Rachel Sydlowski is a visual artist and educator whose large-scale mixed-media installations, sculptures, and prints investigate the layered histories embedded in architecture, ornamentation, and cultivated landscapes. Drawing from archival research, historic decorative arts, and native ecologies, her work reframes the decorative as a site of both cultural memory and critical inquiry. Through processes rooted in printmaking, digital collage, and installation, Sydlowski examines how visual systems—like wallpaper, porcelain patterns, and institutional interiors—reflect systems of power, erasure, and aspiration.
Her recent exhibitions include a long-term immersive installation at the Bronx Children’s Museum and site-specific commissions at the Hudson River Museum, Dyckman Farmhouse Museum, Wassaic Project, Meta Open Arts, and MoCA Westport. These projects often incorporate local history and environmental references, connecting ornamental design traditions with the socio-political contexts that shaped them.
In parallel with her studio practice, Sydlowski curates exhibitions that extend her research-based approach into collaborative frameworks. Curatorial projects such as Building It Up to Tear It Down, Patterns of Power, No Nature, and Lucky to Be Here center artists whose work engages with ideas of place, labor, and visual culture, particularly in relation to the built and natural environment.
Sydlowski holds a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and two graduate degrees from the City University of New York: an MFA in Printmaking and an MA in Art Education. She is currently based in New York, where she balances her practice as a contemporary artist with her role as an arts educator and advocate for interdisciplinary learning and community engagement.
I engage with historical furniture forms and collaged serigraphs to examine the intersections of cultural heritage, environmentalism, and sustainability. By repurposing prints and decorative objects from past centuries—objects that once symbolized status, comfort, and domesticity—I seek to recontextualize them in a contemporary dialogue about excess, consumption, and environmental degradation. These historical pieces, often crafted with an eye toward permanence and beauty, are transformed into symbols of obsolescence and waste in an age of disposable culture.
I primarily use scientific collections, museum open-access archives, and auction catalogs to collect source material. This analog and digital process includes transforming incomplete images, adding or enhancing degraded images, and using digital collage systems to create new imagery from a sparsity of information. Within this process is the freedom to become a mythmaker and fabulist, taking one image, and recontextualizing it away from provenance, collections, museum archives, or ownership. Artworks are further prioritized for the people through translation into print media, reproducible, modular, and compactable, ready to adapt to any space and purpose.
My installations are covered with intricate, hand-pulled serigraphs, layered in a collage format that echoes the fragmentation of nature and society. These prints—derived from patterns and imagery that reference both the natural world and industrialized production—act as a visual commentary on the ways human actions disrupt the balance of the environment. Through this juxtaposition of historical form and contemporary environmental concerns, I create a space where the viewer is confronted with the paradox of beauty and waste, permanence and fragility. This work positions itself as a political stance on environmentalism, calling attention to the urgency of sustainable practices and the ethical responsibilities embedded in our relationships with objects, materials, and the earth. The act of covering walls in these layered prints speaks to the complexity of human impact on the planet—how history, culture, and consumption are inextricably linked to the environmental challenges we face today. The act of repurposing historical forms and collaging them with prints that reflect nature’s vulnerability considers the cost of progress and the possibility of renewal through collective action and reflection.