Rachel Harrison (b. 1966, New York) earned a B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1989 and has worked across sculpture, photography, video, and drawing since the early 1990s. Based in Brooklyn, she is best known for sculptural assemblages that combine cast forms with found and commercial objects.
Her work emerges from a late-analog context shaped by mass media and consumer imagery rather than digital culture. Images—often drawn from popular culture—are embedded into sculptural structures that make them heavy, awkward, and resistant. Materials such as polystyrene and cement, frequently painted in strong artificial colors, are combined with everyday objects including rope, tools, and consumer goods. The works are experienced in the round, with meaning shifting as the viewer moves through space.
Harrison’s practice sits between strategies of repetition and displacement associated with figures such as Elaine Sturtevant and a materially driven approach to assemblage closer to Isa Genzken. Unlike artists whose work relies on withholding or opacity, her sculptures are direct and physically assertive, allowing references to remain visible while refusing to resolve into fixed readings. Humor plays a central role, arising from misalignment, excess, and the failure of images to function as intended once made sculptural.
While informed by postwar and late-20th-century art practices, Harrison developed a distinct position early on. Her work shares an engagement with American imagery and cultural mythologies with artists such as Mike Kelley and Cady Noland, while maintaining a material and spatial focus that distinguishes it from later, more immaterial approaches.
Harrison has been the subject of numerous international solo exhibitions, including a major survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2019–2020). Her work is held in major public collections worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, among others.
Harrison lives and works in New York.