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Bonnie Rychlak (born 1951) is an American artist, curator, and writer. Her work has been featured in many solo and group exhibitions in the United States, Europe, and Japan. She is a leading authority on Isamu Noguchi, having curated numerous international exhibitions and authored more than a dozen key publications on his art.

Education and Early Life and Career
Rychlak was born in Venice, California and attended Venice High School. As an undergraduate, she attended Santa Monica College and the University of California at Los Angeles, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree. Rychlak received a Master of Fine Arts degree in sculpture from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1976. She married fellow artist Brian Gaman in 1973; they later built a modernist artists' retreat in the village of Springs in East Hampton, not far from where Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner's studio is preserved as a National Historic Landmark. Rychlak's inclusion in Selections from the Artist Files at Artist Space in 1986 on the heels of New Uses, a consequential group show at White Columns, helped establish her artistic recognition.

Art Career
In the 1980s, Rychlak created parodies from the minimalist agenda. As a feminist riposte to the embargoes of Donald Judd and others, her sculptures converted primary structures into upholstered, pillowed, buttoned, and bowed boxes. This decorative re-surfacing was a paradoxical suggestion of depth. Padded and essentially wrapped, the cubes acquired an inside or at least the lure of an inside. But the interior was never accessible or even fully present. With no possibility of opening the box, using mirrors in her boxes, the viewer was only subliminally aware that there was an "underneath." These works impel one's gaze away from the sculptures by replicating their surroundings. Her mirrors force the viewer to look inside the box to see not only the duplicated surroundings but also the perceiving subject, thus providing the elusive "content."

Rychlak's work for the past thirty years is strongly illustrative of this invitation to plumb unassailable depths in series based on photographs, evoking cut up and hand colored "secrets" perversely covered by thickly pebbled glass. Visibility is low, so low that if images are discerned at all, they are reduced to a wavering generality. The image inside the clean white box, reminiscent of medicine cabinets, can be read as banal or sinister, or just mysterious.

Along with these "photo narratives," as Rychlak refers to them, her sculptures in wax have been a constant enterprise throughout her forty-year artistic career. Experimenting with colored resin in the early 2000s, she opted for the more direct carving of wax. Her sculptures in wax share in a tale of disruption and playful decrepitude. As she references other everyday objects and urban debris, her motifs have been deflated or incongruously repurposed or converted to the "dark side" of the non-functional. She describes her practice as blunt but joyfully humorous.

Rychlak collaborated in 2021 with fellow New York artist Jeanne Silverthorne in mounting the exhibition Down and Dirty at the Lupin Foundation Gallery at the University of Georgia. The exhibition, which subsequently traveled to the Arts Center at Duck Creek in East Hampton, NY and Project ArtSpace in New York City (2023), showcased conceptual and formal affinities in the two artists' work. "The dichotomy between ugly and beautiful is foundational for both artists," wrote curator Terrie Sultan in the catalog for the exhibition, "as is the recognition that tough topics are often best addressed and alleviated with humor."

Ventilation grilles, drains, and grates, Rychlak seems comfortable with loss, with the rejected and the unplumbed. Her current subjects are unfixed, drifting between ambiguity and the actual, drawing on unsettling juxtapositions of materials and metaphors.

Her current work embraces the dysfunctional and unwanted, forms that invoke the archeology of urbanism, industry, and the failed environment. Her process is labor-intensive and transformative, using mutable materials such as beeswax and paraffin.

Solo
2009

●  Memory and Oblivion. The Viewing Room. April 1-29. 55 West 21st Street, NYC

2006

●  Cutting Holes in Water. ASK? Art Space Kimura. September 19 – September 30. Tokyo 1994 ●   Screen Memories. February 10 - March 5. Gallery Three Zero. NYC.

1993

●   Role Models/Disparate Narratives. November 9 – December 1. The Sculpture Center. NYC. 1991

●   New Works: Bonnie Rychlak. January 19 –February 28. Shoshanna Wayne Gallery. Santa Monica, California.

1988

●   Objects as Sculpture. Rastovsky Gallery. New York. February. NYC

Group
2023

●    Down and Dirty: Bonnie Rychlak and Jeanne Silverthorne (3rd Iteration), Project ArtSpace, NYC

2021

●    Down and Dirty: Bonnie Rychlak and Jeanne Silverthorne, January 15 – February 26, Lupin Foundation Gallery, University of Georgia; 1 May – 6 June, Arts Center at Duck Creek, East Hampton, NY

2020

●    Consummate Plush, 17 March – 19 April. Patchogue Arts Council, MoCA, Patchogue, NY

2018

●    Desire in the Bangles. July 27-Labor Day. R.E. Steele Antiques, East Hampton, NY

●    Black and White and Re(a)d All Over: Part III. Curated by Peter Hopkins. Critical Kunst, okk/raum traveled from:  Galleria Huuto Jatkasarri, May 5 – May 27, Helsinki, Finland

●    No Longer Supported. March 24 – April 19. Sara Nightengale Gallery, Sag Harbor, NY ●    A Radical Voice: 23 Women. February 17 – March 25. Curated by Janet Goleas. Southampton Arts Center, Southampton, NY

2017 ●    R & R Mari Rantanen and Bonnie Rychlak, October 7 - October 23. Ille Arts, Amagansett, NY

●     The Unreliable Narrator. March 3-26. ArtHelix Gallery, Bushwick, NYC

●     Deferred Vision. March 28 – March 6. Curated by Romanov Grave for Spring Break, NYC

