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Bonnie Rychlak (born 1951) is an American artist, curator, and writer. Her work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the United States, Europe, and Japan. As a curator, Rychlak worked for the Noguchi Museum (Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum) for thirty years (1980-2010) beginning her association with the foundation as an assistant to Isamu Noguchi (1980-1988). She is considered an authority on Isamu Noguchi and his œuvre. After her employ at the foundation, Rychlak worked as a curatorial consultant to Henry Segerstrom until 2018. She taught at the Pratt Institute from September 2011 to 2013 and since has had numerous curatorial and writing projects as a consultant. As a writer, Rychlak has written numerous catalogue essays related to Isamu Noguchi and authored a book on Henry Segerstrom in 2013.

Early Life and Education
Bonnie Rychlak was born in Venice, California. She attended Venice High School, graduating in 1969. As an undergraduate, Rychlak attended Santa Monica College and the University of California at Los Angeles, graduating cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree. Rychlak married the artist Brian Gaman (1948-2014) in 1973 and attended graduate school at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst where she received a Master of Fine Arts degree in sculpture in 1976.

Style and Career
In the 1980s, Rychlak created parodies of the minimalist agenda. As a feminist riposte to the embargoes of Donald Judd et al., her sculptures converted mutely literal primary structures into upholstered, pillowed, buttoned, and bowed boxes. This decorative re-surfacing was a paradoxical suggestion of depth. Padded, 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." But unlike Judd's reflective finishes, the mirrors were on the inside of a cube. Whereas Judd's polished objects push the viewer out centrifugally, away from the sculptures, by replicating their surroundings, Rychlak's 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." All this without reasserting some essentialist center, or immutable core of "truth" or "fact." Her method in the 1980s was merely inclusive rather than exclusive. In the 1990s and continuing for another thirty years, the work that, along with her later drain forms, is most strongly illustrative of this invitation to plumb unassailable depths is the series based on photographs, 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 sculpture in wax has been a constant enterprise throughout her forty-year artistic career. Now in the form of wax drains, her sculptures 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. Ventilation grilles, drains, 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. The drain forms 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.

Awards

 * National Endowment for the Arts Grant -- 1976
 * Rockefeller Foundation Residency Fellowship at the Bellagio Study Center -- 1985
 * American Academy in Rome Prix de Rome -- 1990
 * Bogliasco Foundation Residency -- 2013
 * Bogliasco Foundation Residency -- 2020

Curatorial Writings

 * Rychlak, Bonnie. Beyond the Curtain (2016-2017). Six articles. Monthly online magazine
 * Rychlak, Bonnie, The Courage of Imagination: The Cultural Legacy of Henry T. Segerstrom. New York and Paris: Assouline Publishing, 2013
 * Rychlak, Bonnie. Diversities of Sculpture/Derivations from Nature. exhibition catalogue. April 28 – October 26, 2012. LongHouse Reserve, East Hampton
 * Rychlak, Bonnie. On Display in Orange County: Modern and Contemporary Sculpture. exhibition catalogue. November 30 – January 2011. South Coast Plaza, Costa Mesa, CA
 * Rychlak, Bonnie, et al. Isamu Noguchi: Between East and West. Torino: Umberto Allemandi & Co., 2010
 * Rychlak, Bonnie, et al. Design: Isamu Noguchi and Isamu Kenmochi: In Search of the Authentic. New York: Five Ties Publishing in association with The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, 2007
 * Iyer, Pico, & Rychlak, Bonnie. Isamu Noguchi and the Bollingen Journey: Photographs and Drawings. London: Ivory Press, 2007
 * Rychlak, Bonnie. Metamorphosis in Clay: Noguchi in Kamakura. Noguchi’s Romance with Ceramic. exhibition catalogue. October 10, 2006 - January 7, 2007. Madrid: Fundacion ICO, 2006
 * Rychlak, Bonnie. Isamu Noguchi: Connecting the World Through Sculpture. Shifting Desires for Parks and Playgrounds: Noguchi's Landscape Designs. exhibition catalogue. July 8 – September 8, 2006. Yokohama: Yokohama Museum of Art, 2005
 * List, Larry. Forward by Bonnie Rychlak. The Imagery of Chess Revisited. New York: George Braziller Publishers, 2005
 * Rychlak, Bonnie, et al. Noguchi and Graham: A Spiritual Quest. exhibition catalogue. December 2, 2004 – May 1, 2005. N.Y.: The Noguchi Museum, 2004
 * Rychlak, Bonnie, et al. Isamu Noguchi, Master Sculptor, Sitting Quietly: Isamu Noguchi and the Zen Aesthetic (reprint), exhibition catalogue. October 28, 2004 – January 16, 2005, The Whitney Museum of American Art; February 10 – May 8, 2005, The Hirshhorn Museum. London: Scala Publishers, 2004
 * Noguchi, Isamu. Forward by Bonnie Rychlak and R. Buckminister Fuller. Isamu Noguchi: A Sculptor's World. 1968 Reprint. Gottingen: Steidl, 2004
 * Rychlak, Bonnie. Forward by Ian Buruma. Noguchi and the Figure. Exhibition. February – May, 1999, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey; and June – September 1999, Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, 1999