What comes to mind when you hear “Vineyard art”? Is it one of Rez Williams’s huge, dramatic views of fishing boats, or an Alison Shaw farmer’s market photograph? Perhaps it’s a dancing Tom Maley sculpture outside the Field Gallery, or a tapestry of irises by Julia Mitchell. It could be almost anything, given the diversity of art Islanders create, but one thing it probably wouldn’t be is a work of abstract expressionism. Yet one of the Island’s most noteworthy artists was Stella Waitzkin, a painter and sculptor whose style was grounded in the abstract expressionist movement.

What? Never heard of Stella Waitzkin? Not surprising. A complex character to say the least, Stella was something of a recluse whose welcome mat at her Music Street house read “Go Away.” More focused on making art than on showing it, she disliked having her work written about and was known for turning down invitations to exhibit her art and even for canceling shows at the last minute – which earned her few friends in the museum and gallery world.

But now her son, Fred Waitzkin, a journalist, novelist, and the author of several books of nonfiction, including the memoir about his chess-prodigy son Searching for Bobby Fischer, is working to bring her art into the public eye. Although his relationship with his mother was not uncomplicated, Fred believes that Stella’s work is important and should be preserved and exhibited. “She was an artist’s artist,” says Fred, explaining that while the public did not know her work, other artists – including many of the big names of abstract expressionism – did. Shortly before Stella’s death in 2003, Fred founded the Waitzkin Memorial Library Trust, a nonprofit organization dedicated to placing Stella’s work into the permanent collections of museums and corporations throughout the world.

Many artists whose work does not become well known during their lifetimes harbor the dream that they’ll become famous after they die. “Stella always said she wanted us, upon her death, to truck all her sculptures and paintings down to Florida, take them out on our boat, and dump them into the ocean,” says Fred. “But she allowed me to prevail and create the Trust, which is how you know that posthumous success was on her mind.”

Stella began painting in the 1950s. Unhappy in her marriage to a salesman who was working for her father’s company when they had met, she felt stifled by her life in suburban Long Island. She began traveling to New York City to study art. Soon she fell in with the young, maverick painters, musicians, and poets of the abstract expressionist movement. She studied painting with Hans Hofmann and life drawing with Willem de Kooning. She spent long evenings at the Cedar Bar (a Greenwich Village bar known for attracting abstract expressionists in the 1950s), discussing art with Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. In 1968, after her marriage had ended and her children were grown, she moved to the Chelsea Hotel, where her one-bedroom apartment became a sort of salon. “There were always artists and jazz musicians there,” recalls Fred, “and poets like Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso.”

While her early works were largely abstract expressionist paintings, in the 1960s and ’70s, Stella expanded into sculpture, performance art, and film. She made her first sculptures from glass, melting bottles over mattress springs in enormous kilns at her father’s lighting fixtures company, Globe Lighting. In 1973, she discovered polyester resin, which became her primary material and may have been responsible for her eventual move to the Vineyard: When Stella melted down this highly flammable and toxic substance in her living room and on the balcony of her Chelsea Hotel apartment, her neighbors objected to the fumes.

“She was driven here by her New York neighbors,” says Mary Etherington, whose Vineyard Haven gallery, Etherington Fine Art, now represents Stella’s work.

Stella’s first visit to Martha’s Vineyard was in 1958 when, in the throes of divorcing her husband, she took Fred, then fifteen, on a road trip. Twenty-two years later, in 1980, Fred and his wife Bonnie inherited a cottage in Chilmark, and Stella came to visit. “She fell in love with it,” says Fred. For the next eight years, she would stay in the cottage for three to four months a year.

“She found working here intoxicating and inspiring,” says Fred. “The sun and the sea worked their way into her art; the color and imagery of her work was informed by this place.” She liked, for example, to take a folding chair to Lucy Vincent Beach on late fall evenings, particularly when storms were brewing, and sit and look at the sky. Then she would go back home and work.

Toward the end of her life, Stella made a series of sculptural paintings of fish, inspired in part by living on the Vineyard, and in part by her loathing of fishing, a favorite pastime of her ex-husband – and son.

“My mother found it difficult that I fished,” says Fred, “that I went out to sea; but at the same time, the danger of the sea worked its way into her work. The things you think you hate, you internalize, and they become fuel for creative expression.”

But the predominant theme in Stella’s sculpture was books – as objects. Stella made molds of books and then re-created them in various colors of resin. Often translucent, the books would sometimes contain almost indiscernible objects within them – invitations, photographs, found objects. Her focus on books reflects a love-hate relationship with them: On the one hand, she revered books as physical vessels of knowledge, but on the other, she was known for having told the poet Allen Ginsberg that “words are lies.” In an essay entitled “Discovering Stella Waitzkin,” art critic Arthur C. Danto wrote of Stella’s work that “the books were almost literally the ghosts of books....Even if one attempted to break into them, there was nothing to read....It was as if these books, emptied of their words, could no longer impart the toxin of their falsehood.”

