There may be an unusual kindness prolonged by artists whose installations ask guests to sit. The red-curtained, red-carpeted alcove with one thing akin to an overlarge mattress in Diane Severin Nguyen’s In Her Time (Iris’s Model) (2024) involves thoughts. As does the mismatched assortment of chairs organized in a circle in entrance of two flatscreen TVs propped up on extra chairs and benches that comprise Sharon Hayes’s Ricerche: 4 (2024); throughout the 2024 Whitney Biennial, a distinctly older demographic of tourists took apparent pleasure in sitting down to look at Hayes’s video, which paperwork a dialog about sexuality and gender between senior residents.
Is it too simplistic to confess that works like these—that are conceived with customer experiences in thoughts—deliver undue pleasure? Locations of gathering and relaxation inside public establishments have the same impact. Is there something higher than absorbing the solar within the Frick Assortment’s central courtyard, spinning round in Thomas Heatherwick’s Spun Chairs on the Hammer Museum or listening to Louise Lawler’s Birdcalls (1972/1981) in Dia Beacon’s west backyard? Because the painter Mary Heilmann has been identified to say: “Museums are nice locations to hang around.”
In celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Whitney Museum of American Artwork’s dwelling within the Meatpacking District, its curators determined to re-engage Heilmann, whose fee Sundown (2015) inaugurated the constructing. “Heilmann is an artist who cares concerning the expertise of being in a gallery,” the affiliate curator Laura Phipps says, explaining the choice. This care, as Phipps factors out, is “initially why Heilmann made chairs, as a result of there weren’t sufficient locations to take a seat”.
Now, there is no such thing as a scarcity of seats on the museum’s fifth ground. Heilmann’s Lengthy Line options an array of whimsically colored boxy chairs—the likes of which have complemented a lot of her exhibitions prior to now twenty years—playfully scattered about, dealing with no explicit path and organized in no explicit configuration (guests are free to maneuver them round as they want). Ensconced by the undulations of sea inexperienced and foamy white that comprise the artist’s largest mural to this point—an enlargement of her 2020 portray Lengthy Line, created whereas looking on the ocean from her dwelling in Bridgehampton—guests are beckoned by the floor-to-ceiling home windows of the Whitney’s west facet to equally gaze out on the Hudson River past.
“Heilmann grew up in surf tradition,” Phipps says. “She talks concerning the expertise of the ocean, watching the waves are available in and the way you’re feeling each on high of them and in them.” This expertise is made manifest within the set up, as “you get the impression of a number of relationships with water”.
In a second when the world feels more and more inhospitable, Heilmann affords museum-goers a short respite and refuge: a spot to decelerate, relaxation, sit again and watch the waves tumble to the shore.
Mary Heilmann: Lengthy Line, Whitney Museum of American Artwork, till 19 January 2026
