Stella Waitzkin Education Resources

Stella Waitzkin was born in 1920 in New York to Austrian immigrant parents. Izzy, as her father was known, owned a successful lighting fixture company. He hoped his two daughters and one son would help continue the business, but Waitzkin, unlike her siblings, did not want to be a part of the business. She married her husband, Abe, who worked for the lighting company, in 1942, and divorced in 1959.

Waitzkin then traveled from Great Neck, New York, to New York City to study painting with Hans Hofmann and life drawing with Willem de Kooning. During the 1960s and ‘70s, Waitzkin expanded her work to include sculpture, performance art, and film. Waitzkin also experimented with plastics, a new material that allowed for innovative casting methods. In 1969, Waitzkin moved to an apartment on the fourth floor in the Hotel Chelsea in New York City, a place that would influence the rest of her life. In her apartment, Waitzkin cast old, leather-bound volumes in resin as colorful single objects and as elements of larger installations.

Residing for more than three decades at the Chelsea, Waitzkin filled the walls of her small fourth-floor apartment with a library of colorful, cast-resin books and other sculptural and found objects that she termed Details of a Lost Library.