One of Stella’s works, a wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling installation entitled The Wreck of the UPS incorporates a number of Stella’s paintings, several mounted fish, bookshelves stacked with both real books and books cast in resin, and on the floor, nestled in an overturned stepladder, a copy of her son Fred’s memoir about fishing and his relationship with his parents. Stella disliked The Last Marlin because she felt that it revealed too much about her personal life.

“She liked to live behind veils,” says Fred. “The mystery was very important to her. She felt that if the mystery were revealed, the art would be diminished in some way.”

Mary Etherington met Stella in 1977, when Mary was working at the Center for Book Arts in New York City. “One day, Stella walks in and drops a book on the table. It had a stake driven through it and was made of resin. I was new to New York, straight out of Kansas. This was the beginning of my art education, of a real broadening of my horizons.”

In 1990, Stella bought a house on Music Street and began spending as much as three-quarters of the year here. “She worked here, breathed the air, and became an Island institution,” Fred says. Her life on the Island was oddly self-contradictory, consisting of equal parts seclusion and sociability.

As her “Go Away” doormat suggests, Stella didn’t encourage visitors – even her son. (“I had to make an appointment to see my own mother,” quips Fred.) She was intensely private about the process she used to make her art and wouldn’t allow anyone near her when she was working.

On the other hand, she liked to eat lunch at the now-closed Biga Bakery in West Tisbury, swim in the pool at the Mansion House (then the Tisbury Inn), and frequent the Up-Island Council on Aging. She had a stall at the Chilmark Flea Market where she sold secondhand items that she collected in New York City and elsewhere. The epitome of an eccentric “character,” she dressed like a gypsy, was interested in astrology and numerology, and liked to tell people’s fortunes.

“She was marvelously intuitive,” says Fred. “She could scare the heck out of you. You’d spend a couple of minutes with her, and she could tell you all about yourself.”

She made few very close friends on the Island, among them Joyce Bowker, director of the Council on Aging. “Stella chose her friends very carefully,” says Joyce. “She didn’t seek out friendship, but if she liked you, it was for life. She loved her privacy, but she never applied the ‘Go Away’ mat to me. She always had some interesting meal to present to you – exotic tea or vegetables you’d never heard of. You didn’t go to Stella’s house expecting a sandwich.” Stella also regularly brought food over to Joyce at the Council on Aging, and she often presented her with some of her second-hand “finds” – an old scarf, a sweater, a hat, or a purse. “She was always giving away little treasures – or things she thought were treasures,” she says.

“She was a bit of a renegade,” notes Mary Etherington. “She just did it her own way. I think it’s admirable; it’s hard to be that honest about who you are.”
When Stella died in 2003, most of the rooms in her Music Street house were stacked floor-to-ceiling with her artwork and “treasures” for the flea market. Fred says it took two years to sort through it all. Now, however, much of her art is displayed in an old barn on the property. Representatives from museums as well as serious collectors have seen the work there and at her Chelsea Hotel apartment, which now functions both as a showcase and as the office of the Waitzkin Memorial Library Trust. The public can also see pieces at Etherington Fine Art and online at www.stellawaitzkin.com.

Thanks to the work of the Trust, a steadily growing number of museums and corporations are purchasing pieces of Stella’s work for their collections, among them New York’s Museum of Modern Art; the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian Institution, both in Washington, D.C.; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; the Detroit Institute of Arts; and the Yale University Library. This fall, the Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, will open a large-scale installation, including furniture and artwork that will effectively recreate Stella’s Chelsea Hotel living room. Fred reports that income from sales of Stella’s pieces has reached “the significant six figures,” allowing the Trust to be self-sustaining and continue its work. Stella may not have been a household name in her lifetime, but she’s on her way to becoming one posthumously.

“She was of a time and a group of artists who were at the forefront of changing and bringing the rest of us along,” says Mary Etherington. “That comes across in her work. It’s a very personal vision, and there’s mystery to it. The imagery is unexpected, the juxtapositions striking. It’s not necessarily pretty.”
According to her daughter-in-law Bonnie Waitzkin, Stella “hated pretty.” What mattered was originality.

“When I first met Stella,” says Mary, “I didn’t understand the work or the person. I had to grow up first. But if you like a little difference and challenge, it’s worth it. If you put in a little effort, there’s a big payoff.”