Stella Waitzkin, Details of a Lost Library, Hotel Chelsea, New York City, NY
The Site
After moving into the Hotel Chelsea in 1969, painter and performance artist Stella Waitzkin began to experiment with polyester resin, which allowed for innovative casting methods. She primarily cast old leather-bound books as colorful single objects and as elements of larger installations that filled her rooms. The title she gave her environment, Details of a Lost Library, is a double entendre hinting at the lost-wax casting technique where something once solid simply melts away to leave only a shell of itself and referencing the original books’ content—stories, scriptures, poems, etc.—that have disappeared.
At the time of her death, in 2003, the entire interior of her apartment was filled with unreadable cast books, metaphors for intellectual freedom. In 2007, the Arts Center worked with the Waitzkin Memorial Trust to acquire the three-wall installation “The Wreck of the UPS,” which is now installed at the Art Preserve as it was in her home. In 2016, an additional hundred objects were added to the collection.
Stella Waitzkin
1920–2003
Stella (Rosenblatt) Waitzkin was born in 1920 in New York City to Austrian immigrant parents. Her father, who owned a highly profitable lighting fixture company, provided his three children with a privileged upbringing she would come to view as shallow. In 1942 she married Abe Waitzkin, a charismatic and successful salesman for her father’s company. They raised two sons, living first in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and then suburban Great Neck, New York, on Long Island.
In the 1950s Waitzkin began studying painting with Hans Hofmann and life drawing with Willem de Kooning in New York City, where she fell into an iconoclastic scene populated by Beat poets, jazz musicians, and other artists. Rejecting the conventionality and materialism of her home life, Waitzkin left her marriage in 1959 and relocated to the city. A decade later she moved into an apartment in the storied Hotel Chelsea, a place that would heavily influence the rest of her life. The resultant environment, Details of a Lost Library, featured hundreds of resin-cast books and objects that lined the walls of her home.
Four years after Waitzkin’s death in 2003, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center became home to an impressive three-wall section of the artist’s Hotel Chelsea environment with the help of the Waitzkin Memorial Trust. In 2016 the Arts Center acquired more than one hundred additional large-scale works by the artist and now holds the largest collection of her work, with over seven hundred individual pieces.
