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  • Home
  • Nouveau casino
  • Meilleur casino
  • Artists
    • Gallery Artists
  • Member Artist Exhibit
    • Gretl Bauer 2023
    • Laura Westby 2023
    • Harriet Sobie Goldstein 2023
    • Archive Member Exhibits >
      • Scott Wixon 2023
      • beth cartland 2023
      • Joseph O’Neill 2022
      • Gretl Bauer 2022
      • Scott Wixon 2022
      • beth cartland 2021
      • Christa Toole 2021
      • Joseph O’Neill 2021
      • William C Butcher 2021
      • Gretl Bauer 2021
      • Guna S. Mundheim 2021
      • Laura Sussman-Randall 2021
      • Avilmar Maia 2021
      • Harriet Sobie Goldstein 2020
      • beth cartland 2020
      • Laura Westby 2020
      • Christa Toole 2020
      • Joseph O’Neill 2020
      • William C Butcher 2020
      • Gretl Bauer 2020
      • Harriet Sobie Goldstein 2020
      • Avilmar Maia 2019 >
        • Archive Invitational Exhibits >
          • Raktimava Ghosh Dastidar
          • Helene Ruiz
          • Vian Borchert
          • Sally Brown
          • Rachel Yurkovich
          • Antoine Janot
          • Jordan Merlino
          • Jinson Joseph
          • Lisa DeLoria Weinblatt >
            • Samantha Dominik
          • J.P. Snyder
          • J. Leigh Garcia
          • Tai Lipan
          • Azzah Sultan
          • Maryamsadat Amirvaghefi
          • Michael Marks
          • Philip Krejcarek
          • Abigail Kyros
          • Sheena Bajaria
          • bill davis
          • Sarah Jentsch
          • ZAKRIYA RABANI
          • Stephanie Garon
          • Zac Benson
          • Exhibition archives >
            • Past Interviews >
              • Gretchen Beck
              • Sherry Muyuan He
              • Guna S. Mundheim
              • William Culpepper
              • Oaklee Thiele >
                • Mayuko Ono Gray
                • Jessica Burke
              • O'Delle Abney >
                • Amy Guidry >
                  • Mana Mehrabian
                  • Marsha Heller
              • Andre Rubin
              • Ellis Angel
              • Cecilia Martinez >
                • Steven Bleicher
              • Kathleen Deep
              • Artem Ryskin
              • Patti-Anne Grabel >
                • Guglielmo Botter​
              • ​Jave Yoshimoto
              • Stephie Kate
              • Samantha Parker Salazar
              • Resa Blatman
              • Matthew Gualco
              • Mario Loprete
              • keith buswell
              • Joan Bell
              • Paul Hunter
              • Xiaojie Liu
              • Chris Perry
            • Archive
            • Past Member Exhibitions
          • David Boskovich
          • Hanna Vogel
          • Alice Stoler 1
          • Wendy Foster >
            • Rhonda Massel Donovan
          • Avilmar Maia
          • Julia Sebastian & Christy Wittmer
          • Oaklee Thiele
          • Tony Moore
          • BARBARA RACHKO
          • Jackie Lipton
          • Leah Naxon
          • Andrew Phillips
          • Jeff Schmuki
          • Kevin Schumacher
          • Rob Millard-Mendez
          • Kelly Boehmer
          • Nicole Patrice Dul
          • Alice Stoler
      • Marsha Heller 2019
      • Laura Westby
      • Dongze Huo 2019
      • Joseph O’Neill 2019
      • beth cartland 2019
      • William C Butcher 2019
      • Scott Wixon 2019
      • Gretl Bauer 2019
      • Harriet Sobie Goldstein
      • Gretl Bauer
      • Laura Sussman-Randall 2
      • Avilmar Maia 1
      • Harriet Sobie Goldstein 2
      • Joseph O’Neill
      • Dongze Huo
      • beth cartland
      • Pamela Flynn
      • William C Butcher
      • Scott Wixon
      • Pamela Bennett Ader
      • Avilmar Maia
      • Christa Toole
  • News
    • Artist
    • Collective
  • APPLY FOR INVITATIONAL ON LINE EXHIBIT
  • Contact
  • Invitational Exhibit
    • Deshon Washington
    • Natalie Petrosky
    • ROBBII WESSEN >
      • Maggie Chambers
    • John Romi
    • Jo-Ann Morgan
    • Sarah Nguyen
    • Vian Borchert
    • Gina Petrecca
    • Seth D. Ellison
    • Brian McSherry
    • Marshall Sharpe
    • Marilyn J. Fox
    • Maryam Khaleghi Yazdi
    • Theodore Heubein
    • Zac Benson >
      • Lorna Ritz >
        • Melody Croft >
          • Charvis Harrell
    • Marsha Heller
    • ARTIST INTERVIEWS >
      • Melissa Borman
      • Patricia L. Cooke
      • Elaine Fleck >
        • Cathy Breslaw
    • ANDREW LEVENTIS
    • Christine Olmstead
  • Schedules: exhibits and Interview
    • Member Exhibition Schedule
    • Invitational Exhibition Schedule
    • Interview Schedule
  • Ekaterina Vanovskaya
  • beth cartland 2024
  • Soomin Kim
  • William A. Brown
June 2018
  INVITATIONAL EXHIBITION
BARBARA RACHKO

