A Work That Doesn’t Arrive—It’s Made

In February, LACMA acquired a vintage, (opens in a new window) early 1970s wire piece by the post-minimalist artist Richard Tuttle. Unlike most works that enter the museum, this delicate conceptual sculpture, composed only of thin wire and graphite line, did not arrive by crate or truck. Instead, the site-specific piece needed to be constructed onsite, and for the first time in his decades-long career, the artist wasn’t the one making it.

The Challenge of Preserving a Tuttle

As an artist who came of age amidst the rise of Minimalism—an abstract sculptural movement defined by austere, hard-edged geometric forms—Tuttle has, from the start of his career, created artworks that draw power from suggestion and restraint. Working with humble materials such as paper, string, cloth, and wire, Tuttle’s intimately scaled objects are distinguished by their emphasis on fragility and impermanence over monumentality.

Tuttle’s breakthrough came in 1965 with his radically minimal Line Pieces—wall drawings made with just a single stroke. These deceptively simple works marked the beginning of his ongoing, career-long exploration of line as the primary form of expression.

His wire sculptures brought this exploration into three-dimensions, transforming drawn line into sculptural form. Since 1971, Tuttle has created each wire piece himself through a quiet, almost balletic choreography. Barefoot and holding a pencil, he draws directly on the wall in a single, fluid motion, guided by the reach of his arm. He then traces the line with thin floral wire, allowing it to lift from the surface, introducing a third element—shadow—into the composition.  

Because the works have, until now, taken the measurements of Tuttle’s own body as their starting point, curator and museum director Madeleine Grynsztejn once observed Tuttle’s Wire Pieces“suffer the very real risk of extinction.” Acquiring the work meant confronting the urgent questions it raises: how does a museum collect something that isn’t an object but an act of making?

1972/2025

The process of bringing Richard Tuttle’s Wire Piece to LACMA began with a phone call. Connie Tilton of New York’s Tilton Gallery reached out to the modern art department with an offer: she wished to gift the 23rd work in Tuttle’s 1972 series of 48 Wire Pieces. It would be LACMA’s first unique work by the artist, joining several prints and textiles already in the collection.

Senior curator Stephanie Barron and I took on the project, with Barron—who had navigated similar questions around Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings early in her career—encouraging me to take the lead. As a junior curator, the prospect was daunting but exciting. More accustomed to working with painting and sculpture than site-specific or conceptual art, I contacted colleagues at other institutions that had acquired Wire Pieces through similar channels. In every case, I heard the same thing: the work was always made with Tuttle present.

Yet, in conversation with the artist, the donor, and colleagues at the museum, we determined a better solution was necessary, a path forward for producing and displaying the wire work for many decades to come. We weren’t just preserving an artwork; we were preserving a method.

It soon became clear that to do so, we needed to embrace a model of distributed authorship in which the artist's gesture is extended through the hands of a community entrusted to sustain it.

(opens in a new window) Continue reading at LACMA.org.