Commissioned by the Hudson River Museum, Porcelain Dreams and Gilded Schemes is a site-specific installation by Rachel Sydlowski that reimagines the ornate interiors of the Gilded Age through a critical, contemporary lens.
Drawing imagery from the museum’s historic Glenview home — including its collection of Kangxi Chinese blue-and-white porcelain — the work fuses fabulism with historical critique. Design motifs, liberated from porcelain cups and vases, spill across an upturned parlor room, enveloping visitors in a maximalist space of beauty and chaos.
The installation parallels two eras of grandeur and instability: America's Gilded Age and China's early Qing Dynasty. During the transitional Jingdezhen period, civil war and political turmoil disrupted traditional porcelain production, pushing artisans to create for private and foreign markets. Similarly, the Gilded Age, often celebrated for its opulence, was also a time of rampant greed, corruption, and social upheaval.
By connecting these histories, Porcelain Dreams and Gilded Schemes invites viewers to consider how aesthetics and material excess can simultaneously mask — and reveal — deeper fractures within society.
Responding to the agricultural and dairy history of Wassaic and Amenia, Blue Arcadia transforms a steel molasses tank into a dreamlike folly. Hundreds of printed magnet-sheets, arranged in arching forms, reference beet‑sugar and dairy production—flowering cowslips playfully nod to the milk-train’s route to New‑York City. The piece melds Gilded‑Age architectural motifs and pastoral myths, reimagining industrial relics as visual poetry
All images courtesy of Jenna Bascom
Coinciding with the return of the cicadas after a seventeen-year hibernation, this site-specific installation also marks a downturn in the COVID infection rates and the beginning of summer. The enclosed space allows visitors a place of sanctuary and respite. Woven in the dense foliage are hundreds of paper cicadas. The title is taken from the Maria Elena Walsh song Como La Ciggara whose lyrics poetically describe resiliency in the face of severe adversity.
Acid Glasshouse is a speculative environment—a hybrid vivarium where prints, patterns, and sculptural forms imagine how flora and fauna might adapt to a toxic or post-industrial world. Drawing from botanical illustration, decorative arts, and ecological collapse, the installation evokes both greenhouse and ruin: a fragile shelter in which growth is still possible, even under acid skies. Through this imagined architecture, the work questions what survives—and how beauty persists—in an increasingly hostile landscape.
Site-specific installation at Bronx Children’s Museum
The numerous plants, animals, and fish making the Bronx River their home are sometimes difficult to see. This installation uses a form of printmaking called screen-printing to reproduce the lush river environment. Black light is used to make the invisible, visible, illuminating the often unseen yet vibrant wildlife. American lady, viceroy, and eastern tiger swallowtail butterflies hover above burdock flowers. Sunfish, alewives, and mummichog swim in the currents. Painted turtles sun themselves along the riverbank while wood ducks, an egret, a black cormorant, and gray tree frogs weave in and out of the dense green canopy. While the varied forms of life along the river are well hidden, patience and a keen eye can learn to spot even the most camouflaged wildlife.
Site-specific installation, 2019
Sunroom Project Space, Wave Hill
Rachel Sydlowski creates an installation addressing history and the natural world in Wave Hill’s Sunroom. Parlor in the Wilderness comprises layers of historical wallpaper that serve as background for complex, screen-print collages of flora and fauna, architectural details and decorative motifs from Wave Hill, Inwood Hill Park and other surrounding green spaces in New York. Freestanding in the space are decorative objects made by Sydlowski and a wrought-iron, circular bench. Her project transforms the room into a collage of the past and present—a reconstruction and reinterpretation of traditional histories based on her research.
The color palette from the west to north walls of the Sunroom ranges from yellow to green to blue, addressing successive time periods. The yellow wall depicts prehistoric plants while the yellow-green wall focuses on agriculture, specifically corn, squash and climbing beans—three main crops of indigenous peoples in North America. The darker-green wall portrays rare plants and their aesthetic beauty, and the blue (north) wall features a contemporary environment filled with invasive and native plant species. Forms and details of Wave Hill’s architectural features, as well as flora and fauna in various stages of growth and decay, are emphasized as part of each wall’s tableau.
Investigating America’s ecological and architectural histories, Sydlowski focuses on its changing landscape and its excesses, failures and rapid growth. In urban areas, cultivated gardens and public parks are accepted as nature—spaces for contemplation, meditation and escape. In this “domesticated nature,” Sydlowski blurs the lines between familiar and unfamiliar, fact and fiction.
