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Stella Waitzkin (1920-2003) began as an abstract expressionist and studied painting with Hans Hofmann and life drawing with Willem de Koonig. She expanded from painting to sculpture to performance art and film. After the 1930s her primary subject was the book.
Stella cast old, leather-bound volumes as single objects and as elements of larger installations, including free standing shelves, small book cases, or entire library walls. These are magnificent pieces of art—colorful, translucent, and luminous. One of only a few female environment builders, Stella’s constructions are composed almost entirely of books, although she occasionally included “real” books in her libraries or other cast objects such as clocks, birds, fruit, or human faces.
Her work has been widely exhibited in Europe and the U.S., and Stella’s work is in both public and private collections, among them the Museum of Modern Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the National Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian, and the Walker Art Center.
Through the trustees of the Waitzkin Memorial Library Trust, Kohler Foundation acquired three "walls" to recreate Stella’s Chelsea Hotel living room. After cleaning, documentation, and conservation treatment, the collection was installed in the Sublime Spaces and Visionary Worlds exhibit at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center and is now in their permanent collection. The Waitzkin memorial Library Trust and Kohler Foundation also made gifts of Stella Waitzkin’s art to the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and the Chazen Museum in Madison, WI.
