RACHEL ROSE Spengler (m. Morrissey) was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts in 1986. Rachel received her MFA in May 2016 from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She earned a Post-Baccalaureate degree from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 2014 and a BFA in Studio Art from Indiana University in 2009. She has been featured in Create Magazine, Art Seen Magazine, Women’s United Magazine and Friend of the Artist. Her work has been exhibited with Voltz Clarke Gallery in New York City, Ze Arts in Tel Aviv, The Colony Hotel in Palm Beach and 19 Karen Gallery in Queensland, Australia. She is a proud Jew and a mother of two young children. Rachel currently lives and works in her home studio in Atlanta, Georgia, United States.
STATEMENT: Rachel’s work explores the layered terrain of motherhood, mental health, and her evolving experience with Lupus. With masterful sensitivity, she harnesses organic forms to translate the emotional and physical realities of daily life—realities that are often invisible to the outside world. Though her diagnosis dramatically altered her path, it echoed familiar themes: resilience, hidden pain, and a long-standing intimacy with internal struggle. Lupus, in its quiet intensity, mirrors the undercurrents in Rachel’s paintings—where seemingly lush and radiant botanicals conceal a more complex, sometimes haunting truth. Her fascination with plant life lies in its power to communicate without words. In her compositions, bold color and lush foliage draw viewers in, but a closer look reveals tangled vines, subtle signs of rot, and uneasy mutations. This tension between beauty and burden animates each piece, evoking the dualities of joy and exhaustion, vitality and fragility, control and surrender. Rachel’s paintings are in constant flux, much like the conditions they reflect. Each canvas becomes both a mirror and a record—an honest, evolving chronicle of living with illness, raising children, and finding meaning through making.