Santa Monica-based artist Rachel Lachowicz was born in San Francisco, CA in 1964 and received her BFA from California Institute of the Arts.  Her professional history covers over 30 years of conceptual art making and her work can be found in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Orange County Museum of Art, The Palm Springs Museum of Art, the Museum Moderner Kunst, Palais Lichtenstein in Vienna, and The Bronx Museum of the Arts.  She is a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award. 

Rachel is known for turning her witty eye on the masculine-centric world of Modernism and for making radical incursions into the canon of art history by reconfiguring famous works.  She falls under a multitude of headings: feminist, appropriationist, post minimalist, conceptual artist, and conceptual sculptor.  Labels aside, her work contributed to a ground-breaking reconceptualization of the feminist position. 

The term “Lipstick Feminist,” grew out of an 80’s-90’s philosophy but more specifically the art world came to use that term to refer to the work of Rachel Lachowicz, and less than a handful of others.  She explores the relationship of identity and the politics of mark making, predominately through the use of cosmetics.  Lachowicz makes both discreet objects and large-scale installations that are visually lush (at times sexually provocative) and always with a deliberate repurposing of meaning. 

Rachel is the chair of the Art Department at Claremont Graduate University, has over 20 years of teaching experience at the graduate level, and her lecture résumé is extensive.  For 12 years she was a Santa Monica Arts Commissioner, and served on the board of the Santa Monica Arts Foundation and was a member of the Santa Monica Public Art Committee.