Floor 5: Sol LeWitt Open Cube Interpretive Space (exiting Lewitt Wall Drawing 273)
Overview
Gallery Wayfinding
You are in the Sol LeWitt Open Cube Interpretive Space.
You've entered from the middle of the back of this wide, rectangular gallery, facing the long, front wall. On your right, on the back wall, is a video about LeWitt with seating directly in front of it. On the floor near the front wall are two sculptures. On the back wall to your left is a touch object. This touch object has an additional QR code with a guided tactile description. Next to the touch object is a series of small prints by Sol LeWitt, and on the adjacent wall is a large photo blow-up of Incomplete Open Cube, one of the two sculptures in the space. Below the photo blow-up is a standing case that contains books and ephemera.
The exit to the Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing 273 Gallery is the same as the entrance to this gallery. To find the next QR code, walk all the way back through the Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing 273 Gallery and find the the exit to the Sol LeWitt Gallery in the front left corner. The QR code is at the threshold on the right wall, marked with a perpendicular tactile floor strip.
Label
"I did not invent the cube, pyramid, or any other geometric figure.
(My art is not about inventing forms, but using them as building blocks.)"
—Sol LeWitt, 2007
Using straightforward lines, squares, and cubes as his basic elements, Sol LeWitt (born 1928, Hartford; died 2007, New York) created rigorously systematic works of art that are often visually surprising and arresting. LeWitt devised rule-based systems that yielded multiple variations of repeating geometric forms, sometimes pushing the work’s internal logic to the edge of irrationality. Over the course of his career, he made drawings, prints, photographs, artist’s books, and sculptural works he called "structures." Each medium offered a distinct set of opportunities to put a concept in motion and let it run its course.
LeWitt argued that the idea behind a work could itself qualify as art, distinct from the act of executing it. His wall drawings, six of which are on view in these galleries—from his very first, devised in 1968, to one of his last, from 2008—demonstrate this approach. After every exhibition these works are painted over, yet each one continues to exist as an idea and a set of instructions to be carried out again and again in different locations by trained assistants. Depending on the hand of the draftsperson and the conditions of the installation space, it will change slightly each time it is re-installed.
The wall drawings on view in the next several galleries were installed in 2026 by Yuka Ezoe, Lacey Fekishazy, Sarah Heinemann, Clifford Hengst, Jen Hitchings, Gabriel Hurier, Evangeline Neuhart, Mitzi Pederson, Kate Rhoades, Emily Rose Rudnick, Michael Benjamin Vedder, Arthur Wechsler, and Jean Pettigrew Whelan.
Family Label
Sol LeWitt loved working with simple lines and shapes. He wrote many instructions for making drawings, like a composer writes music. For him, the instructions were the art! It was up to other people to follow his "sheet music." These drawings were made by trained artists following the rules LeWitt made during his life.
Related Media
Artwork Label Text
Sol LeWitt on conceptual art.
SFMOMA interview (1999); re-edited 2022
Single-channel video, with sound, 4:29 min
Transcript
Sol LeWitt:
Conceptual art. It's an art that is basically based on ideas: the idea, the concept, would drive the work. Once the idea was presented, then the work would be done.
I started going to Italy in the 70s and being close to the large-scale frescoes that were all around. It made it seem that it was a natural way of making art. And once you start on the idea of the wall, then it becomes the whole wall.
I started to do things with pencil and went to, gradually, to crayon. As the walls became larger and the spaces larger, it was a natural kind of medium to use to cover large areas in a fast way. And then gradually I started to use color.
The idea is that the color theory and printing theory is that you just use the primary colors and, from those primary colors, all the other colors could come out of them.
The Abstract Expressionists would make large, very large paintings, but they were still like easel paintings done large, instead of using the wall, or the room, or the building, as a focal point for making art.
When I do a wall piece, I don't go and do it with a brush. I do it as a plan, as a drawing, and then other people can read the plan and do it. The underpinning, theoretically, could be said that: to separate the idea of art from the idea of craft—not that craft is a lower or less exalted activity, but there is a difference, and it’s a historic difference.
Parallel of other arts, architecture or music, whereby the composer doesn't play all the instruments or any of them, and the architect doesn't build the building. You think all the ideas are good but some of them crash, and you don't know until you do it. You pick up a bad idea, then you discard it and figure out a different way of doing it. It may turn out good again.
