MICHAEL BRENSON : The New York Times: Weekend: In Connecticut, a Conceptualist’s
Nonconceptual Collection: Friday August 9, 1991

Hartford, Aug. 6 – There is surely no other art collection of a contemporary artist even remotely like Sol LeWitt’s.  This 63-year-old pioneer of Conceptual Art, whose open gridlike architectural-sculptures suggest anti-storage bins – that is to say, wall-less storage bins in which nothing can be stored – is in fact a great accumulator of all kinds of art, by all kinds of artists, from all over Europe and the United States.

The 160 works by around 100 artists in “Open Mind: The LeWitt Collection,” at the Wadsworth Atheneum, could have been assembled only by someone of immense generosity and restlessness, someone who has lived in constant movement and yet been so sure of himself that he had remained fundamentally in one place.

It is the collection of a Hartford-born artist whose mature work was composed by him and executed by others, and who therefore has a history of expressing himself – as he does in his collection – via other hands.  Mt. LeWitt’s architectural-sculptures can be like coops in which birds can come and go, or like windows that will never darken or close.  Few other major American artists after 1960 have a curiosity about art that so far transcends their own generation.

This exhibition of Mr. LeWitt’s multifarious accumulations was selected and installed by Kimberly Davenport, an associate curator at the museum, which has been the primary repository for the collection since 1976.  The exhibition is not exclusively Conceptual in focus.  It includes many works that were not included in previous exhibitions of the collection.  Brice Marden’s “Adriatic-Grids” from 1973, in which a tight grid in one etching loosens up and becomes more light-filled in the other, is one of them.  Another is Fred Sandback's line installation – made from instructions on a certificate that is itself a work in the collection – of one yellow, one blue, and one black strand of yarn, suspended from the ceiling, that are b themselves enough to evoke vast space.