Winter Street Gallery is pleased to present Widow’s Walk, an exhibition of historical and contemporary art and design curated by New York / Los Angeles-based architecture and interior design firm Charlap Hyman & Herrero (CHH). Widow’s Walk will open with a public reception on July 22, 2023, from 4 to 7pm and will continue until August 27, 2023.

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The exhibition brings together works by Carmen Almon, Carlo Bugatti, Alphonse Cytere, Leonor Fini, Pieter de Grebber, Camille Henrot, Jenny Jesky, Matthew Leifheit, Thad Lovett, Eli Ping, Miroslav Tichý, and Andra Ursuta.

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For me the question is, how do you get the rich ambiguities present in the architecture produced within the European condition into an architecture of separation and isolation? What fascinates me in American architecture, especially in the architecture of New England houses, is the way they are stock and they are elemental but they are also mysterious. They are austere, but it is not the austerity of the Modern Movement in European architecture; it’s an austerity which is inexplicable. I mean, at first they look so very simple, very direct, very elemental, but on a second look there’s something else going on, and that’s what interests me. This quality persists throughout the history of American architecture. The architecture is really bone dry, but the “bone dryness” is an essential American phenomenon
— John Hejduk, Mask of Medusa, 1979

 

Widow’s Walk is named for the architectural element present on the roofs of many houses on Martha’s Vineyard, evoking the wives of mariners who watch for their spouses’ return in vain as the ocean takes their lives. “The widow’s walk meant both hope and despair, life, and death in the same element,” proposes Hejduk. Each of the works brought together here speak, in their own way, to this state of longing. 

 

In the gallery, the floor, the walls, and the ceilings are marked by smoke damage with impressions of objects and artwork formerly present. These traces and absences speak to the paradoxical beauty of widow’s walks and recall their most pragmatic function — as accesses to the tops of chimneys so that sand could be poured into the shoot during a fire.

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— Chelsey Mitchell and Adam Charlap Hyman

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ABOUT CHARLAP HYMAN & HERRERO
Charlap Hyman & Herrero is an architecture and design firm that considers all aspects of the built environment, centering collaboration at the core of their practice. Working across a multitude of mediums, CHH endeavors to create spaces that become worlds unto themselves, from gardens to freestanding structures, theater sets to curated exhibitions.

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