A Very New York Crowd Came Out to the Opening of Rachel Feinstein’s Retrospective at the Jewish Museum 

“I love Rachel’s work because it’s always different and out there, but it’s always very Rachel,” Sofia Coppola told Vogue last night in the atrium of the Jewish Museum on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “She talks about themes that I can relate to.”

Coppola was just one in the seemingly endless stream of patrons and admirers who turned out for the debut of Maiden, Mother, Crone, the first American survey highlighting artist Rachel Feinstein’s unmistakable works. Anna Wintour, Steve Martin, Wendi Murdoch, and Michael Stipe all joined too.

Feinstein’s works range in material and scale, with the common denominator being that her themes are always informed by her personal life experiences, from her upbringing by a Catholic mother and Jewish father to the birth of her children and everything in between. Each piece from her 25-year-and-counting career was selected with deliberate purpose by the artist and Jewish Museum curator Kelly Taxter.

“It’s this whole idea that life is not aligned, it’s a circle,” Feinstein, in Gucci, explained. “When I started, I was making this hyperaggressive, sexual, woman’s work, and then I met my husband, John [Currin], and got really confused. I ended up having this idea that when I had come out the other end of having children, I wanted to go back to that angry, female thing. It was interesting because I have looked at the trajectory of life in artists, and they have a different life after menopause. There is something that is not discovered, that people don’t want to talk about because they are freaked out by menopause, but it’s a rebirth where you can look at your life like a man. You don’t have to be held down by your ovaries anymore.”