Stella Waitzkin: From the Chelsea Hotel
February 7–May 19, 2023
Artist Stella Waitzkin (1920-2003) was born in New York City. After briefly studying acting, she married in 1942 and shortly thereafter gave birth to two sons. In the 1950s, Waitzkin began creating visual art as an abstract expressionist painter. She studied painting with Hans Hofmann and life drawing with Willem de Kooning. Waitkzin began friendships with other New York artists and musicians including Jackson Pollock and Tony Fruscella in Greenwich Village at this time as well. When her sons were teenagers she moved to West 9th Street, took a studio on 14th Street, and expanded from painting to sculpture, performance art, and film.
Waitzkin moved into room 403 at the Chelsea Hotel in 1969. She befriended many of the residents, leaned even more deeply into her interest in jazz, and created what scholars call an “art environment” within her apartment. One of only a few female environment builders, Stella’s constructions are composed almost entirely of cast books—although she occasionally included “real” books in her libraries or other cast objects such as clocks, birds, fruit, or human faces.
Writing about her work, Laura Delano Roosevelt explained, “But the predominant theme in Stella’s sculpture was books—as objects. Stella made molds of books and then re-created them in various colors of resin. Often translucent, the books would sometimes contain almost indiscernible objects within them—invitations, photographs, found objects. Her focus on books reflects a love-hate relationship with them: On the one hand, she revered books as physical vessels of knowledge, but on the other, she was known for having told the poet Allen Ginsberg that ‘words are lies.’ In an essay entitled ‘Discovering Stella Waitzkin,’ art critic Arthur C. Danto wrote of Stella’s work that ‘the books were almost literally the ghosts of books....Even if one attempted to break into them, there was nothing to read....It was as if these books, emptied of their words, could no longer impart the toxin of their falsehood.’”
Examples of an abstract expressionist sculpture vocabulary, Waitzkin’s sculptures have much in common with many paintings from her contemporaries. These rather messy-looking objects embrace an aesthetic idiom that emphasizes process and gesture over appearance. In many ways these sculptures are three-dimensional records of Waitzkin’s creative energy; she and many others in her circle agreed that the artist’s mark should be as intuitive and direct as possible.
The first presentation of Waitzkin’s works at the Museum, this installation is a primary opportunity for studying these objects while sharing them with our visitors. A timely acquisition, Waitzkin’s works, practice, and life share many connections with our institution’s exceptional collection of midcentury American abstraction. While some of Waitzkin’s sculptures were arranged in fixed arrangements or installations, these mostly untitled and undated sculptures may be regrouped in multiple iterations just as the artist would do in her studios both at the Chelsea Hotel and in Martha’s Vineyard.
