Lo and Behold Mira y Ve

In Situ Installation by Lawrence Weiner From Dec 9th, 2006 through Mar, 2007The Wolfsonian Museum in Miami Beach, FL has commissioned U.S. artist Lawrence Weiner to create a new work installation. Lo and Behold Mira y Ve is the work created by Weiner in response to the extensive collections found at The Wolfsonian, its location, and its place in the community. His installation begins on The Wolfsonian facade at Washington Avenue Street and lines the walls of the lobby, culminating at the lobby fountain. Like much of Lawrence Weiner’ s oeuvre, the work is grounded in language and a mix of common signs. The result is a simple structure put before The Wolfsonian’s public to, literally, Lo and Behold Mira y Ve. The work, presented in both English and Spanish, is in recognition of Miami’s diverse culture and its strong Hispanic community. Lawrence Weiner was born in the Bronx, New York. In the early 1960s he set out to make a career as a painter in the downtown art scene. Work from this period included experiments with systematic approaches to shaped canvas. With that work, the interactive, collaborative approach to his work began to develop. The paintings were produced on demand; their color, size, stripes, and notches were based on the needs or desires of the receiver. As time went by, the limitations of painting brought Weiner, along with many other artists, to abandon painting and to realize his work as sculpture. Using language meant making ideas accessible. The framework for this is built on a factor he calls Statement of Responsibility, in which three possibilities for his work to exist are put forward. The first is that the artist can build the work; the second is that the receiver can build the work; and the third states that the work does not need to be built at all. For Weiner, this means the work exists as language itself. For more information, please call: 305.531.1001