For A Sleep and a Forgetting:
“I understand the grid as an artist’s tool for design and structural support but also, more urgently, as a net cast into deep space, expanding and contracting presence and meaning, slicing through the atmosphere to become a two-dimensional framework that cradles the energy flowing through it. Through this lens, the grid becomes a place for magical thinking, beyond any sense of a fixed reality. Emotions and obstacles can be as powerful as deep space is infinite, and through their perspectival vantages, abstractions emerge. The grid measures my artistic impulse to describe explosive psychic landscapes while providing containment and constructing peaceful resolution, creating a tension which I endeavor to emphasize visually through color relationships, scale and material. These formal elements embody perseverance, and their rendering is delivered in the spirit of celebration.”
Rachel Collier / B. 1981 Minneapolis, MN
Recent Exhibitions (Solo and two person)
2026 upcoming solo at Hawthorne Contemporary, Milwaukee, WI
2026 Appears to be Dreaming, Hair + Nails, NYC
2025 A Sleep and a Forgetting, Hair + Nails Gallery, Minneapolis, MN
2022 NADA Miami, Hair + Nails Gallery, Miami, FL
2022 Still Together, St. Kate's Arts Hotel, Milwaukee, WI
2022 Field Moves, Hair + Nails Gallery, Minneapolis, MN
2021 Soft Landing, Nemeth Art Center, Park Rapids, MN
2020 Something that I’m supposed to be, Waiting Room Gallery, St Paul, MN
2018 Relief: 3 Fresh Approaches to Building Surface, Hair + Nails Gallery, Minneapolis, MN
Recent Exhibition (group)
2026 Avant Aquarelle, This and That, Minneapolis, MN
2026 Excerpts, Hair + Nails, NYC
2025 I Regali, The Orange Advisory, Minneapolis, MN
2025 Mixed Feelings, Special Effects, Kansas City, Mo
2025 Murmurations, DeVos Art Museum, Marquette, MI
2025 North of the 45th, DeVos Art Museum, Marquette, MI
2025 Door County Contemporary (with Hair and Nails Gallery), Fish Creek, WI
2024 Freshly For You, Hair + Nails, NYC
2024 Look, Second Shift Gallery, St. Paul, MN
2024 Feeling Minnesota, TOA Presents (pop-up), Cody, WY
2024 Gone Fishin’, I Love You Too, Portland, OR
2024 Minnesota State Fair Fine Arts Exhibition, MN State Fair Fine Arts Building, St. Paul, MN
2024 Hair + Nails Gallery Presents: Heat at Easy Does It, LA, CA (group)
2024 Felix Fair (with Hair + Nails Gallery), LA, CA (group)
2024 Foundations Fair (with Hair + Nails Gallery), Artsy.net (group)
2023 Chimera, Hair + Nails Gallery, Minneapolis, MN (group)
2023 The Otherworldly Gaze: Women Redefining Surrealist Art, Morlan Gallery, Lexington, KY (group)
2023 First Light, Skye Gallery at Highline 9, NYC (group)
2023 Intervention, Night Club Gallery, Minneapolis MN (group)
2023 Foundations Fair (with Hair + Nails Gallery), Artsy.net (group)
2023 Intersect Aspen (with Skye Gallery), Aspen CO (group)
2023 Cross Country, Carolyn Glascoe Bailey Foundation, Ojai CA (group)
2022 Painting Show, Hair + Nails Gallery, Minneapolis, MN (group)
2022 Nido, International Center for the Arts, Monte Castello di Vibio, Umbria, Italy (group)
2022 Tournament of Lies, Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY (group)
2021 The Human Scale, Rochester Art Center, Rochester, MN (group)
2020 Future Future, Hair + Nails Gallery, Minneapolis, MN (group)
2018 Relief: 3 Fresh Approaches to Building Surface, Hair + Nails Gallery, Minneapolis, MN
Residencies and Awards
2025 Mcknight Foundation Imagine Fund, Annual Faculty Research Grant
2024 Roswell Artist-in-Residence (alternate), Roswell, NM
2022 Anderson Ranch Snowmass Village, CO
2022 Jerome Emerging Artist Residency, The Anderson Center, Red Wing, MN
2022 Nido Invitational Residency and Exhibition, International Center for the Arts, Monte Castello di Vibio, Umbria, Italy
2022 Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY
2021 Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY
Press / Publications
2026 Gideon's Bakery. "Three Questions (with Rachel Collier)", Interview by Matt Jones
2025 Catalog for A Sleep and a Forgetting, Essay by Christina Schmid, interview by Shana Kaplow, published by Hair + Nails
2024 Top 10 artworks to see at the MN State Fair Fine Art Exhibitions, Alicia Eler, MN Star Tribune
2024 The New Alphabet of Shapes, Emmy Smith, MN Artists
2023 HAIR+NAILS is the Minneapolis Gallery for Artists by Artists, Maxwell Rabb, Artsy
2023 New American Paintings, No. 167, Midwest Issue
2023 10 Small Galleries that are Spotting Emerging Talent, Artsy
2023 Kilbourne Building Dons Minneapolis Artist Rachel Collier’s Work, Josiah Kopp, Fargo Monthly
2023 Featured Artist Newsletter, Danielle Krysa / The Jealous Curator
2022 Twin Cities artists flocked to Miami to show at Art Basel, NADA and more, Sheila Regan, MinnPost
2022 Catalogue Zine for Field Projects at Hair and Nails Gallery with essays by Cameron Downey and Brooks Turner
2021 Spring into spring at these four Twin Cities art exhibitions:
Still life, portraits, shag rugs and some hope for the future, Alicia Eler, Star Tribune
2021 Soft Landing: multidimensional exhibit inspired by far out journeys of the mind, Katie Carter, Northern Community Radio
2021 Vast Magazine, Issue #2
2021 Catalogue for Soft Landing at Nemeth Art Center, Matthew Bakkom
2020 Catalogue Zine for Right Now at Hair + Nails Gallery, Brooks Turner
2018 Zine for Relief: Three Fresh Approaches to Building Surface at Hair + Nails, Isa Gagarin
Education
2007 BFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
