Watershed Moment
Please read our COVID Visitor Requirements before purchasing tickets.
Open Saturdays and Sundays 11 am to 3 pm, free entry with purchase of Daily Grounds Pass and/or Tour ticket. Running until September 26th.
Jorge Otero-Pailos
Watershed Moment
Swimming pool building
Free entry to exhibit: Purchase of Daily Grounds Pass or Landscape Tour ticket required to enter the property by car.
Watershed Moment is a site-specific art installation commissioned to mark the opening of Lyndhurst’s cavernous and unrestored swimming pool building after a period of extensive stabilization of the building’s structure. Combining water sounds and dust and conceived as a meditative space by artist and historic preservation expert Jorge Otero-Pailos, the installation invites visitors to pause and reflect on the memories, both personal, social, and environmental, that define each of us. The installation includes latex casts of the raw brick interior walls of the pool building suspended from ceiling joists over the empty swimming pool below. While perambulating the mosaic tile-inlaid pool deck, visitors can experience these 67-foot-long curtains of glowing latex while being enveloped by a series of water sounds recorded from throughout New York State. In its unrestored state, the building is spacious, unsealed, and well-ventilated with a clear directional path through the exhibition, providing ample social-distancing space between visitors.
Built by Helen Gould in 1911, the Lyndhurst swimming pool building was designed as a Roman bath for the late Gilded Age elite. It was abandoned during World War II when coal was unavailable to heat the boilers. Over the years it was destroyed by water leaking through the roof, causing plaster and wood elements to deteriorate. Today it is evocatively ruined but in a stabilized condition. Watershed Moment marks the first time that the Lyndhurst swimming pool building will be open to the public as a museum space.
About the Artist
Jorge Otero-Pailos is a New York-based artist and preservation architect best known for making monumental casts of historically charged buildings. Drawing from his formal training in architecture and preservation, Otero-Pailos’ art practice deals with memory, culture, and transitions, and invites the viewer to consider buildings and functional objects as powerful agents of change. Many of his artworks are made by preserving parts of monuments deemed insignificant by others, whether it be dust or entire building parts.
Visit
Watershed Moment is a multi-disciplinary art installation that involves the interplay of monumental cast-latex curtains, changing lights, and the sound of six different New York State bodies of water. The exhibition will reopen to the public in its full form from mid-summer through September 26th, 2021. Visitors may enter at any time and stay for any length of time. For those wishing to experience the full interplay of the piece, the entry on the hour or half-hour is recommended. Watershed Moment lasts for 20 minutes with a five-minute period of quiet and contemplation at both the beginning and end. Social distancing will be maintained by a gallery attendant stationed in the building.
Entry to Watershed Moment and the swimming pool building is free. However, those entering Lyndhurst by car are required to either purchase a daily grounds pass or landscape tour to gain access to the property.
Parking
There is no parking near the swimming pool building. Visitors will need to park in the Lyndhurst upper parking lot and walk across estate lawns to reach the exhibit. The swimming pool building is adjacent to the Old Croton Aqueduct trail at the northeastern corner of the Lyndhurst property and is easily accessible to walkers.
Exhibition Schedule
The exhibition will reopen to the public with additional interpretive content from mid-summer through September 26th, 2021. Additional exhibition materials will be included at that time.
Accessibility
The exhibition will reopen to the public with additional interpretive content from mid-summer through September 26th, 2021. Admission to the exhibit is free, visitors arriving by car must purchase a Daily Grounds Pass.
Parking is available Friday – Sunday in our Upper parking lot requiring a five-minute walk across the lawn; bear left off the main drive just past the guard booth. ADA accessibility requires prearrangement; please contact aboesch@savingplaces.org.
Acknowledgments
Watershed Moment is funded in part by ArtsWestchester, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and the New York State Council on the Arts.
Otero-Pailos Studio would like to thank Krystyn Hastings-Silver for general contracting, Daniel Erdberg for sound design, Alex Jainchill for light design, New Project for rigging, and fabrication, Ivkosic Painting for painting, and Gina LeVay for video documentation. We would also like to thank FormD for the virtual tour of the swimming pool building.
