Elaine Spatz‑Rabinowitz

Elaine Spatz‑Rabinowitz (born 1942) is an American visual artist known for her hybrid works that merge illusionistic painting, photography, and sculpture. She is professor of Art Emerita at Wellesley College (1988-2008) and taught painting at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University for sixteen years.

Born in New York, she lives, works, and continues to teach privately in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her work has received awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship in Visual Art and is held in numerous public collections including Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Addison Gallery of American Art, and the Worcester Art Museum.

Spatz‑Rabinowitz's recent work focuses on the theme of environmental collapse. Inspired by an expedition to the Arctic in 2013, it explores motifs of connectedness, materiality, the relationship between myth and deception, and our universal implication in systems of production.

Detail from Arctic Abrasions (c. 2017), from the Arctic Abrasions series. Artistic practice Spatz-Rabinowitz has been a practising artist for over fifty years. Throughout the period, her work has sought to collapse the distance between the abstraction of illusionistic imagery and the fragility of the materials used to produce such effects. In doing so, it strives to bring myth into closer contact with the concrete realities of existence.

Early work (1972–1990) Spatz‑Rabinowitz graduated from the M.F.A. Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1974. Her early work encompassed an examination of the domestic interior alongside more public spaces. Dealing with themes of disruption, decay, and death it questioned the boundaries of representation and illusion.

During the early 1980s she began creating mixed-media relief works and developing a serial approach to her art. Examples include Dead Birds, Dead Fish (1988–1989), a series which explores both the connectedness and fragility of nature. Her early works were displayed in numerous exhibitions including the 1974 New Talent at Harcus Krakow Rosen Sonnabend Gallery. Throughout the 1980s Spatz‑Rabinowitz also collaborated extensively with theatre director and McArthur Fellow Peter Sellars. Together they created set designs for international productions including the original performance installation Sudden Difficulties (1983) for the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.

Landscapes and exteriors (1990-2005) After 1990, Spatz-Rabinowitz's subject matter began to focus increasingly on social and environmental devastation. Series such as Landscapes (1991–2001) and Flowers and Flora (1994–1999) examined this theme in relation to the organic world. Others such as Exteriors (1990–2005) extended the focus to the urban environment, exploring themes of social exclusion and economic inequality. During this period Spatz-Rabinowitz began integrating cast Hydrocal plaster with trompe-l’œil techniques. The fractured and distorted surfaces, combined with realistic imagery, emphasised the theme of devastation, a connection brought out more forcefully in her subsequent "War Work." Surrounded by media images of devastation and suffering, she began to rely increasingly on her use of fragmented and distorted surfaces to evoke the seeming omnipresence of violence. Series such as Bas Reliefs (2010-2012) and Burned Books (2007) demonstrate this tendency. Others, such as War Drawings (2005-2010), directly critique prevailing media narratives by reconfiguring newspaper depictions of violence in the Middle East and beyond. Reviewers compared the work that of Anselm Kiefer. an expedition to the Arctic in 2013 provoked a shift in Spatz-Rabinowitz's subject matter. The Arctic Abrasions and Vanishings (2018–2022) series draw on the tradition of American landscape painting that includes works such as Frederic Edwin Church’s The Icebergs (1861) and William Bradford’s Scene in the Arctic (ca. 1880). Drawing on her earlier work, Spatz-Rabinowitz executes these works on carefully degraded surfaces to invoke the literal collapse of the environment that she witnessed in the Arctic.

Awards and recognition In addition to her Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007, Spatz-Rabinowitz has received numerous additional fellowships and awards throughout her career. This includes three Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowships and a fellowship at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute (then known as the Bunting Institute). Reviews of her work and writing about her practice have appeared in publications including ARTnews and Art in America alongside The Pittsburgh Tribune and The Boston Globe. 1987, Elaine Spatz-Rabinowitz: Paintings and Drawings, New Works New England Gallery, DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA 1987, A.C.A. Galleries, New York, NY

Selected group exhibitions The Long View: Women Artists in the Studio, Suffolk University, Boston, MA (2025) Lived Space: Humans and Architecture, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA (2018) Occupying Pools, Art on the Marquee, Round 25, Boston Convention and Exhibition Center (2018) Arctic Abrasions, Grand Rapids Art Museum, selected for ArtPrize Nine (2017) Thinking About Water: Artists Reflect, Overlook Gallery, Metropolitan Waterworks Museum, Chestnut Hill, MA (2017)