Rachel Collier (b. 1981) is an artist born and based in Minneapolis. Collier’s work is rendered in expansive color and materials, transcribing ecstatic realms that populate our shared consciousness. Abstract forms anchor familiar psychic landscapes to our physical world, stirring the spirit in preparation for advancement or departure. Collier has her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and recent solo and two-person exhibitions include HAIR+NAILS (NYC, NY and Minneapolis, MN), the Nemeth Art Center (Park Rapids, MN), Saint Kate’s Arts Hotel (Milwaukee, WI), and (upcoming) Hawthorne Contemporary (Milwaukee, WI). Recent group shows and publications include Felix Fair (LA, CA), NADA Miami (Miami, FL), Intersect Fair (Aspen, CO), Door County Contemporary Fair (Fish Creek, WI), I Love You Too (Portland, OR), Special Effects (Kansas City, MO), DeVos Art Museum (Marquette, MI), TOA Presents (Cody, Wyoming), Carolyn Glascoe Bailey Foundation (Ojai, CA), Rochester Art Center (Rochester, MN), New American Paintings, MN Artists and Gideon's Bakery.
Rachel has been awarded residencies at Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Snowmass Village, CO (2022), Nido invitational residency and exhibition, Monte Castello di Vibio, Umbria, Italy (2022), The Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY (2021, 2022), Anderson Center Jerome Emerging Artist Residency and Fellowship, Red Wing, MN (2022), and Roswell Artist-in-Residence (alternate), Roswell, NM (2024-2025.)
Gideon's Bakery VOLUME 2
“Three Questions”
with Rachel Collier
April 10, 2026
Volume 2
Issue 22
Gideon’s Bakery: What do you like about painting?
Rachel Collier: What attracts me to painting is how deeply you can dive into it. It’s a feeling like romantic love, like being in the ocean of love with painting. I think because it feels emotional to me, I use it as a place to organize whatever urgencies and impulses I am dealing with. Lately, in the real world, we are collectively processing an overwhelming amount of both abundance and scarcity and it is creating a lot of confusion. If I were to relate this to painting, which is what I often do, it reminds me that painting is a place where conflicting ideas and multiple realities exist naturally. A painting can be an object that represents something and it can also be the actual something. It has the function of both the architectural model and the finished building. This concept has power in its potential for immeasurable growth. If you deconstruct the abstract idea of immeasurable growth you find many qualities that can be easily manipulated; it is unverifiable, irrefutable, non-objective, etc. I’m interested in recognizing the ways that people with power manipulate these systems against us and I’m looking for ways to create work in resistance to their false narratives. Abstract painting feels like a place to build resilience by asserting physical forms as adaptable, unrestricted and beautiful. I’m invested in self-generated painting as a place to visually configure our overwhelm into a new kind of abundance.
GB: When you say painting can reconfigure overwhelm into a new kind of abundance, what does that abundance look like materially in the studio? Is it excess, restraint, repetition, scale? Have you read "All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess” by Becca Rothfeld?
RC: I like the idea that some of my fiber work could be evidence that painting has an abundance of qualities that are translatable to materials other than paint. Anything that can be described ‘painterly’ without being made with paint exposes the invisible side of painting. Invisibility lives in darkness which is widely considered a feminine and witchy place to gather wisdom and that feels like the place to be right now. I have not read the Rothfield essays but I’m seeing that one of her themes is that ‘art is the ultimate object of appetite because it cannot be fully consumed or diminished.’ Sounds like she could agree that painting is both the appetite and the food? The appetite is the invisible quality that exists even without the food, the painterly quality.
To further answer your question about materials and studio, I feel like I get a lot of abundance out of ‘scalability.’ Structurally speaking, I love to make the biggest paintings possible for the space they will be shown, I’m working on scaling down which is a challenge. As far as content goes, I focus on forms that feel like they could exist in the micro and the macro or across multiple terrains; ocean, outer space, underground, at the cellular level, etc. If things get ‘landscapey’ which they often do, I try to make that place feel familiar in a psychic way, like it’s a place you could imagine going and here you are.
GB: You describe the invisible side of painting as a dark, feminine place of gathering wisdom. How do you make that invisibility active rather than hidden in the work?
RC: I like this question and I think about it a lot. It sounds like what you are asking is to explain how I bypass the barriers that guard the invisible magical realm. The answer is highly subjective so it’s maybe best explained by talking through process. When I’m painting I try to watch myself like how a person watches a movie in a dark theater, both open to being entertained but also watching critically, looking for interruptions to the ‘suspension of disbelief.’ There is a way something can be too visually familiar or the craftsmanship can fail or the edges around shapes can be too inconsistent or a thousand other things that are disruptive to an immersive experience. Being sensitive to these failures is a way to build trust with myself to better understand when something is coming from the hidden place. I try to focus not on how to render the invisible but on how to create an environment that is sensitive to what has to be erased.