Rachel Sydlowski is a visual artist and educator. She makes large-scale mixed-media installations, sculptures, and prints informed by historical architecture, planned gardens, and native plants. Recent exhibitions include a long-term installation at The Bronx Children’s Museum, and site-specific installations at the Hudson River Museum, Dyckman Farmhouse Museum, Wassaic Project, Meta Open Arts, and MoCA Westport. Curatorial projects include; Building it Up to Tear it Down, Patterns of Power, No Nature, and Lucky to be Here. She holds a BFA from SMFA/Tufts, two graduate degrees from The City University of New York; an MFA in Printmaking, and an MA in Art Education.
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.