Hear the Curator (PP617)

As you pass through the Bloomberg Arch of Bloomberg Dormitory, be sure to look up: there you’ll find Sol LeWitt’s vivid painting, Wall Drawing #1134, Whirls and Twirls (Princeton). In the late 1960s, LeWitt pioneered a new way of working: inspired by the tradition of mural painting, he began to create drawings and paintings for walls, all of them abstract. However, instead of making them himself, he penned instructions and diagrams and then outsourced the labor to others. The resulting works, like this one, are carefully scaled to their architectural settings. They combine a variety of relatively simple marks and geometric motifs to create aesthetic effects that are both dynamic and beautiful. Whirls and Twirls is especially playful for LeWitt, and its interlocking bands of color, which form a larger series of interconnected shapes, suggest exchange, movement, traffic, and the transmission of energy. When it was commissioned by Princeton University in 2004, Whirls and Twirls inaugurated a new phase of Princeton’s campus art program. Until then, the University’s campus art collection had been comprised almost entirely of monumental bronze or steel sculptures.