Rachel Lee Hovnanian is an American conceptual artist whose work spans sculpture, installation, painting, and performance. Her recent institutional presentations include Nature Deficit Disorder, her first solo museum installation at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2026, and Angels Listening, an official Collateral Event of the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022.

For more than two decades, Hovnanian has explored the forces shaping how we see ourselves and connect with one another, with a particular focus on technology and our increasingly digital lives. Her work has been shown internationally across the United States, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, and is held in public, corporate, and private collections, including the 21c Museum Hotels Collection.

Hovnanian received her BFA from the University of Texas at Austin and continued her studies at Parsons School of Design in New York. She now divides her time between Miami, New York, and Italy.

INTERVIEW

You grew up surrounded by creativity; both of your parents painted, your father was a writer and literature professor, and artists were part of your family’s world. What do you remember most vividly about that childhood, and when did you first understand that you were going to be an artist yourself?

I don’t remember deciding to become an artist. I always was one. Drawing and painting were simply part of the language of my childhood, and I spent so much of my time imagining and dreaming. I would collect fishing line on the beach and call it mermaid’s hair, or pick up pieces of cement from the road and carve and paint them. When I was five, my parents were called into my school because my teacher wanted to show them a drawing I had made. She pointed out that I had instinctively understood perspective without even knowing what it was.


Your work is often quite provocative, exploring complex and sometimes challenging subjects, yet you seem to approach life with enormous curiosity and energy. How similar is the Rachel we encounter through the work to the Rachel your family and closest friends know?
I think we are very much the same person. The work probably concentrates certain parts of me, the curiosity, the humor, the things that concern me, but the people closest to me would recognize all of it. I’ve always been an observer, and I’m endlessly interested in why people behave the way they do. I was born curious. 


Motherhood and family have been an important part of your life, and you’ve spoken about not exhibiting seriously until your children were older. How did becoming a mother change you as an artist, and did putting your career on a different timeline ultimately give you something creatively that you might not otherwise have had?
Motherhood changed my timeline, but I always found time to work. I kept a studio at home and continued painting, but my children and family came first. Those experiences also deeply informed my work. I began exhibiting seriously when my children started school, and looking back, those years gave me a much deeper reservoir of experience, family, marriage, motherhood, expectations, contradictions, all of which eventually entered the work. 

So much of your work examines the expectations placed on women: beauty, perfection, domesticity, motherhood, and the idea of having it all. How much of that comes from things you witnessed or experienced personally?
A great deal of it is personal. I arrived in Texas as a girl and suddenly became very aware of what girls were supposed to look like and how they were expected to behave. My parents were intellectuals, and their perspective was very different from the culture around me, so I became conscious of those contradictions quite early. Later, works such as Body Armor, Texas Beauty Queen Cream, Happy Hour and The Women’s Trilogy Project allowed me to examine those expectations, as well as the things we sometimes conceal behind an image of perfection.

That pursuit of perfection runs through much of my work. It began with what I observed about women, but of course it isn’t limited to women. Today, technology and social media have amplified that pressure for everyone. We are constantly confronted with our own image and given tools to alter, perfect and curate it. I’m interested in what that constant pursuit does to us, and what gets lost when perfection becomes the expectation.


What has getting older taught you about beauty, confidence, and the pursuit of perfection, subjects you began exploring much earlier in your career?
Getting older has made perfection much less interesting to me. When I was younger, I was fascinated by what women were being told to fix…now I’m more interested in what happens when we stop apologizing for being human. Confidence is much more beautiful than perfection ever was.

I remember a show I did when I was starting out, and when asked for my age, I listed 100. There is something absurd to me about how much importance we place on age, because you’re never quite the age you’re supposed to be. When you’re young, you’re striving to be taken seriously, and when you’re older, you’re expected to look younger. Getting older has made me much less interested in those expectations and much more interested in simply being myself.


You have said that your job as an artist is to elicit conversation. When someone walks away from one of your installations, what do you most hope has happened to them, intellectually or emotionally?
I don’t need someone to agree with me. I want them to leave having noticed something they weren’t noticing before. If the work starts a conversation, whether in the gallery, around a dinner table, or even privately with yourself, then it has done something meaningful. I hope they remember the work and the conversation I’m trying to have, and perhaps it even inspires a small change in the way they live or see the world. If that happens, I’ve done my job.

Your work often seduces us first – it can be beautiful, polished, funny, or familiar – and then something deeper reveals itself. Why is that tension between attraction and discomfort so important to you?
If I begin by shouting at you, you may walk away. Beauty, humor and familiarity invite you in. Then you begin to notice the crack underneath, the loneliness, addiction, narcissism, fear or absurdity, and suddenly the thing you were looking at is also looking back at you.


