Since its opening in 1884, New York’s Hotel Chelsea has been famed as a hotbed of creativity—a seedy yet alluring beacon drawing artists, musicians and bohemians of all kinds. While the luminaries associated with the place (Mark Twain, Janis Joplin, Andy Warhol) are well known, less famous residents are only now beginning to gain recognition.
Among the more recently “discovered” artists who once called the Chelsea home are the late Bettina (1927-2021), Ching Ho Cheng (1946-89), Bernard Childs (1910-85), Herbert Gentry (1919-2003), Nicola L. (1932-2018) and Teruko Yokoi (1924-2020). Many of their relatives still live in the building; some feel their presence to this day.
“It’s happened many times, Ching contacting me,” Cheng’s sister, Sybao Cheng-Wilson, tells The Art Newspaper. She moved into the Chelsea in the 1980s to take care of her brother, who was dying of Aids. For years after Cheng’s death, the bathroom light bulb would flicker on his birthday, 26 December; Cheng-Wilson became convinced it was his way of checking in on her.
For her part, Cheng-Wilson became dedicated to preserving her brother’s legacy. She held onto both his art and the apartment where he made it. She even raised her daughter at the Chelsea, despite its notorious reputation as a hedonistic haven.
Judith Childs and her artist husband moved into the Chelsea in 1966. “My parents were a little horrified by the whole building,” she recalls. “It was not an elegant hotel.” Childs still lives in the first-floor apartment she and Bernard once shared, surrounded by his soft-hued geometric abstractions that seem to glow from within.
Bernard Childs’s work at the Armory Show 2026 Courtesy Bank
In September, these works—imbued with an almost cosmic fluidity—were the subject of a solo stand at New York’s Armory Show with the Shanghai- and New York-based gallery Bank. The 1970s canvases—priced between $14,000 and $55,000—stood out amid the more than 200 exhibitors at the fair; they hung above a fuzzy, cantaloupe-coloured carpet that enhanced the works’ warm, luminous quality.
Showing an essentially forgotten artist like Childs was a bit of a risk for Bank founder Mathieu Borysevicz. “He’s been off the map for so long,” says the gallerist, who just began working with Childs’s estate. The artist’s work was featured in Documenta in 1959; that same year, he had a solo show at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. But Childs’s previous dealer, Jason McCoy Gallery, last gave the artist an in-person solo show in 2013; the gallery itself closed in 2024.
Borysevicz already had experience helping artists from the storied hotel emerge from the shadows, having worked with the Cheng estate since 2021.
Over Cheng’s short but prolific career, the artist developed four major bodies of work, beginning with psychedelic paintings inspired by Tibetan spiritualism before experimenting with airbrushed gouache, graphite on torn paper and rusted surfaces made using iron and copper oxide on paper. The artist, who appeared in last year’s Sixties Surreal at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, will have his first major retrospective in September 2027 at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts.
Ching Ho Cheng in his Chelsea Hotel studio in 1985 Courtesy the artist’s estate
Cheng had moved into the Chelsea in 1976, where he befriended Childs. Judith and Cheng-Wilson have stayed close over the years, united by their shared devotion to preserving and promoting their late loved ones’ work. It was Cheng-Wilson who introduced Judith to Borysevicz.
Another friend of Childs, from his time in Paris in the 1950s, was Herbert Gentry—an African American painter known for his jazz-inspired abstractions. He arrived at the hotel in the late 1960s; Gentry’s second wife, the artist Mary Anne Rose, joined him in 1978. She still lives at the Chelsea and now oversees his estate.
“Herbert’s work is so distinctive stylistically, but he was also foundational in bridging what was happening in North America and Europe,” says Gentry’s dealer, Jeffrey Lee of the New York gallery Ryan Lee. By December, the artist will have work simultaneously in museum group shows in Alabama, Germany and Martinique, plus a solo show at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Sweden.
But not all Hotel Chelsea artists have family members on the premises to safeguard their legacies. When the reclusive Bettina died in 2021, management quickly began clearing out her apartment. The unit was nearly bursting with the conceptual artist’s life’s work, to the point where Bettina slept in a lawn chair in the hallway, as memorably captured in the 2022 documentary Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel. That would have been the end of the story had Bettina not connected with the Moroccan artist Yto Barrada in her final years.
Barrada fervently believed in the value of Bettina’s work, and its need to be saved from the dumpsters and shared with the world. Before Bettina’s death, Barrada presented the older artist’s sculptures at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Arts Center on Governors Island, leading to an appearance in Greater New York 2021 at MoMA PS1. When Bettina died, it was Barrada who saved the contents of her apartment from the trash. The estate, which Barrada oversees with the assistance of Anna McCormick-Goodhart, is now represented by Ulrik in New York; a solo show at the Ruth Foundation for the Arts in Milwaukee closed in April.
