Rachel Perry is an interdisciplinary artist working in drawing, sculpture, video, photography, textile and performance. She’s exhibited globally in group exhibitions and had solo exhibitions at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where she was Artist-in-Residence in 2014; the deCordova Museum; the Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers University; and Yancey Richardson in New York, where she recently had her eighth solo show. Her work is held in numerous museum and institutional collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Detroit Institute of Arts, The Ford Foundation, and the Baltimore Museum of Art.
Perry is a four-time recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Award for Excellence, the only artist in its history to win in four separate disciplines: Photography, Drawing, Sculpture, and Visual Arts. She’s been reviewed in Art in America, The New Yorker, Art:21, Sculpture, and The New York Times, and created a four-page pictorial essay for Vogue. She has twice been commissioned by The New York Times Magazine, most recently for a feature on the “Me Too” movement.
At MacDowell in 2009, Perry completed sculptures for an ongoing series in aluminum foil and bread tags, made five large collage drawings, and worked on a video with sound for exhibition at Gallery Diet in Miami and the DeCordova Museum. In 2011, she made large-format photographs for her Lost in my Life series, and created medium-format photographs for a new untitled series. She also worked on a talk to be delivered at a symposium at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
During her 2015 residency, Perry completed drawings for her Chiral Lines series, continued editing a series of photographs made during her Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum residency, and finished work for an exhibition on the facade of Gardner Museum. In 2017, she worked on her Chiral Lines series, Soundtrack to My Life series, Halos series Me Mask series, and edited Postcards from Bermuda in preparation for a show at the Masterworks Museum and prepared a lecture to be given at the Winsor School in Boston.
At MacDowell in 2025, she worked on several projects including work on her Unfolded series; a needlepoint canvas called Eyeshadow: You think it; I’ll Say it and began another not yet titled; created several props for performances including work on a wall grid of twist ties to be used in a performance photograph; began the finishing process on a large 16x8’ unfolded box shape created in needlepoint for a solo exhibition at the Cape Ann Museum; completed a full-sized sports net for pickleball made from twist ties, and staged and filmed a performance with four Fellows at MacDowell’s amphitheater; and created a wall weaving of plastic bag tops, and a 16x9’ floor and wall sculpture in the same material.
