In May 2026, The Block Museum hosted an online conversation about Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #215 (1973). Erica DiBenedetto, curator at the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a scholar of LeWitt’s work, joined Block Academic Curator Corinne Granof to discuss the wall drawings as a practice: how they are made, why LeWitt began making them in 1968, and what’s involved in making and viewing them.
In the event recording, DiBenedetto walks through Wall Drawing #215 in detail: an arc and a not-straight line in black crayon, accompanied by graphite annotations that record LeWitt’s written instructions directly on the wall. She reads the instructions in full to underscore the contrast between the complexity of LeWitt’s verbal description and the simplicity of the resulting drawing. The work belongs to LeWitt’s location series from the 1970s, in which convoluted directions challenge the drafter as much as the viewer to follow where LeWitt wanted points, lines, and geometric shapes to go.
The talk also traces the broader history of LeWitt’s wall drawings, from the first, drawn at the Paula Cooper Gallery in October 1968, to the more than 1,300 he devised by the time of his death in 2007. DiBenedetto explains how the instruction-based form allowed the practice to expand rapidly across different sites, and how the works are governed by certificates and diagrams rather than by physical objects. She and Granof discuss the role of professional drafters, including Lacey Fekishazy, who led the installation at The Block, and how each generation of drafters trains the next. Wall Drawing #215 was first installed by LeWitt and J. Jackson at the Cusack Gallery in Houston in September 1973; The Block’s installation, carried out by Fekishazy and the museum’s preparators over the course of a week, marks only the second time the work has been drawn.
Granof situates Wall Drawing #215 within the context of Pouring, Spilling, Bleeding: Helen Frankenthaler and Artists’ Experiments on Paper, the exhibition that prompted its installation. The two discuss LeWitt’s interest in providing drafters and viewers with all information concerning the work, the meaning of the “not-straight line” and its connection to Eva Hesse, and LeWitt’s claim that “the idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”
Wall Drawing #215 is on view at The Block Museum through June 14, 2026.
Erica DiBenedetto is a newly appointed curator at the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a recognized expert on the artist Sol LeWitt. She formerly worked at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, where she served as a curatorial assistant and curatorial associate in the department of painting and sculpture. Erica also co-curated exhibitions at the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston and the Williams College Museum of Art in Massachusetts. She earned her PhD from Princeton University and her MA from the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art.