One of Bettina’s index cards outlining the details of her unrealised exhibition The Chelsea Hotel: Artists at Work Courtesy the artist’s estate
“There is a lot to sort and sift through, and it leaves wonderful traces of the history of the making of her works, of her travels, of the people in her life—it’s very densely layered,” McCormick-Goodhart says.
In her later years, Bettina—whose work encompasses photography, printmaking, painting, sculpture, textile and commercial design—was known largely for her eccentricities. But she also planned an ambitious, albeit unrealised, exhibition to show her neighbours’ art. A series of typed index cards from the 1980s reveal the artist list and potential venues for The Chelsea Hotel: Artists at Work. The exhibition would have featured the works of Cheng, Childs, Gentry and Rose, among other residents.
Another artist in this heady milieu was Nicola L. A documentary film-maker, who turned her own lens on her home of nearly 30 years for the 2014 film Doors Ajar at the Chelsea Hotel, Nicola L. is best known for her “functional sculptures”—anthropomorphic furniture shaped like a massive foot, the silhouette of a head and other body parts. In a critique of the objectification of women’s bodies, some mimic the female form, but they somehow avoid feeling overly sexualised.
Nicola L. was largely overlooked until London’s Tate Modern included her work in a broader view of international Pop art for its 2015 exhibition The World Goes Pop. Nicola L.’s first institutional solo show took place in 2017 at New York’s SculptureCenter; the London gallery Alison Jacques began representing her estate after the artist’s death in 2018. A retrospective, When the Earth Turned the Other Way, closed earlier this month at Belgium’s Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, and the travelling museum show I Am the Last Woman Object wrapped up a European tour in March.
Installation view of Nicola L.: When the Earth Turned the Other Way, Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp, Belgium Courtesy Alison Jacques
Nicola L. was the catalyst behind the Chelsea Hotel residents’ successful fight to keep their apartments after new ownership embarked on an 11-year renovation project to transform the property into a high-end hotel—where rates start at around $500 per night. It was at her urging that the residents banded together to successfully protect their rent-stabilised tenancy.
“The Chelsea was a safe haven for these artists,” says Christophe Lanzenberg, Nicola L.’s son. “The Chelsea allowed them to thrive and stay in New York, instead of getting kicked out of places where rents were coming up.”
Today, there are 42 families still living at the Chelsea. (One artist, Gerald DeCock, is facing eviction at the end of February after 31 years in residence.) Over the years, those remaining have forged tight bonds.
When Childs died, Gentry sent Rose downstairs to keep Judith company. Rose and Nicola L. shared a Long Island City studio for years. As Nicola L.’s health began to decline due to Alzheimer’s, Rose and Judith kept a close watch. They let her sons know when their mother could no longer live alone.
Though its heyday as a refuge for free-spirited artists is long past, the hotel is still deeply connected to its creative history, including artists who checked out decades ago. The lobby, stairwells and hallways are filled with works of art, some said to have been given to the longtime manager Stanley Bard (1934-2017) in lieu of rent. A new Japanese restaurant, Teruko, opened in the basement last year featuring paintings by its namesake, Teruko Yokoi (1924-2020), who lived at the Chelsea from 1957 to 1960, during her marriage to Sam Francis (1923-94).
Teruko Yokoi’s Untitled (1959) will be on offer on Hollis Taggart’s stand at New York’s ADAA Fair in November Courtesy Hollis Taggart
“I was a baby when she was just coming out of art school, juggling having a newborn and continuing to paint. Her studio was actually in the apartment,” says Yokoi’s daughter, Kayo Malik. But when the couple hosted parties for friends like Mark Rothko and Al Leslie, Francis would have Yokoi put her paintings away, hiding her work.
At the Teruko restaurant, the artist’s pieces are displayed in the dining room, enjoyed and appreciated by guests gathering to share a meal—“a full circle moment”, Malik says. The artist is also the subject of a solo show, Seasons, at New York’s Hollis Taggart (until 25 November). And the gallery is bringing one of Yokoi’s Hotel Chelsea-era works, Untitled (1959), to the ADAA Fair at New York’s Park Avenue Armory (12-16 November); there, it will be on offer at a two-person presentation with the artist Michael West (1908-91). Meanwhile in Los Angeles, the artist has a solo show currently on view at James Fuentes Gallery (until 7 November).
Yokoi eventually moved to Switzerland after separating from Francis. Determined to show her work, she opened two dedicated museums in her native Japan, enjoying a long career across three continents. But Malik still feels close ties to her first home at the Chelsea, that formative chapter in Yokoi’s life, and its vibrant artist community.
“The hotel has had an incredible life,” Malik says.
