Artist Sol LeWitt and Points, Lines, Angles

Sol LeWitt was an artist born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1928 he was most known for his conceptual art, however in this overview we are going to focus on his Instructables. Instructables are wall art where the artist has to follow a particular set of instructions. Sol LeWitt came up with a large number of different instructions, some he never did himself.

For example Wall Drawing #65 in colored pencil is of follows:

Lines are not short, not straight, crossing and touching, drawn at random using four colors, uniformly dispersed with maximum density, covering the entire surface of the wall.

This is what Sol LeWitt came up with:

This is bad example, because it does not take in the sheer size of the piece. Since it is a wall piece it is so large that you could not fully see it from one spot.

So how does this relate to math?

Sol LeWitt has hundreds of these instructions were he takes shapes such as squares, circles, and triangles. He also loves lines, some straight some not, and vertical and perpendicular angles. So to introduce and apply the first section of geometry points, lines, and planes. We attempted our own Sol LeWitt.

Our instructions were: On a wall surface, any continuous stretch of wall, using a hard pencil, place fifty points at random. The points should be evenly distributed over the area of the wall. All of the points should be connected by straight lines.

I assigned all students a letter and then had them connect to each other, so we only really had 26 points, but our artwork was just as amazing.



It did take a little bit more time than I was planning, but the picture at the top took 8 days to make.

We talked about lines and line segments and this brought up a good conversation about how we name lines. I would ask a student which one is the longest line, but would not let them get out of their seat. So it was easier for the student to name the line segment than point.

I love using art in the classroom and Sol LeWitt's Instructables are an easy way to get art in the geometry classroom.

Below is a PDF with some Instructions to do you own.