It was hard to pick out just one sentence from the thirty-five that Sol Lewitt wrote on art; I guess it’s a good sign that so many of them resonated with me as being factual.

I chose this sentence to dwell upon because of the significance of it. The process of making a piece is one of the most important parts of making art, and yet it is very much an open process. When I make art, I focus almost entirely on what I want to accomplish, not so much on the steps I need to take to get there. It’s important to keep one’s mind on the goal, or they’ll get lost and make something unlike what they were intending.

There are indeed side effects to making art, especially when the idea in question calls for new materials or techniques to be used. The process of making is never ending, we make ideas for works that need to be made, and in the process of making we make innovation in technique and we make new ideas to repeat the process over again.

I don't necessarily agree with this. I am one who thinks that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and that art is to be found everywhere if one can only see it. An artificial landscape had to be designed by someone, and even though it's a purely functional structure there is still something about it that is beautiful. A marvel of human engineering, like looking at any of the many Roman aqueducts.

I was particularly drawn to Theaster’s passion and involvement with buildings and his community. His reclamation of materials from demolished buildings can be seen as a means of preserving that building, or as recycling materials that would have otherwise been trashed.

His going into and playing for a dying church stood out to me, the image of him playing the cello is burned into my memory. His “last sermon” for something as holy as a church built in the 1890’s, one that he didn’t have the means to save, was powerful and poignant. One goes to a church to worship, to have their soul saved, and yet the Church was unable to be saved.

What makes one building more worthy of preservation than another? Theaster spoke of buildings being preserved because it means a fat check for a contractor, or of it being destroyed because it happens to be in a black, yellow, whatever colored neighborhood where it’s not “culturally significant” enough to be saved.

Speaking on the Dorchester Project, where he acquires abandoned buildings, guts them, creates art from the innards and uses the funds to restore and refurbish with found materials; is almost creating a performance out of the bureaucracy of saving a building. He spoke of talking to and spending money on lawyers for three hours every day to give money away, I wonder how many hoops he has to jump through to preserve a building? He gives the reclaimed building an entirely new purpose, and everything that goes into the rebirth of the building has a story of its own. It’s beautiful. Perhaps it’s all for the church that he was unable to save.