Did You Know There is a Sol LeWitt in the ICE Building?

Inside 26 Federal Plaza in downtown Manhattan, the de facto headquarters of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement department, there’s a monumental work by Sol LeWitt, titled Wall Drawing #746.

It comprises 36 cubes measuring 5ft by 5ft, each with black borders and superimposed coloured ink washes. The work was completed by artists overseen by the LeWitt estate in 2008, one year after the American conceptual artist died.

The wall drawing is visible from the street, but getting close to it is dicey. The first time I saw it, a friend on an extended holiday had asked me to ship him his Vyvanse prescription, and GPS had directed me to a post office inside the building. I showed security guards my passport, then passed through a metal detector. The personnel shouted in Spanish for me to “quítate las botas!” (‘take off your boots!’), without asking if I spoke Spanish. Another gave me directions to the immigration court before I could finish asking where the post office was.

There’s not much point to the story other than thinking that this LeWitt would never have been made today. It was funded by the US General Services Administration’s Art in Architecture Program, an initiative founded in the 1970s to place art in federal buildings that has faced severe cuts under the Trump administration. When it was commissioned, the building housed several federal agencies and wasn’t synonymous with ICE. The meaning of public art always changes drastically with its political context. We have to believe that LeWitt wouldn’t have agreed to make a work for ICE. 

The second time I was there, months later, I went out of curiosity to see the work again after not finding much information on it online. When a friend and I approached the guards and told them we wanted to look at the wall drawing inside, they didn’t understand why. “This is a federal building,” one said, and there were plenty of walls that we could look at from the outside. But they didn’t have any good reason to bar us from entering. 

Despite protests from the artworld, the sculpture was ultimately dismantled.

Shortly before that visit, a district judge had ruled that ICE couldn’t routinely arrest people attending their immigration hearings. Unlike the previous visit, the lobby where the LeWitt is installed was completely empty except for a few people in ICE vests milling around the metal detectors. They all began directing us in unison to keep left and walk through the winding ropes, which had no queue. I stopped to photograph the wall drawing. One yelled, “Izquierda!” (‘Left!’) Then I took a picture of the wall label, a small bronze plaque, as one does for these kinds of stories. “No pictures!” one of them yelled. We turned around and left.

The Jacob K. Javits Federal Building is better known for once housing Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc on its plaza, a 120ft-long and 12ft-high rusted steel wall that was installed between 1981 and 1989 before being removed following public backlash and a lawsuit. It cut diagonally across the plaza, meaning that pedestrians had to walk around it rather than straight through. Some argued that it was an eyesore, or that it was a barrier and not a sculpture. It collected graffiti and trash, and made the space feel allegedly ‘physically and psychologically oppressive’. Despite protests from the artworld, the sculpture was ultimately dismantled.

The Reagan era, like the Trump era, saw growing scepticism towards government spending on the arts. Serra famously said that the sculpture could not be relocated because its relocation would destroy the work itself. The fallout of the controversy led to the creation of the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990, which protects certain moral rights of artists, including the integrity of their work. 

The order declares classical architecture as the ‘preferred and default’ style.

The building itself, a flat-roofed cube clad in black glass with granite walls and terrazzo floors, would definitely not be standing today either. It was completed by the firms Alfred Easton Poor and Kahn & Jacobs in 1969 and is an important example of American Modernism. Last year, the Trump administration issued official guidance on the design of future government buildings through an executive order titled ‘Make Federal Buildings Beautiful Again’. Although no buildings have been made under these guidelines to date, the order declares classical architecture as the ‘preferred and default’ style.

The order also argues that presidents such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson consciously modelled federal architecture on Greco-Roman styles, whereas administrations since the 1960s have favoured Modernism and Brutalism. It states that buildings and artworks commissioned through the GSA programme were ‘often unpopular with Americans’, and appealed to ‘the architectural elite, but not the American people whom the buildings are meant to serve’.

Conservative movements have long claimed links to Greco-Roman empires through citation of their artistic and architectural forms, using classical aesthetics to symbolise cultural continuity and legitimacy. This is undeniably the basis for the idea that architecture meant to serve Americans should return to classical forms. By contrast, the order declares classical architecture as the ‘preferred and default’ style.

Earlier this year, I reported on a Dutch art dealer who had come under criticism for selling artworks that once belonged to Third Reich leaders, including pieces formerly owned by Adolf Hitler. He told me he was politically neutral, but that his clientele tended to be conservative and preferred more traditional, representational art, which just happens to reflect the same aesthetic values promoted by the Nazis. It’s interesting to think that something like Serra’s Tilted Arc was condemned as oppressive while these aesthetics are brazenly upheld.

The LeWitt wall drawing is the artwork many people now encounter before potentially life-changing events.

The LeWitt wall drawing is the artwork many people now encounter before potentially life-changing events. An artist friend who works in civic-minded projects suggested a guerrilla intervention: invite hundreds of people to descend on the ICE building and ask to see the LeWitt as a roundabout critique on immigration policy. It would probably go viral, create discourse, and so on, he said.

LeWitt’s wall drawings were conceived to embody openness and possibility. Yet this one exists inside a building that is an emblem of authority and exclusion. Nearly two decades later, the colours and shapes are still there, but the meaning has been lost.