt died, in 2007 at the age of 78, there was a recognition among art-world insiders that one of the greats had gone, but the commendations were all very quiet—like the man himself. Prediction: Time will bring LeWitt the broader accolades that are his due.

One of the groundbreaking figures who found his voice in the downtown Manhattan of the 60s, LeWitt was everything that we expect of artists but all too rarely get these days: stubborn, generous, iconoclastic, uninterested in money—other than giving it away to help other artists—suspicious of power, and as visionary as anyone who ever made art. In his belief in the power of ideas, he even outdid Andy Warhol, in that LeWitt built into his works the premise that they could continue to be made after his death.

Personally modest, even camera-shy, LeWitt probably would have blushed at the posthumous tributes that have been piling up, starting with a 25-year-long—yes, 25—exhibition of his wall drawings that opened in 2008 at Mass MoCA. Now comes Lower Manhattan's LeWitt moment: the Public Art Fund has curated the first outdoor survey of the artist's three-dimensional works, which will be installed in and around City Hall Park; it opens May 24, runs through December 2, and features some 25 works conceived between 1965 and 2006, including modular, serial, geometric, and irregular structures. This ambitious show will be an opportunity to test LeWitt's unshakable belief in the audience's intelligence—and what better place to witness his journey, from his early monochromatic white cubes to the wild, multicolored organic "Splotches" that he created toward the end, than where it all started?

INGRID SISCHY