BIO

Rachel Goodwin is originally from New Orleans. During high school, she began her arts education at The New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA) studying visual art.

She attended Syracuse University’s Visual and Performing Arts School, studying painting in Florence, Italy through Syracuse’s Division of International Programs Abroad and earned a BFA in painting in 1994. She went on to study painting at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) where she earned an MFA in 1999. 

She attended school, lived and worked in San Francisco and Oakland for 8 years. She now lives in Durham, North Carolina.

Rachel works with paint, wood and found materials building paintings, collages and constructions. Her pieces create odd, disruptive, intense arrangements, where form and color accumulate, stack and interact. They suggest both a meditative and often playful visual language. Inspired by how we consume our world and dispose of it, her work resuscitates and transforms the old, broken, tortured objects we live with everyday.

While living in San Francisco, Rachel exhibited work at the Walter McBean Gallery, had a solo show at Quotidian Gallery and was part of Super UnNatural at Adobe Books. Her work was also selected for the Excess Baggage exhibition, curated by Enrique Chagoya, at The Luggage Store. In Oakland, she showed work at Pro Arts and her work became part of the permanent collection of the Di Rosa Art Preserve in Napa Valley, California.

In North Carolina, her work has been shown in Durham, Raleigh, Chapel Hill, and Carrboro at Spectre Arts, LUMP, The Carrack, Durham Arts Council, Golden Belt’s Gallery 100, Duke University’s Brodhead Center, the Rubenstein Art Center, and The Scrap Exchange. She was on the painting crew for the Durham Civil Rights Mural in 2015. She also participated in The North Carolina Museum of Arts’s (NCMA) Monster Drawing Rally in 2016. In 2017, several of her latest pieces were selected for the King of Cockroaches show at Guest Room in Carrboro, NC. In the Spring of 2018, she participated in the Satellite Park Mural project in Durham. In 2020, Hyperallergic.com featured her in “A View from the Easel During Times of Quarantine: Rachel Goodwin, Durham, North Carolina,” hyperallergic.com, May 29, 2020.