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.
Education 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.
Career She moved to New York City shortly after graduating from art school. She worked as an art director for McCann-Erickson, a New York ad agency.
One of her first art shows was at the David Beitzel Gallery, 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., which included "Beauty Queen Totem", an marble sculpture; 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, and Aina Nowack/AAC Gallery in Madrid, among others.
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, and reprised the Perfect Baby Showroom for the 2016 Dallas Art Fair.
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. The third part, PURE, had dozens of oversized bars of Ivory soap carved in marble.
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.
Her 2024 exhibition Beyond the Hedges at Brintz + County featured large-scale oil paintings and mixed-media collages. The same year she was included in the mobile exhibition Body Freedom for Every(Body) and created the sculpture Poor Teddy in Repose, a bronze teddy bear with a knife through its chest.
In spring 2026, Hovnanian's Nature Deficit Disorder was exhibited at the Baltimore Museum of Art. 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). After stints living in New York City and on an Ohio farm, the family moved to Houston in 1969.
Hovnanian is dyslexic and struggled with reading, but "art came very naturally to her". Her parents both painted and took her to visit abstract expressionists of their acquaintance. A Girl Scout, she was nicknamed "Ray Lee" because of her "stereotypically masculine" interests, like fishing and camping. She was taught to bake by her mother, who forbade her to have popular processed foods or to play with Barbie dolls. Her childhood was also impacted by her father's alcoholism and violence.
She married Ara K. Hovnanian in Dallas, Texas, on February 23, 1985. They had sons Alton and Alexander and daughter Serena. The family lived near Red Bank, New Jersey. Alton was killed in 2002, aged 15, in a boating accident.
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