                                                                                           Artistic Statement
​                                                                                          THE BLACK PAINTINGS
The assimilation of styles and motifs from African cultural artifacts into the work of avant-gard
artists was a means of challenging conventional western aesthetic values and hierarchies that reflected what those artists perceived as a vacuous and moribund society. In looking to these sources to invigorate their own creative visions, what these artists actually discovered were new ways of seeing and making art.  Wendy Grossman in Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens 
I am drawn to Mexican and Guatemalan cultural objects—masks, carved wooden animals, papier mâché figures, and toys—for reasons similar to those of Man Ray and the modernists, who in their case were drawn to African art. On trips to southern Mexico and Guatemala I frequent local mask shops, markets, and bazaars searching for the figures that will later populate my pastel paintings and photographs. How, why, when, and where these objects come into my life is an important part of the process. I take very old objects with a unique Mexican or Guatemalan past—most have been used in religious festivals—and give them a second life, so to speak, in New York in the present. When I return home I read prodigiously and find out as much about them as I can.
The BLACK PAINTINGS series of pastel-on-sandpaper paintings grew directly from the earlier DOMESTIC THREATS. Both series use cultural objects as surrogates for human beings acting in mysterious, highly-charged narratives. In the BLACK PAINTINGS the figures (actors) now take central stage. All background details, furniture, rugs, etc. are eliminated and are replaced by intense dark black pastel. Each painting takes months to complete as I slowly build up as many as 30 layers of soft pastel.
The idea for the BLACK PAINTINGS began when I attended a jazz history course and learned how Miles Davis developed cool jazz from bebop. In bebop the notes were played hard and fast as musicians showcased their technical virtuosity. Cool jazz was a much more relaxed style with fewer notes, i.e., the music was pared down to its essentials. Similarly my current series evolved from dense, complex visual compositions into paintings that depict only the essential elements—the actors.

"Conundrum Image" 38 x 58"
"The Champ" 26 x 20"
"Survivors" 20 x 26"
"Colloquium" 58 x 38"
"A Long Goodbye"
"White Star" 38 x 58 "
"Troublemaker"
"Dichotomy"
"Motley"

Picture

        Biography
Barbara Rachko was born in Paterson, New Jersey and grew up in a New York City suburb. She graduated from the University of Vermont with a B.A. in psychology.
After college, Barbara earned a commercial pilot’s license and Boeing 727 flight engineer’s certificate, then spent seven years on active duty as a Naval officer. In 1986 while working at the Pentagon, she began to study figure drawing and medical anatomy, and began many long years of developing her craft. Barbara subsequently resigned from active duty (but remained in the Navy Reserve and retired as a Commander) to devote herself to making art.
On 9/11 Barbara’s life was changed forever when her husband, Dr. Bryan C. Jack, was killed
on the plane that hit the Pentagon.
Dividing her time between residences in New York and Alexandria, Virginia, Barbara enjoys a busy career as a professional artist. She is represented by six galleries throughout the United States, exhibits nationally and internationally, and continues to win accolades, including completion of Ajira’s Emerge 2000 business program for artists, a 2008 – 2009 Joyce Dutka Arts Foundation award, and grants from the Templar Trust in Lichtenstein. 
​

​For inquiries contact the artist directly:
212-643-6293 703-998-7496
www.barbararachkoscoloreddust.com 
www.facebook.com/barbararachko 
www.barbararachko.com
http://museumofnonvisibleart.com/interviews/barbara-rachko/ 

Barbara’s first eBook, From Pilot to Painter, is available on Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HNVR200
http://bit.ly/BarbaraRachkoFromPilotToPainter



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