Organized by Curator of Visual Arts Eileen Jeng Lynch, the Sunroom Project Space provides an opportunity for New York-area emerging artists to develop a site-specific project to exhibit in a solo show.
Hummelland or Small Acts of Resistance places Hummel figurines in fantastical compositions free from their normalized cultural context such as the curio-cabinet, mantlepiece, or as objects of kitsch. Interested in the mindset of the collector and the historical enthusiasms surrounding porcelain, artist Rachel Sydlowski investigates the origins of Hummel figurines. The experiential synthesis of viewing Hummel collections in private homes and the novel Utz by the British writer Bruce Chatwin guided this collection of digital collages that recontextualize porcelain figurines in quixotic dreamscapes with saturated colors, sacred geometry, lush gardens, and forests.
Behind the cheerful uncanniness of these nostalgic collectibles hides a complex history of faith, rebellion, and hope. Hummels are the invention of Sister Maria Innoctia Hummel, a German nun who initially drew the ire of Adolf Hitler in 1933 for her painting The Volunteers. She continued incorporating imagery like the Star of David into her drawings and figurines until her order was forcibly closed. The artist comments, “I find Hummels both intriguing and repelling. They seem strange in their sweet and overly optimistic poses. I imagine each figurine has an intricate backstory, a personal history, and a contextual history as an object of material culture. I wanted to know more about the conditions that supported the manufacture of these fanciful figurines in an enduring material like porcelain. The Hummel collection and the book Utz by Bruce Chatwin share some commonalities. Utz is the story of a mad collector, his obsession with porcelain intertwined with the myth of the Golem set in post-war Europe. Like M.I. Hummel, who rebelled through kitsch and craft, the fictional character Utz is a bit of a rebel too, but in a completely different way. He refuses to relinquish his priceless collection of Meissen figurines to a totalitarian state. He goes to comically absurd lengths to protect the Meissen figurines by creating a sanctuary for the collection within his cramped apartment. The explicit Hummel collection and the imaginary or implicit Meissen collection of Utz speak to the alchemical qualities of the porcelain figurine. I construct fabulist landscapes and alternate realities for these objects through digital renderings. Additionally, Utz and Hummel figurines sublimate objects of kitsch into acts of rebellion, which is incredibly interesting since the objects seem utterly benign in their static state.”
Dissemination of Hummels into the homes of thousands of collectors globally was a collective gesture for post-war peace, even while the uncommon circumstances of the maker were in a perpetual state of erasure. Ultimately the sublimation of porcelain kitsch objects in this exhibition is a re-examination of small acts of rebellion and dissent. Resistance exists in many forms including joy, folly, and idealism.
Serigraphs, wallpaper
This paper installation maps a non-linear history of Inwood Hill Park through native plants, local wildlife, and remnants of built architecture. Drawing on decorative arts and historical floral motifs, the screenprinted panels evoke the indulgent aesthetics of the region’s privileged past. A restrained monochromatic palette creates visual cohesion, while the layered collage and dense patterning introduce tension between excess and erasure. The result is both seductive and unsettling—a space poised between ruin and regeneration, where ornament becomes a lens for ecological memory and transformation.
Vivarium is a large-scale installation that conjures a fabricated wilderness—an ornate, contemplative ecosystem where birds and flora are curated, contained, and aestheticized. Thousands of hand-printed serigraphs are collaged into a lush yet fragile microcosm, where birds nest in improbable places and foliage stretches with impossible precision. This imagined Eden, while seductive, is precariously constructed; its elaborate harmony suggests not stability, but collapse.
Lotus flowers, recurring throughout the work, evoke both mythic escapism—via the Lotus-Eaters—and enduring symbols of rebirth and spiritual perseverance. Greenery cantilevers beyond reason, reflecting the ambition and overreach of human-controlled nature.
The imagery draws from Kono Bairei’s 19th-century bird studies, vintage botanical illustrations, and neoclassical garden urns, all culled from open-access archives and auction catalogs. Through a labor-intensive process of layering, printing, and recomposition, these references are stripped of their original context. The resulting tableaux point to larger questions of migration, loss, and ecological transformation in the wake of industrialization and aesthetic consumption.
