Rachel Maxi

Rachel Maxi is a long time Seattle based artist working in painting and sculpture. She was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and came to Seattle in 1990. For about the first twenty years of her career, she painted urban landscape and still life. During this time, she often described her approach as “the diary of the mundane”: a meditation on beautiful quiet moments captured through careful rendering, composition, and depiction of light. Her work has been shown in the Seattle and Tacoma Art Museums, and widely collected both publicly and privately.

Around 2015, she gradually transitioned into her current body of work, which appears very different, but in many ways shares the same theme.

Her more recent work has been informed by six artist residencies spanning from Morocco to locations throughout the American West. What emerged from these spans of focused creativity is an alternative visual language and approach to art making. She thinks of it as a mystical, fantastical coded diary framed in explorations of nature, cities, memory and place — and as with her previous body of work, a meditation on the simple, but sacred act of just being here.

Maxi has been award residencies in Morocco, Playa in Oregon, Joshua Tree, Wilapa Bay, and Wyoming. She has done two solo shows at i.e. Gallery In Edison, WA. in 2020 and 2022. In 2024, she had a solo exhibit at the Vashon Arts Center, and was featured in a group show at AMcE Creative Arts called Embodiment.