In the midst of the hushed and calm surroundings of the Martha's Vineyard Museum (MVM) with its display cases of scrimshaw, old photographs, and historic artifacts, one current exhibit is so visually striking and charged with energy it seems to shout its presence.
A 1978 photo of the artist in her apartment at the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan. Behind her are shelves filled with her art, molded ornamented books in polyester resin. Photo by Claudio Edinger
Stella Waitzkin would have been pleased.
The modestly sized room is filled with her replicated world - floor-to-ceiling shelves of real and molded ornamented books in polyester resin. It is Stella Waitzkin's signature work, created works in series in varying hues and translucencies. Appearing at the same time familiar and bizarre, aggressively colored objects - garish slashes of orange and reds, subtle greens and black - have been embellished and embedded with salvaged scraps. There are also religious images, cherubs, birds, bottles, pots, and her more recent focus, fish, all made singular and strange by her hand. Molded faces grimace from behind bottles and bookbindings. The real and unreal form secret pacts, everything implying something personal and meaningful in a wordless clutter, not to be deciphered.
Stella Waitzkin in 2001, relaxing in her studio on Music Street in West Tisbury. Photo by Lynn Christoffers
Ms. Waitzkin, who began as an abstract expressionist painter and a performance artist, was a student of Hans Hofmann and Willem de Kooning, accepted into the inner circle of New York's abstract expressionist art scene, the Beat artists of the 1950s, including Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, poet Allen Ginsberg, and others.
It was a long and self-determined course that brought her from the privileged suburbs of Long Island (her father owned the Globe Lighting company) to her apartment in Manhattan's eccentric Chelsea Hotel, where she lived and worked in polyester resin for 35 years. Leaving the Chelsea (neighbors complained about the fumes from the melting resin), she came to the Vineyard, first visiting in 1958 with her then teenage son Fred (Fred Waitzkin, author of the memoir, "The Last Marlin," and "Searching for Bobby Fischer," about his prodigy son, Josh).
In 1980, she began spending months at the Chilmark cottage of Fred and his wife Bonnie, and in 1990, she bought a house on Music Street in West Tisbury, where she lived and worked until her death in 2003 at 83. Her work has long been represented on-Island by gallery owner Mary Etherington, who met Ms. Waitzkin during her New York days.
However Island-conventional she might have appeared, there was nothing ordinary about the rag-tag, passionate, and somewhat reclusive artist (her doormat read, "Go away"). While determinedly solitary, she set up her booth of odds and ends at the Chilmark Flea Market, told fortunes, listened to John Alaimo play piano, frequented Biga Bakery, and swam in the pool at the old Tisbury Inn, all the while filling the rooms of her house from floor to ceiling with hundreds of her polyester-resin sculptures.
The art of Stella Waitzkin on exhibit at the Martha's Vineyard Museum. Photo by Lynn Christoffers
Although she instructed her son to throw all her work into the ocean after her death, Fred Waitzkin together with Charles Russell, a friend and Rutgers College professor, founded the Waitzkin Memorial Library Trust. It is an organization
devoted to placing Ms. Waitzkin's art in the permanent collections of museums and corporations, such as New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Yale University Library, among others. She was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.
The exhibit at MVM has been thoughtfully curated by Dana Street and her assistant, Anna Carringer. Ms. Waitzkin's longtime friend, Island photographer Lynn Christoffers, curator of the Waitzkin Memorial Library Trust together with Mr. Waitzkin, went through the Music Street studio and home, foraging through a daunting clutter of rubble and art in order to preserve the pieces.
The result is compelling; a point-and-shout display of art that includes "I Spy," activities for youngsters (can you find five toes?), a video of Ms. Waitzkin's Chelsea apartment, and an audio of her son's recollections: "The world in which she lived existed mainly as materials that she could put into her art."
There are intricacies to consider in each piece, but the collective effect is broad and startling, provoking observation and thought.
Thursday, July 23, 5:30-7:30 pm, Professor Charles Russell will speak on the art of Stella Waitzkin at MVM, corner of Cooke and School streets, Edgartown. Fred Waitzkin will speak on Thursday, August 6. $10 members, $12 non-members. The Stella Waitzkin exhibit at MVM will extend through the fall.
