Untitled (Portrait)

New York artist Stella Waitzkin lived in a small Hotel Chelsea apartment for over thirty years amidst her Details of a Lost Library, a mixed-media art installation (pictured in situ at right). Believing “words are lies,” she cast books and other collected objects in pigmented polyester resin to create luminous and haunting sculptural shells devoid of function and frozen in time. In the early 1990s she began another major wall-sized installation—The Wreck of the UPS—as a meditation on her shattered family life (site photo at left; now in the collection of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI). When her sons were young Waitzkin and her family began taking frequent fishing trips; their personal tensions and differences played out over the years and are represented in the sea imagery that alludes to a mother’s fears, unity and divisions of a family, and the power of memory. During the 1950s Waitzkin’s estrangement from her husband and two sons grew as she pursued her artistic career, and she eventually left their home in Long Island to live closer to her friends and teachers in Manhattan, including Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning, and other leading abstract expressionists. The mixed-media portrait on view here had hung in the hallway of Waitzkin’s Hotel Chelsea apartment. The sculpture is a cast of an old mirror frame from her Martha’s Vineyard summer cottage. The photograph was probably acquired at a flea market on the Vineyard. Human faces—along with books, birds, clocks, and marine imagery—figured prominently in Waitzkin’s work from the 1970s on to evoke a sense of times past and weighted personal presences.