Rachel Perry works across disciplines, exploring ideas of language, mass media, consumption and individuality in photography, drawing, video, and printmaking. During her first residency at Tamarind, Perry expanded on her ongoing series of Chiral Drawings, where she made intricate line drawings using her left and right hand, experimenting on both lithographic stones and plates placed side by side. Her studio practice tends to draw upon materials that are readily at hand, utilizing the stuff of everyday life as the basis for her work. At Tamarind, she pulled together every tool, brush, sponge, and writing instrument she could make a mark with, defining the parameters and the possibilities of her mark making within the workshop itself.

Most recently, Perry returned to Tamarind in 2025 to further explore her photographic series Lost in my Life and recent Unfolded needlepoint works, in which our relationship with familiar consumer packaging is made new and unfamiliar, this time expanding on repetitive touch, and an abstracted micro-lens on the shape of what we desire, consume and discard.

Her work is held in numerous public collections including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts; the Baltimore Museum, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Archives, Boston. She has had solo exhibitions at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where she was Artist-in-Residence in 2014; the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum; the Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers University; The Drawing Center, New York; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; and the Beatriz Esguerra Gallery, Bogotà, Colombia.

 

Perry has received five fellowships from MacDowell and 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, Visual Arts and Sculpture. She been reviewed in Art in America, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Art:21, Sculpture, 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.