Sometimes, you do something that jars you out of your present thinking and sets you off in a different direction, just by doing something with a different medium or a different space. People tend also to keep doing what's comfortable to do, and you need some kind of outside shock to set you off in a different direction.
To me, art is a means of transmitting my ideas to someone else through that medium, which is what we call art.
Label
In this gallery we invite you to dive deeper into LeWitt's thinking and process through a variety of materials, including books, posters, and other ephemera; accessible touch objects; and a video showing past wall drawings in production. Special focus is devoted to LeWitt's 1974 Incomplete Open Cube series, which captures the artist's distinct system-based approach.
Feeling inspired? Visit Co-Lab nearby on this floor to experiment with similar ideas.
"The idea becomes the machine that makes the art."
—Sol LeWitt, 1967
Objects
3 objects in the order you'll encounter them from this entrance. Select an object to view details.
Artwork Label Text
1980
Aluminum and paint
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1989
Visual Description
Spanning about sixteen feet in length—about the length of the average car—and rising to about three feet at its highest point, this white-painted aluminum structure built from repeated small open-cube modules with uniform, square-edged frames that form a lattice-like grid. The structure snakes back along its length, turning at ninety-degree angles. As it does so, it maintains a consistent width of one cubic module wide, but each time it turns, the number of horizontally and vertically joined cubes increases in a regular mathematical sequence: it goes up by perfect squares (one, four, nine, sixteen etc.).
On one end, the structure is a single small open cube (1×1); it joins and turns into a wall of four cubes (2x2), which then joins and turns into a wall of nine cubes (3x3). This continues through five-squared (twenty-five), six-squared (thirty-six), seven-squared (forty-nine), and eight-squared (sixty-four), until the modules form a 9×9 (or eighty-one-unit) wall. From this central line, the structure then descends back according to the same progression in reverse until ending at a single cube again, so that the two sides form mirror images of one another.
It takes some time to discern this underlying logic to the work; the initial impression is of an elaborate, zig-zagging, three-dimensional grid. The lattice-like frames of the modules produce an intricate pattern that changes as one walks around the work and perceives the overlapping forms from different angles. The visual complexity of the work is heightened by the way that the many matte-white facets catch the gallery lighting differently, with some bright white and others in shadow. The structure is presented here on a low museum platform (rectangular and painted white), which is set along the gallery wall, so that the structure can be seen from three sides.
Touch Object Available
There is a physical touch object associated with this artwork.
Skip to Touch ObjectGuided Tactile Description
Sol LeWitt – Single "Pixel"
This is one of two touch objects representing the sculpture Zig-Zag by Sol LeWitt. The off-white, open-frame, aluminum sculpture is composed of cubes that are the same size as this touch object.
To your right is a scaled-down version of the sculpture.
Sol LeWitt – Zig-Zag
This is one of two touch objects representing the sculpture Zig-Zag by Sol LeWitt, an off-white, open-frame, aluminum sculpture built from repeated cubes. An example of one of the cubes can be felt on your left. This touch object is about eight times smaller than the original artwork.
In the original sculpture, the cubes are not filled in like they are in this touch object.
Artwork Label Text
1980
Aluminum and paint
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1989
Artwork Label Text
1974
Aluminum and enamel paint
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1991
Spend some time looking at the large Incomplete Open Cube sculpture on the floor behind you. Seen on its own, this work may appear simple. However, when the 122 variations are pictured together, a complex and obsessive system of patterns emerges. Each cube is unique: No two are exactly alike, even when rotated. LeWitt systematically worked through every possible way a cube could remain structurally incomplete using a minimum of three parts. This system does not exist at one scale or even in a single medium; the artist also mapped this process through diagrams, photographs, posters, and artist’s books like those in the nearby cases.
Visual Description
A three-and-half-foot cubic structure—about the size of a large moving crate or packing box—is set directly on the gallery floor. The irregular, open geometric frame is constructed from thick beams with crisp square edges in aluminum uniformly coated with smooth, slightly glossy white enamel paint.
There are subtle seams at some of the joints where the bars meet. Only one of the six sides of the cube has all four of its "edges" (the angular beams), taking the form of a vertical square frame. The other sides have only two or three edges, and in different configurations: one side has two vertical posts but is open at the top and bottom; one has a single vertical post attached to a top horizontal bar; and one has single vertical post but two horizontal bars above and below.
The top of the work forms a "U" shape that is open on one side, while the base consists of two bars that meet at a right angle. The base also contains the footprint of the vertical bar on the other side of the structure.