There is an uncommon kindness extended by artists whose installations ask visitors to take a seat. The red-curtained, red-carpeted alcove with something akin to an overlarge mattress in Diane Severin Nguyen’s In Her Time (Iris’s Version) (2024) comes to mind. As does the mismatched assortment of chairs arranged in a circle in front of two flatscreen TVs propped up on additional chairs and benches that comprise Sharon Hayes’s Ricerche: four (2024); during the 2024 Whitney Biennial, a distinctly older demographic of visitors took obvious pleasure in sitting down to watch Hayes’s video, which documents a conversation about sexuality and gender between senior citizens.
Is it too simplistic to admit that works like these—which are conceived with visitor experiences in mind—bring undue joy? Places of gathering and rest within public institutions have a similar effect. Is there anything better than soaking up the sun in the Frick Collection’s central courtyard, spinning around in Thomas Heatherwick’s Spun Chairs at the Hammer Museum or listening to Louise Lawler’s Birdcalls (1972/1981) in Dia Beacon’s west garden? As the painter Mary Heilmann has been known to say: “Museums are great places to hang out.”
In celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s home in the Meatpacking District, its curators decided to re-engage Heilmann, whose commission Sunset (2015) inaugurated the building. “Heilmann is an artist who cares about the experience of being in a gallery,” the associate curator Laura Phipps says, explaining the decision. This care, as Phipps points out, is “originally why Heilmann made chairs, because there weren’t enough places to sit”.
Now, there is no shortage of seats on the museum’s fifth floor. Heilmann’s Long Line features an array of whimsically coloured boxy chairs—the likes of which have complemented many of her exhibitions in the past two decades—playfully scattered about, facing no particular direction and arranged in no particular configuration (visitors are free to move them around as they wish). Ensconced by the undulations of sea green and foamy white that comprise the artist’s largest mural to date—an enlargement of her 2020 painting Long Line, created while looking out at the ocean from her home in Bridgehampton—visitors are beckoned by the floor-to-ceiling windows of the Whitney’s west side to similarly gaze out at the Hudson River beyond.
“Heilmann grew up in surf culture,” Phipps says. “She talks about the experience of the ocean, watching the waves come in and how you feel both on top of them and in them.” This experience is made manifest in the installation, as “you get the impression of multiple relationships with water”.
In a moment when the world feels increasingly inhospitable, Heilmann offers museum-goers a brief respite and refuge: a place to slow down, rest, sit back and watch the waves tumble to the shore.
Mary Heilmann: Long Line, Whitney Museum of American Art, until 19 January 2026
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