fall design

A Soho Loft That Still Feels Like a Soho Loft

The artist Dorothea Rockburne hasn’t done much to the place since 1974.

The Front Studio: Here, Dorothea Rockburne is currently creating various works investigating knot theory. Photo: Annie Schlechter
The Front Studio: Here, Dorothea Rockburne is currently creating various works investigating knot theory. Photo: Annie Schlechter

In 1974, the painter Dorothea Rockburne was living in a walk-up on Chambers Street when she received an eviction notice from her landlord. Until that point, she’d been supporting herself and her daughter by waitressing and assisting Robert Rauschenberg, and she was forced to move just as she was offered her first solo show at MoMA. “So I started looking at these dreary, cramped apartments — then someone told me about this place,” she says. What she saw was a barren 6,200-square-foot Soho space in what had originally been built as a hotel and later converted to a furniture factory. “I said to myself, ‘Well, better too big than too small,’ and I took it.”

Rockburne is sitting on a sofa in a little grouping of furniture — all of which is covered with moving blankets (to protect the pieces from her cat) — in her vast front room, which is flooded with light from the 12-foot windows. A wall separates the front room from the back part of the floor, which Rockburne uses as a painting studio, exhibition space, and office. (Right now, she’s preparing to install a show of her carbon works at Dia:Beacon that will open this fall, an expansion of her long-term exhibit on view now.) Since moving here 44 years ago, she has added only a kitchen and bathroom. “It’s like my work,” Rockburne says of her home. “It isn’t tarted up. My work is straightforward, and the answers are there because that’s the answer; there is no other answer. And that’s how this place is.”

The Front Studio: Rockburne at work. Photo: Annie Schlechter
The Bedroom Nook: Next to the bedroom door is a ladder that leads to a loft area with a bed for guests. The column of framed photos is by English photographer Eadweard Muybridge, while a drawing of the Dendera Temple hangs above the door. Photo: Annie Schlechter
The Kitchen: Rockburne put in this bare-bones but very functional kitchen when she moved in. The wood counter in front of the stove is her cat Mahoney’s favorite spot in the apartment to lounge. Photo: Annie Schlechter
The Back Studio: Rockburne uses this as an exhibition space and painting studio. The plastic panels hung behind the original Corinthian columns shield the office and archive area on the other side of the room. Photo: Annie Schlechter
The Back Studio: One side of the back studio with grouped works from left to right on the wall: Gravitational Pull, A Cosmic Vocabulary, and Astronomy Drawings. Photo: Annie Schlechter
The Back Studio: A detail of one of the columns in the back studio near the area where Rockburne paints. Photo: Annie Schlechter
The Back Studio: One side of the back studio, shown here, with Cydney Williams, Rockburne’s studio manager, working at the computer. This area stores archival material and supplies. Photo: Annie Schlechter

*A version of this article appears in the September 3, 2018, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!

A Soho Loft That Still Feels Like a Soho Loft