"Eva LeWitt’s Career Blossoms" by Katy Diamond Hamer

Right now, on the walls of the lobby gallery of the Jewish Museum, there is a site-specific installation called Untitled (Flora), by Eva LeWitt. Made out of Plexiglas and cast polyurethane foam, the work resembles floppy if somewhat abstract bundles of — yes — flowers. They came to be planted through an invitation of one of the museum’s curators, Kelly Taxter, who’d seen some of LeWitt’s previous work at Frieze New York, in the booth of her Oslo gallery, VI, VII, in 2017. The warm, autumnal colors of the work — hand-dyed by the artist — offer a moment of respite to the gathering gray of the New York City winter. LeWitt is also part of “Known: Unknown,” a group exhibition at the New York Studio School on view until December 2.

LeWitt, 33, was born in Spoleto, Italy, but grew up in Chester, Connecticut. Her father is the late minimalist and conceptualist Sol LeWitt, born 1928, who’d moved his family to Italy in the 1980s after finding success in Manhattan and needing a break from it. He had his first wall drawing at Paula Cooper Gallery, in their inaugural exhibition in 1968 (at the time, he charged “per hour”), and then, ten years later, he had a retrospective at MoMA (New York’s critic observed: “LeWitt’s cool, smooth impersonal textures repel intrusive questions and anecdotal digressions with inscrutable politeness.”) He currently has an exhibition of site-specific wall drawings called Lines in All Directions on view at Mignoni Gallery, accompanied by a few sculptures.

LeWitt is soft-spoken and reserved, with a slight frame and long brown hair that falls just below her shoulders. We met at the Jewish Museum, and she sipped LaCroix as we spoke about her work and the experiences that have led to where she is today. Currently, she divides her time between New York and Spoleto, where she has utilized the family property to create an art residency called Mahler & LeWitt Studios. They host residents of various disciplines in the former studios of her father and the artist Anna Mahler, who was a neighbor of the LeWitt’s and whose family is generously involved with the residency. We spoke about finding her way to grow and blossom as an artist and not be too much in the shadow of her accomplished father.

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