Elaine Reichek
b. 1943, United States
For more than four decades, Elaine Reichek (b. 1943, Brooklyn, NY, USA) has been working on a critical and feminist reading of historical texts and images. The analytical engagement with narratives from myth and literature, and the reflection on their social function as a medium of cultural cohesion, run through the artist’s oeuvre. Reichek employs a wide variety of media and engages works of art and literature from all eras in creative dialogue. Textile techniques such as embroidery and knitting as well as conceptual methods, photography, and various printing processes have been central to her practice since the 1970s.
Elaine Reichek lives and works in New York. She received a BA from Brooklyn College and a BFA from Yale University and has exhibited extensively since the mid-1970s in the United States and abroad. She has had solo exhibitions at Secession, Vienna; the Jewish Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; the Tel Aviv Museum; the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; Stichting De Appel, Amsterdam; and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. Her work is in the collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, Jewish Museum, Museum of Arts and Design, and Brooklyn Museum; Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum, Philadelphia; the Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach, Florida; the Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas; and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, among others. Reichek’s work was included in Art_Textiles at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, UK, in 2015; Art/Histories at the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, in 2014; the 2012 São Paulo Biennial in Brazil; the 2012 Whitney Biennial; and the Cheongju International Craft Biennale 2011 in Korea. Her work is also presently on view in Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, until February 2022. McClain Gallery presented a solo survey of the artist's work in 2020 entitled Between the Needle and the Book.