ArtForum // Entanglements
Louise Aline Barnsdall’s Hollyhock House was intended to be a temple to artistic invention. But the oil heiress and arts patron, who commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design it, found the architect so exasperating she fired him, forcing the project manager, Rudolph M. Schindler, to finish the troubled job, Schindler brought along Richard Neutra to help design the garden terrace. Barnsdall never completed the full plan for the project. She lived in the home only for a handful of years—her dissatisfaction made it less a temple to art or architecture than to forces at odds.
“Entanglements: Louise Bonnet and Adam Silverman at Hollyhock House” responds to the site’s history of tensions and refusals. The first contemporary art intervention staged inside the Mayan Revival home, the show was proposed by the artist couple, who were inspired by the house’s history of great minds at cross purposes. Designated a World Heritage site by UNESCO in 2019, the exhibition needed to be installed with a light touch, so that even the most monumental works could be swiftly removed without a trace. The sense is that Hollyhock remains a locus of counterforces: In hosting these works, the edifice reveals how unwelcoming to them it is.
Image credit: View of “Entanglements: Louise Bonnet and Adam Silverman at Hollyhock House,” 2023. Foreground: Adam Silverman, Entangled (Reading Room), 2022. Background: Louise Bonnet, Hollyhock Gold, 2022.
