Down & Dirty: Bonnie Rychlak & Jeanne Silverthorne

Down & Dirty is an exhibition featuring sculptures and videos by New York-based artists, Jeanne Silverthorne and Bonnie Rychlak. Shown together for the first time in their decades’ long careers, the work spans from 1991 to 2020. Sharing in their respective affection for rubber and wax, the artists look to everyday objects for inspirations, objects that are deflated or are incongruously repurposed or converted to the “dark side” of the non-functional. Rychlak’s many wax drains placed on the floor plumb the depths of our consciousness, referencing what might lie beneath. Silverthorne too engages the ethos of the down and dirty, pointing to the grueling work of an artist alone in her studio as she excavates the space, replicating her studio floor in rubber. Leaning on the wall or draped over the gallery floor, both artists refuse the heroic verticality so often associated with traditional sculpture. Instead, through directness as well as joyful humor, Silverthorne and Rychlak create objects that examine the infrastructure of the architecture of our daily lives, revealing that which is both terrifying and illuminating. The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color catalog and includes an interview with the artists and scholarly essays be Terrie Sultan and Katie Geha.

Bonnie Rychlak has shown in many exhibitions over the past 40 years of her career including recent solo exhibitions at The Viewing Room (New York, NY) and Art Space Kiumra (Tokyo, Japan). Rychlak graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California at Los Angeles and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She has held numerous residencies including recently one at the Surnadal Billag (Norway) and was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in sculpture. Her works are in collections in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Since 2010, she taught at the Pratt Art Institute and the ArtBarge on Long Island.

Rychlak is the former curator and studio assistant for Isamu Noguchi, his museum, and foundation. As an independent curator and writer, she was published in Looking Forward: Ivory Press, Books, and Stories (2020) and authored Henry T. Segerstrom: The Courage of Imagination and the Development of the Arts in Southern California (2013). Past curated exhibitions include an outdoor sculpture exhibition at LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton, New York and On Display in Orange County: Modern and Contemporary Sculpture which opened in 2011 as part of the Pacific Standard Time project in California. Rychlak currently lives and works in East Hampton, New York.

Jeanne Silverthorne received a BA and an MA from Temple University. For over two decades she showed at McKee Gallery up to David and Renee McKee’s retirement in 2015. Her one-person museum exhibits include PS1 (New York, NY) the ICA Philadelphia (Philadelphia, PA); Phillips Collection (Washington D.C); and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York ,NY). In 2017, she was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work is included in many major museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY); MFA Houston (Houston, TX), the San Francisco Museum of Art (SF, CA) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY). Silverthorne currently teaches at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) New York and is represented by Marc Straus Gallery in New York and Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Santa Monica, CA.