2016 ●      Fish Tank. September 16 – October 31. Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus NY

●      Black and White and Re(a)d All Over: Part II. September 16 – October 16. ArtHelix, Bushwick, NYC

●      Diminishing Intervals. March 25 - April 17. Curated by Jackie Cantwell.Shim at ArtHelix, Bushwick, NYC

2015 ●    Reinventing the Helm: Self-Styled Nautical Activists Pirate the Canon of Maritime Art. June 6 - August 3. Sara Nightingale Gallery, Water Mill, NY ●     Comedies and Tragedies. April 30 – June 27. Hudson Guild Gallery, NYC

2014 ●    Redacted. Curated by Janet Goleas. April 13 - June 1. Islip Art Museum, East Islip, NY

2013 ●    Physical Property. Brian Morris Gallery. November 15 - December 5, NYC

●     The Moby Project. Installation at Mulford Farms, East Hampton, NY, September 27 - October 5

●     Skin Trade. P.P.O.W. June 27 - July 26 NYC

●     Slight of Hand. Brian Morris Gallery. June 26 - July 27 NYC

●     Modest Sublime. ArtHelix. April 12 - May 4, Bushwick, NYC

2012-2013

●     Sculpture Key West. December 1, 2012–March 23, 2013, Zachary Taylor Historic State Park, Key West, Florida

2012 ●    Kathryn Markel Fine Arts. June 2 – 30, Bridgehampton, New York 11932

2011 ●    Twin Twin. Curated by Matt Freedman. Pierogi Gallery, Brooklyn, New York

2008 ●    Thresholds of Visibility, August 2 - August 24. Surface Library Gallery, East Hampton, NY

2007 ●    So This Is How It All Began… September 27 - November 26. Hudson Guild Guild Gallery, NYC

●     Wrapped. June 9 - July 9. Surface Library Gallery. East Hampton, NY

2002-2004 ●    H2O. Traveling Exhibition. Curated by JoAnna Isaak. October 9, 2002, at Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA; Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI; Houghton House Gallery Hobart and William Smith College, Geneva; Renato Danese Gallery, New York, New York; June 2003. Santa Fe Art Institute, October 2003-January 2004

2002 ●    Strength In Numbers. Curated by Lincoln C. Caplan. October 10. Williamsburg Art & Historical Center, Brooklyn, NY

2001 ●    Artists Choose Artists. Parrish Art Museum, October 6-November 11. Southampton, NY

●    The Language of Vision. May 12 –June 3rd. Williamsburg Art & Historical Center, Brooklyn, NY

2000 ●    Momenta Benefit Exhibition. April 22-May 2. Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY

1999-2000 ●       Encaustic Works. December 4, 1999 - January 8, 2000. R&F Gallery. Kingston, NY

Curational Career
As a curator, Rychlak worked for the Noguchi Museum for thirty years (1980-2010) beginning her association with the foundation as an assistant to Isamu Noguchi (1980-1988). As a leading authority on Isamu Noguchi and his œuvre, she was also managing editor of his catalog raisonne Her numerous exhibitions and writings include a forward to the reprint of Noguchi's 1968 autobiography, Isamu Noguchi: A Sculptor's World as well as other seminal essays that accompanied exhibitions. Bonnie Rychlak's earliest exhibition, Noguchi and the Figure, was her first international curatorial project. Organized in 1999 for Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey and the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City, it was the first critical analysis of Noguchi's sculptures in relation to the figure. In all of her writings about Noguchi and his work, she examined his legacy through his process and strategies, allaying art history's tendency to mythologize him. Through some of her essays and exhibitions, she reflected on the popularized exemplification of his "spirituality" as well as his understudied advances related to Japanese conventions of ceramics and furniture design.

In 1981, Noguchi introduced Rychlak to thousands of negatives and notebook drawings connected to a world travel grant he received from the Bollingen Foundation in the 1950s that took him around the world over a six-year period. Noguchi had hoped to use the material for another autobiography and kept it private during his lifetime. Rychlak ultimately staged an exhibition of this project fifteen years after Noguchi's death, illustrating the artist's deep interest in other cultures and the journey's impact on his artistic evolution.

During The Bollingen Journey exhibition at the Noguchi Museum, Elena Ochoa Foster, founder and creative director of Ivory Press, visited the presentation and subsequently selected photographs from the thousands of images not employed in the exhibition. Rychlak advised and wrote the commentary for the editioned book produced by Ivory Press.

After her employment at the Noguchi Museum, Rychlak organized On Display in Orange County: Modern and Contemporary Sculpture in 2011 as part of the Pacific Standard Time project in California. She also worked as a curatorial consultant to art patron Henry Segerstrom until 2018, producing several exhibitions for him in South Coast Plaza, California, and authoring a monograph on him. Simultaneously she taught at the Pratt Art Institute and sat on the exhibition committee for the LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton, New York. In 2012, she organized an outdoor sculpture exhibition for the LongHouse as well as also participating as a curatorial partner with Peter Hopkins, director and founder of ArtHelix, a gallery in Bushwick, helping to organize several exhibitions for the gallery.

Awards
Bonnie Rychlak received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1976, a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation for a residency at the Bellagio Study Center in 1985, the Prix de Rome from the American Academy in Rome in 1990, and a residency at the Bogliasco Foundation in 2013 and 2020.