Rachel Lee Hovnanian

Rachel Lee Hovnanian (born 1959) is an American artist whose work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale and the Baltimore Museum of Art. She focuses on themes of digital addiction and the pursuit of beauty and perfection.

Career Hovnanian completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin in 1982. She then did postgraduate studies at Parsons School of Design. She worked as an art director for McCann-Erickson, a New York ad agency. a 2001 series of paintings titled Isolation Beauty. In 2007, Hovnanian exhibited at the Jason McCoy gallery. In 2009 she debuted Fun House Changing Room, a funhouse distortion mirror alongside swimsuits and an audio recording criticizing the viewer's body; this was exhibited at the 2011 Art Platform Art Fair in Los Angeles. Also in 2009 was her exhibition Power and Burden of Beauty at Jason McCoy, Inc., it was also presented at a group show at Parasol Unit. Hovnanian's 2010 show Too Good to be True also addressed the theme of beauty pageants; it was presented at the Cat Street Gallery in Hong Kong, Collette Blanchard in New York,

Her 2012 exhibition Mud Pie included a Southern café which served dishes inspired by the mud pies of Hovnanian's childhood, delivered by an actress playing a waitress. She followed this in 2014 with New Year's Feast at the Joyce Gallery in Beijing, China. In 2014, her exhibition Plastic Perfect was held at the Leila Heller Gallery; its "Perfect Baby Showroom" of lifelike dolls that viewers were encouraged to cradle. She took the exhibition to a show at the Perchersky Gallery in Moscow,

This was followed by the 2018 three-part Women's Trilogy Project: according to Alessandra Codinha (writing in Vogue), "the first time in recent memory that a single artist will have three sequential exhibitions in a New York gallery". The first part of the trilogy, NDD Immersion Room, "requir[ed] visitors to surrender their phones and spend time alone in a reproduction of a crepuscular forest". The second part of the trilogy, Happy Hour, showed imagery of Girl Scouts and debutantes alongside Hovnanian's family photographs.

In 2019, she had an exhibition, Open Secrets, at the in Italy. This was the museum's first solo exhibition by a woman or an American. Also in 2019, she created a mobile exhibit called Fuck My Life, My Battery is Dead out of a Piaggio Ape truck. She exhibited Dinner for Two in a church in Lucca, Italy, in 2020, and again in Pisa in 2021.

For the 59th Venice Biennale, she created the exhibition Angels Listening: seven angels cast in bronze with their mouths taped shut. She was described as the first Texas artist to participate in the Biennale since 1964. As part of the exhibition, viewers were invited to "write something they couldn't say or didn't say"; Hovnanian compiled those messages into a 2024 exhibition, You Are Not Alone, Angels Listening, in Pietrasanta, and published them as a book. She was also part of a group exhibition of women sculptors, The Divine Feminine, at the Ann Norton Sculpture Garden. Press coverage included the New York Times.

Personal life Rachel Robertson Lee was born in Parkersburg, West Virginia, in 1959. Her mother, Peg Lee, was a cooking school teacher and later director; her father, Edwy Lee, was a writer and professor of English. She was one of five children, with four brothers (one of whom drowned at age 2). the family moved to Houston in 1969. but "art came very naturally to her". A Girl Scout, She was taught to bake by her mother, They had sons Alton and Alexander and daughter Serena. The family lived near Red Bank, New Jersey.

In 2019, she and her husband moved to Miami, Florida. She initially worked in Wynwood, but in 2023 moved to a studio in Miami Beach. Hovnanian also has studios in New York City and Pietrasanta, Italy.