Rachel Sydlowski
Screenprint collage, hand printed upholstery, vintage chairs and table, acrylic paint, cardboard, UV-A light
In Assembly of Ciphers at the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum, I intervene with the architectural space of the front parlor to challenge and reframe the historical narrative of this space. Once a leisure area for the Dyckman family, this room is transformed into a space that honors and recognizes the lives of enslaved peoples from Upper Manhattan—specifically those enslaved by the Dyckman family. The work serves as a meditation on the complexities of history and the ways in which spaces, objects, and structures can hold untold stories that demand to be uncovered. How can we truly know the past? How do we connect with those who lived before us? Assembly of Ciphers forces the viewer to confront these questions, positioning them as active participants in unearthing fragments of history and interpreting a cryptic code.
False artifacts replace some of the existing furniture, and decorative elements of the farmhouse, replacing the portraits of the Dyckman family with UV-A sensitive images, and placing ceremonial and mourning garments—an elegant formal dress and suit created by Marquise Foster within the parlor disrupts the authority of the Dyckman family. These garments, presented as "false artifacts" in the context of the Dyckman home, serve to collapse the boundaries between the past and present, blending historical memory with contemporary reinterpretation. The clothing acts as both a symbol of loss and a marker of resistance, suggesting the presence of lives and histories that were once silenced.
The room is further transformed with cobalt blue prints of native and medicinal plants, connecting directly with the delft tiles that decorate the hearth—a pastoral motif that echoes the comfort and economic power of the Dyckman family’s life, while simultaneously highlighting the natural resources that sustained both the wealthy and the enslaved. Hidden beneath this aesthetic layer, I add a layer of invisible ultraviolet imagery: native plants from the lands of the enslaved, excerpts from historical documents, and the names of enslaved individuals, all encoded in an ultraviolet medium. To reveal these hidden traces of history, viewers must engage with the space using a blacklight or UV-A lantern. This method of revelation forces the viewer to actively search for and uncover the past, making the act of discovering these concealed histories an intimate, participatory experience.
The chairs that form a circle in the center of the parlor are symbolic of an assembly or meeting space—an invitation for viewers to engage in a collective reflection and conversation. The act of sitting in this space, once a place of leisure for the Dyckman family, now becomes a space for reckoning and contemplation, where the legacies of enslavement and resistance come into focus.
By activating the space, Assembly of Ciphers asks visitors to reconsider the lives of those who were enslaved and the histories that were erased or overlooked. Rather than restoring lost histories, this work creates a space for the viewer to inhabit the parlor and engage directly with the past. The complex code of history is activated in the present moment, creating an opportunity for reflection and dialogue. In this way, the installation does not merely present a historical narrative, but empowers the viewer to be a part of the process of uncovering and interpreting that narrative. In doing so, the act of being present in the space, engaging with the past, and reflecting on it, becomes a step toward creating a more just and informed future—a future that acknowledges the untold histories and seeks to right the wrongs of the past
Keeping Room
Keeping rooms date back to Colonial times. The keeping room, located directly off the kitchen, was also the warmest room in the house. By day, families gathered here to do indoor chores, and by night would sleep there during the colder seasons. This functionality engenders social engagement and the keeping room is not only a place to stay warm but a place for friends and family to gather. A staple of early American vernacular architecture this printed version of a keeping room also serves as a vanitas.
Vanitas still lifes are often appreciated for their visual appeal and for their deeper philosophical meaning. Although at first sight this casual assortment of objects may seem random, but each is selected with care and purpose. The fire, teacup and flowers, all speak to the ephemeral quality of life; the clock on the fireplace mantel symbolizes the passing of time; the ornately carved and upholstered furniture represent the fleeting nature of temporal power; and the citrus fruits signify the futility of monetary pursuits. Native plants, hummingbirds and flying insects support and frame the interior composition indicating the need for balance between the aims of human progress and the natural world.
At the nexus of several transportation lines on Fordham Road, Keeping Room presents a quiet sanctuary away from the noise and complexities of modernity, a mnemonic prompt for reflection, spiritual balance and finding beauty in unlikely places.
Paper Garden
Serigraphs on backing paper, LED lights
Installation, dimensions variable
Using a matrix of hand screenprinted imagery, Paper Garden offers an ephemeral, indoor reimagining of Untermyer Park. Printed plants, garden architecture, and ornamental motifs unfurl across architectural surfaces, transforming them into an immersive paper garden. With no framing or fixed boundary, the installation blurs the line between authenticity and illusion—inviting reflection on how natural spaces are curated, staged, and mythologized.
This uncanny interior landscape parallels our experience of urban parks: environments that appear wild yet are carefully designed to simulate wilderness. By transposing the garden indoors, Paper Garden stages a dialogue between interior and exterior, nature and artifice—revealing how both cultivated gardens and ornamental patterns serve as frameworks for controlling and romanticizing the natural world.
