The Al Held Foundation and the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College are pleased to present “Ice House,” a solo exhibition by Maite Iribarren Vázquez, the current Al Held Archive Fellow. This exhibition of five site-specific sculptures was informed by research in the Al Held Foundation’s archive and will be on view in Held’s former drawing studio from June 13–19, 2026.
Maite Iribarren Vázquez is an artist based in Brooklyn, where she creates sculptures and interventions that question standardized forms, revealing projections of the body, labor, and cultural specificity. During her research in the Al Held archive, Iribarren Vázquez became fascinated by the origins of wealthy NYC “Ice King” Harry Bailey who built Beechford Dairy Farms in the 1920s, which Al Held converted into a home and studio between 1965 and 2005. Today the property houses the Al Held Foundation.
The works presented in “Ice House” are infrastructural components for an imagined system. A light blue refrigerant fluid resembling a synthetic milk appears both frozen and pooled. Rags hastily wrapped around leaky pipes are petrified in cast aluminum. Uncanny plumbing components hold latex tubing, copper and glass vessels, curved steel pipe, and silicone breast implants. With these fragments, Iribarren Vázquez suggests the larger body of an unintelligible open system.