Statement
I am a maker, who unmakes and remakes with the aim of dismantling entrenched ways of seeing and believing. I am interested in the creative possibilities of the sewing machine, which I use to draw, create installations, and initiate socially engaged public projects. My process is iterative, investigative, research-based, and activist oriented. In undoing seams and re-making connections with sewing, I divert sewing’s original purpose of creating and mending toward social critique. Through these acts, I aim to create projects and spaces for cultivating deeper understandings of labor rights, solidarity and collective power.
I reveal, viscerally and poetically, how the clothes we wear are a material connection with the workers, around the globe, who make them. I work with used textiles because of their material potency and the way they reference the scale of the many crises caused by capitalism – climate change, racism and labor abuse. Creating installations with used clothes also embeds a range of histories – both those of workers and those of wearers – into my work, raising essential questions about how garments are discarded and the impacts of overproduction on our climate. This “invites” the public to see themselves in my work. I often exhibit wall drawings and installations together and present public engagement projects in conjunction with my work as well, layering meanings and processes.
My interest in labor rights stems from histories of Jewish activism in the garment industry and also my own family’s history as immigrants. My focus on people who sew garments visually emphasizes we are part of a global community.
Biography
Rachel Breen’s work has been shown widely across the country as well as internationally. Her exhibitions include a solo exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art in 2020. Her exhibition, The Price of Our Clothes,” at the Perlman Museum, was Included in the top 20, best of 2018, exhibitions in the US by Hyperallergic (December 20, 2018). Rachel was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to India in 2022 and has been awarded an artist residency at MacDowell, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and Willapa Bay AiR. Rachel is an inaugural recipient of the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, has received four Minnesota State Arts Board grants and a fellowship from the Walker Art Center Open Field. Rachel’s social engagement projects have been presented across the state including two projects commissioned for Northern Spark, a public art festival addressing climate change in Minnesota. Rachel holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota and a BA from The Evergreen State College. She lives in Minneapolis, MN, maintains an active studio practice and is a professor of art at Anoka Ramsey Community College.
