Step Inside Rachel Feinstein’s New York Studio as She Readies for a Major New Show

During a springtime visit to her cluttered Tribeca studio, a storefront space that was once Pearl Paint’s frame shop, the artist is busy preparing for “Rachel Feinstein: The Miami Years,” opening September 25 at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach. Featuring some two dozen works in sculpture, painting, and video from across the artist’s career, the exhibition “speaks broadly about the impact that Miami, as a kind of a fantasy and a reality, has had on her practice and her juxtapositions of the high and the low,” explains Bass curator James Voorhies.

Among the highlights is a site-specific panoramic landscape painted on mirrored panels that span some 30 feet. “It’s my homage to old Miami,” says Feinstein, showing a mock-up of the work, in which she collaged together photos of significant places and events from her past. There are images of the now-defunct Serpentarium, where in her childhood a boy her age fell into the crocodile pit and was drowned in front of his parents; the Cuban restaurant Versailles, where she would go late at night after clubbing as a teenager; and the artist Christo’s legendary 1983 project in Biscayne Bay, where he surrounded 11 islands with hot-pink fabric.

“That was probably my first foray into understanding that art can be anything you want it to be,” says Feinstein. She was also influenced by the artist Judy Pfaff, her teacher at Columbia, who once threw a bag of garbage on the floor and challenged students to pick something and make a sculpture. “It made me so excited that art didn’t have to look like Rodin,” says Feinstein, whose figurative paintings and sculptures were paired with works by Italian Old Masters in a multivenue show in Florence, Italy, last year.

The Miami collage also includes the Venetian Pool, where Feinstein learned to swim and later had synchronized swimmers perform as part of her 1998 wedding to painter John Currin. They had met four years earlier, when Currin came to Feinstein’s exhibition at Exit Art, where she lived for six weeks inside a gingerbread version of Sleeping Beauty’s house.

On this day, Feinstein is working on replicating the photo collage as a freehand drawing, which will be scaled up to the dimensions of the mirrored panels—each five by six feet—and used as a template from which she will paint a landscape for the show. The artist has created one other such panorama, based on Rome, for a 2012 show at Gagosian’s outpost in that city. Feinstein says she likes the idea of making an imaginary version, a kind of stage set, of the real place where her work is shown.

At The Bass, the mirrored panorama will be installed on a long wall, reflecting other works in the gallery. These include a twisted plaster castle from 2001 that conflates Disney’s Magic Kingdom version with its Rococo antecedents and several figurative sculptures from 2018 based on Victoria’s Secret models that are garishly painted and unsettling in their scale shifts, ranging from less than five feet tall to more than seven feet.

In another gallery, Feinstein plans to project a loop of grainy Super 8 footage of her wedding at the original Parrot Jungle where she resembles Botticelli’s Venus. “This whole thing is so deeply personal,” she says. “False realities and fairy tales have always been my jam. I love Miami for that. It gave me this fantastical belief system.” 

A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2024 Fall Issue under the headline “Art & Artifice.” Subscribe to the magazine.