Creator Record
Images
Metadata
Artist |
Waitzkin, Stella |
Category |
env builder |
Biography |
Stella Waitzkin (1920-2003) Stella Waitzkin was born in 1920 to Austrian immigrant parents, Isador and Sadie Rosenblatt. Hoping to realize their American dreams, Isador and Sadie immigrated to the United States in the early 1900s. Izzy, as her father was known, was a self-made man who owned a highly profitable lighting fixture company and planned for his two daughters and one son to follow him into his business world. While her siblings fell into step, the romantic and rebellious Stella considered her father's commercial ambitions and materialist lifestyle to be shallow. In the 1950s, Waitzkin 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 heavily influence the rest of her life. In her apartment, Waitzkin would cast in resin old, leather-bound volumes as colorful single objects and as elements of larger installations. In 2007, with the help of the Waitzkin Memorial Trust, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center became home to an impressive three-wall section of the artist's Hotel Chelsea environment. In 2016, the Arts Center acquired more than one hundred additional large-scale works by Waitzkin. Although her work is featured in collections across the United States, the Arts Center now has the largest collection of her work with over seven hundred individual pieces. Stella Waitzkin's work has been shown in several solo and group exhibitions at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center including Sublime Spaces and Visionary Worlds: Built Environments of Vernacular Artists (2007), American Masterpieces (2008), and The Road Less Traveled (2017). |
