I grew up staring at Donald Judd’s SoHo building, at 101 Spring Street, from our loft on Mercer. My dad liked to tell the story of how David Novros painted a fresco on one of the interior walls in the late 60s that remains there to this day. I liked the story too because it made Judd and Novros sound like big kids drawing on walls together; they were having fun, I thought. As I got older, I realized that this story was a more serious allegory about the exchange of ideas between friends and the heart of Judd’s mission which was to protect and immortalize his legacy and that of his community. It’s hard to imagine now, because society has become painfully aware of itself (note: not the same thing as self-awareness), that before the internet and social media some people could have an acute sense of where their generation stood within modern history. As a former art critic and one of the key figures in the Minimalist art movement, Judd was a visionary who knew he was living in a developmentally rich and significant time not just for art history, but for human evolution and self-expression as well. He knew SoHo was the artists’ salon where ideas were king and that buying a building in the heart of it was paramount in the preservation of everything to which he had dedicated his life up to that point. Enlisting friends like David Novros and Dan Flavin to install artworks inside it was an equally strategic effort toward the same end. Of course Judd wasn’t entirely altruistic; he had a voice (and ego) that he wanted to be influential. But what’s most impressive and fascinating here is that he recognized his peers and their contribution to a visual lexicon that was bigger than any individual or sub-movement; he was consciously participating in an intellectual revolution.
-Rachel Willis