Laura Letinsky

Chaos and beauty reign simultaneously in our dear friend Laura Letinsky’s home in Hyde Park. It’s a magical and wonderful world she’s created with her husband, Tony Wight of Tony Wight Gallery, and her two sons. With their combined collection of art, artful treasures and furniture spanning decades and styles, their interior environment simply can’t be replicated; the high and low coexist here in every corner (with the exception of their  fine art collection), from fashion (Rick Owens to thrift ) to furniture (mid century originals to yard sale finds).

We’ve always been a fan of her beautiful artwork, photographic still lifes that in their beauty and melancholy can make you ache.  And we find here that she lives life and juggles her many roles at the highest level.  Her art is featured in some of the best collections and galleries in the world, her culinary and gardening skills are formidable, she is a fantastic mother, a good friend, and has a handsome husband all while co-chairing the Art Department at the University of Chicago.

We invite you to take a look at this lovely home, a place where adolescent mess and high art coexist happily, in a way that only Laura could make beautiful.

We elevate our intellect with Laura Letinsky:

How do you define beauty?
It’s a combination of aesthetic pleasure, sensorial pleasure that is abiding and makes you experience things with intensity and longevity.  There is an intellectual aspect to it – body and mind.

What attracts you?
Beauty is a kind of engagement that is complex and perplexing and sometimes confounding or provoking as opposed to something that is not sustaining, a fleeting thing like chocolate ice cream. It is something that is more engaging, makes me think about what I’m experiencing as opposed to just a reassuring or comforting experience. Yet high and low can both be attractive simultaneously. I try to consider ideas and experiences that are part of the everyday as opposed to always being elevated. I’m as attracted to a Givenchy bag as I am to the work of my garden and getting a tomato that I’ve planted. I like to wear and use objects, I can’t think of something as beautiful if they can’t be touched or used.

Is there a hierarchy to the senses?

You can’t separate one from another.  All the senses are so built in together.  I’m interested in the Western approach where things that are more bodily are debased. For instance, why are the eyes are elevated over the mouth or the nose.  I try to think about why that is so and try to push at that and problematize that. When I create work, it is very much about a sense of the palpable – I want my work to have a smell, almost. It’s a false dichotomy of elevating the mind over body, it’s a problematic dichotomy.  It leads to a host of other problematic associations and beliefs that we aren’t animals.  We are animals. The whole mind body split, the Descartes theory, has been so influential.  Now it’s changed quite a bit in the last 20 or 30 years, but when I was in art school there was still the Clement Greenberg split. The work that I’ve been interested in, be it Literature or visual, has tended towards work that tried to figure out the relationship and see the relationship between those categories.  I’m interested in why we tend to fall into categories so easily and why those are so difficult to tear down and why they’re so reassuring to have those categories in place.