Draft:Bonnie Rychlak

• Comment: More inappropriate subjective commentary incudes
  *“Padded and essentially wrapped, the cubes acquired an inside or at least the lure of an inside and thus a paradoxical suggestion of depth. But the interior was never accessible or even fully present, impelling 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." Her method in the 1980s strove to be inclusive rather than exclusive.”
  *”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”
  *”Her sculptures in wax share in a tale of disruption and playful decrepitude. She describes her practice as blunt but joyfully humorous. 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.Please remove/re-write in plain dry neutral tone. Theroadislong (talk) 16:33, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

• Comment: Please remove subjective commentary like "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." If this is a quote then it needs a source if it is your own opinion it should be removed as original research. Theroadislong (talk) 15:09, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

• Comment: Please provide sources for the public collections, notability hinges on this. Theroadislong (talk) 21:12, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

• Comment: You are also editing the sane draft here User:Gaw54/sandbox please only edit one version! Theroadislong (talk) 20:38, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

• Comment: Rychlak would have to pass the criteria at WP:NARTIST and it's not clear how they would yet? Theroadislong (talk) 15:37, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

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Bonnie Rychlak (born 1951) is an American artist, curator, and writer. Her work has been featured in various solo and group exhibitions in the United States, Europe, and Japan and is in collections in the United States, Europe and Asia. 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. She attended Santa Monica College and the University of California at Los Angeles as an undergraduate, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts. Rychlak received a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture in 1976 at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She married the artist Brian Gaman in 1973; together they built a notable modernist art retreat in Springs, Long Island not far from the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center. 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 in the New York art world, along with her first one-person gallery exhibition at the Rastovsky Gallery in 1988.

Art career

In the 1980s, Rychlak created parodies from the minimalist agenda. Reviewing an exhibition of her work, critic Ephraim Birnbaum commented: "Take her brilliant parodies of the minimalist cube. As a feminist riposte to the po-faced embargoes of Judd et al, they are priceless, converting mutely literal primary structures into no doubt rage-inducing upholstered, pillowed, buttoned and bowed boxes.

In a review of the works in Rychlak's 1989 solo exhibition at the Rastosky Gallery in New York, Art News critic Tiffany Bell, noted that “Rychlak contrasts the implied utility of the form with the preciousness of encaustic-a traditional material for art making. One might say it’s about transformation-either art humbled by the use of the mundane material or the materials made elegant and beautiful by the use of artistic form."

In an Arts Magazine review of the same 1989 asolo show, critic Robert Morgan addressed Rychlak’s neo-minimalist approach, noting that “Bonnie Rychlak’s show at Rastovski (February 2-25) is an extension of neo-minimalist sensibilities but without the distancing effects seen in works by such artists as Ronald Jones, Allan McCollum, and Louise Lawler. Rychlak’s artful abstractions, often based on furnishings, have an erotic intertextuality that brings geometry back in touch with tactile reality."

Rychlak's work in the 1990s, which she termed photo narratives "is strongly illustrative of an invitation to plumb unassailable depths in a series based on photographs, evoking cut up and hand colored 'secrets' covered by thickly pebbled glass. The image inside the clean white box, reminiscent of medicine cabinets, can be read as banal or sinister, or just mysterious."

When a Village Voice critic visited Rychlak’s studio on Lafayette Street before her show opened in 1994 at Gallery Three Zero, she "was struck by the familiarity of the hay images in shadow boxes behind mottled-glass coverings. Rychlak’s hand colored photo blowups of family snapshots mounted on mirror several inches beneath the blurring glass are mementos from her childhood.”

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. Briefly experimenting with colored resin in the early 2000s, she opted to return exclusively to carving of wax. Her sculptures in wax share in a tale of disruption and playful decrepitude. She describes her practice as blunt but joyfully humorous. Her current subjects are unfixed, drifting between ambiguity and the actual, drawing on unsettling juxtapositions of materials and metaphors.

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 between the two artists' works. "The dichotomy between ugly and beautiful is foundational for both artists," wrote curator Terry Sultan in the catalog for the exhibition, "as is the recognition that tough topics are often best addressed and alleviated with humor."

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.

Rychlak's work is in important private collections in Japan, the United Kingdom, Verona, Italy, New York and East Hampton, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, California. Public collections showcasing her work include the ,Department of Art at Harvard University, Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, and Department of Art at New York University of California at Los Angeles. In Japan, her work is in the collections of Shizuoka-ken Prefectural Museum of Art.

CURATORIAL CAREER [edit ]

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 foreword to the reprint of Noguchi's 1968 autobiography, Isamu Noguchi: A Sculptor's World as well as other seminal essays that accompanied exhibitions.

Noguchi and the Figure was Rychlak's first international curatorial project. Organized 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, respectfully 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 years. 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, that illustrated Noguchi'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 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 that subsequently took part in 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. From 2011 to 2018, she was a curatorial partner with Peter Hopkins, director and founder of ArtHelix, a Brooklyn gallery, helping 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.