RACHEL BERWICK

risd connection: BFA in Glass, 1984; Associate Professor, Department of Glass

medium: mixed media installations

about her work: In the simplest sense, Berwick’s work addresses a matter of life and death: the sometimes permeable boundary between survival and extinction. Two Fold Silence in 1995 juxtaposed refrigeration equipment and a cast rubber Coelacanth, a rediscovered species of fish that had been thought to be extinct. Her celebrated May-por-é (1998) enclosed live parrots in a translucent cylinder, backlit into shadows and chattering in strange syllables: she had taught the parrots to speak the few known words of the lost Maypure people of South America, who had been massacred, but passed their vocabulary on through their pet parrots.

what the critics say: “In Berwick’s hands [the story of the Maypure] becomes a tale of paradise regained.… It gives one the sense of eavesdropping on a whole other world, but [her] parrots are shadows in more ways than one. In recalling a vanished people, they are at best a mirage. May-por-é may be seen as an examination of our desire for deception — especially the kind we perpetrate on ourselves.” (critic Yvette Brackman, Time Out New York magazine)

selected one-person shows
Brent Sikkema Gallery, NYC, 2004, 2000
UMass, Dartmouth, 2004
May-por-é, Wooster Gardens, NYC, 1998
Two Fold Silence, Nordanstad Gallery, NYC, 1995
Sounding Measures, Nordanstad Gallery, NYC, 1993
The Substance of Shadows, Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT, 1985

selected group exhibitions
26th Bienal de São Paulo, 2004
Seventh Annual International Istanbul Biennial, 2001
The Greenhouse Effect, Serpentine Gallery, London, 2000
A Scattering Matrix, Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles, 1996
La Belle et la Bête: Art Contemporain Américain, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France, 1995
Promising Suspects, The Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT, 1994

education
Yale University School of Art, MFA in Sculpture, 1991
Rhode Island School of Design, BFA in Glass, 1984

awards + fellowships
Fellowship Grant, Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation, 1996
Fellowship Grant, The Ingram Merrill Foundation, 1995
Project Grant, Connecticut Commission on the Arts, 1993
Fellowship, New England Foundation for the Arts, 1993