Technology, smartphones, and digital addiction entered your work long before they became such an urgent cultural conversation. What did you notice happening to human behavior that made you think, “I need to make work about this”?
I noticed it first in my own family. I used to get annoyed when my husband was on his phone, and then one day I realized I was doing exactly the same thing. I started noticing it everywhere, couples sitting together but not speaking, families looking down instead of at one another, playgrounds sitting empty while children were increasingly staying at home. Dinner for Two, which I first presented at Leila Heller Gallery in 2012, came directly out of those observations, long before digital addiction became part of our everyday language. Now we have research telling us how lonely people are. We may be more connected than ever through technology, but increasingly removed from genuine human connection, disconnected from one another.

Your work repeatedly questions what is real and what is artificial, from beauty and genetically engineered “perfect” babies to social media, technology, and even our relationship with nature. In an age of AI, filters, and increasingly manufactured realities, does that question feel more urgent to you than ever
Much more urgent. Perfect Baby Showroom in 2014 was already asking what happens when technology begins promising us a perfected, customizable reality. AI, filters and synthetic images have pushed that question even further. At what point do we become so accustomed to the artificial that we stop recognizing, or valuing, what is real?

Do you think of your work as a warning, a critique, a mirror – or simply an invitation for us to notice what we are becoming?
Probably all of those things, but I like wake-up call best. I’m not interested in telling people what to think. I’m interested in making something strong enough that they stop for a moment and ask themselves what is happening to us.

You move between painting, sculpture, installation, and performance rather than being defined by a single medium. When an idea arrives, how do you know what physical form it needs to take?
The idea decides. I don’t begin by saying, “I’m going to make a sculpture” or “I’m going to paint.” Sometimes an idea needs an object, sometimes it needs an entire room, sometimes it needs performance, sound or an image. I choose whatever will communicate it most directly.

Is there one work or exhibition that feels like the key to understanding you, the piece where the personal and artistic Rachel come closest together?
The Women’s Trilogy Project from 2018 probably comes closest because so many strands of my life meet there. Happy Hour, which is part of the trilogy, is deeply personal, while the works as a whole move through addiction, femininity, perfection, technology and our disconnection from nature. It’s difficult to separate the artist from the person in those works.

Which artists, living or dead, have most profoundly shaped the way you see, rather than necessarily the way you make art?
Louise Bourgeois has been enormously important to me. Her work can be monumental and intimate at the same time, and psychologically it never lets you off easily. I was fortunate to make Body Armor, 2023 at the modern art foundry where her groundbreaking Maman was produced, and being around that work was unforgettable.

As an artist yourself, how do you collect? What makes you want to live with another artist’s work, and which works in your own collection mean the most to you personally?
I collect very personally. I don’t want something simply because I’m told it is important…I want to keep looking at it and discovering something. The works that mean the most to me tend to carry a memory, a relationship or a story, and sometimes the things I collect aren’t conventional art at all. I have a weakness for vintage Schwinn banana-seat bicycles and vintage kitchen tools like orange juicers and electric handheld mixers.

You live between New York, Miami, and Italy and have exhibited around the world. What does each of those places give you creatively that the others don't
New York gives me people, ideas and friction...you’re constantly in conversation with something. Miami gives me extraordinary light, openness and the physical space to make large work. And Italy, especially Tuscany and Pietrasanta, is my spiritual and creative home; there is something about working among craftsmen, stone, history and landscape that slows me down in exactly the right way.

For someone who spends so much time thinking about our disconnection from the physical world, what does your perfect escape look like? Where do you go when you genuinely want to switch off, and what do you love to do once you're there? Somewhere outside, preferably in Italy, with the phone put away. I love cooking, walking, being around nature and having people I love around a table. Interestingly, the more work I make about technology, the more luxurious ordinary physical life feels to me.

Give us a glimpse into your personal world of favorites: a hotel you return to, a museum you could wander through endlessly, a restaurant you love, a place everyone should experience once, and the one destination still at the very top of your list.
A few things I love: The Menil Collection in Houston, which I could wander through endlessly; small, mom and pop Southern luncheonettes; Zecchi Colori Belle Arti, the incredible art supply shop in Florence; and the Johnson Space Center. I’m drawn to places that have a strong sense of character and history, and that still feel very much themselves.

You’ve spent much of your career observing where society is heading before the rest of us necessarily recognize it. What are you thinking about now, what is preoccupying you or exciting you, and how is that shaping what comes next?
Right now I’m thinking a great deal about attention…who owns it, what we’re giving away and what happens to imagination when technology begins anticipating everything for us. Poor Teddy and Nature Deficit Disorder both came from watching children and adults become increasingly detached from the physical world. AI makes that conversation even more urgent, but I’m interested in the human question underneath it: what do we need to protect in ourselves as technology becomes more powerful?

https://rachelleehovnanian.com/