Anne Truitt, “Signature” (1974)

Photo: Don Stahl

Dia’s long-term Anne Truitt exhibition opened in May of 2017. It consists of sculptures and paintings from Dia’s collection—White: One (1962), North (1963), Pith (1969), Landfall (1970), Echo (1973), and Grant (1974)—as well as a select group of loans. In June 2021, Dia installed Signature (1974), a new loan from the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College in Arlington, New York. 

Signature is a welcome addition to the Anne Truitt gallery space. The work poses questions of chronology, trajectory, life and death, and potential, all of which buzz and vibrate under its layered surface. 

Inspired by the color fields of Barnett Newman and the local architecture and character of her childhood home in Maryland, Anne Truitt packs decades of rich personal experience into works that take the form of columnar wooden boxes. The sculptures are painstakingly painted and finished with up to forty layers of color. 

Signature stands tall and thin and features two short rectangles of differing lengths and widths that expand out from the sides near the top of the pillar. Bright golden-orange paint adorns the shortest side, and a gradient of muted pink tones continues out over the rest of the column and teases movement out of the monolith. This piece is a unique allusion to the divine in its cruciform shape. Often referencing architectural features such as fences and gravestones in her work, Truitt evokes both the headstone as well as the heavens in Signature. 

Lauren Bradford is an artist and art historian, as well as a member of the Advanced Fieldwork in Art Education at Dia Beacon cohort, offered in partnership with Vassar College, during the 2020–21 school year.