Rachel Feinstein: Maiden, Mother, Crone

This fall, the Jewish Museum presents the first survey of New York-based artist Rachel Feinstein, featuring three decades of sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, and video.

Rachel Feinstein: Maiden, Mother, Crone, the first survey of the New York-based artist in the United States, brings together three decades of Feinstein’s work in sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, and video, as well as a newly commissioned wall-relief, a panoramic wallpaper, and the artist’s sculptural maquettes. From Feinstein’s earliest to her most recent works, female figures and protagonists are a dominant feature, probing how notions of “the feminine” manifest in the popular imagination. Her fascination with the dualistic nature of cultural expression and everyday life, how fundamental yet oppositional concepts coexist and are ceaselessly negotiated in art and the construction of identity.

Sculpture is Feinstein’s primary medium, but her process comprises and retains the visual traces of diverse methods. She realizes her large-scale forms by transforming preparatory drawings and paper maquettes into three dimensions, or fusing painting with object-making. Feinstein also draws upon incongruous sources, time periods, and ideas such as religion and fairy tales, high European craft and American kitsch, or her experience of motherhood and feminist ideologies. She weaves together and deconstructs these perceived binaries, underscoring that there is no reality without fantasy, lightness without darkness, perfection without chaos.

Rachel Feinstein was born in Fort Defiance, Arizona in 1971. She received her BA from Columbia University in 1993, where she studied studio art and religion and worked closely with Kiki Smith and Ursula von Rydingsvard. That same year she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. 

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.