• WATER STORIES: River Goddesses, Ancestral Rites, and Climate Crisis
    Harvard Radcliffe Institute
    September 18 – December 16, 2023
    Public Programs:
    Panel Discussion, October 13
    Conversation & Collective Artmaking, November 18

    Water Stories: River Goddesses, Ancestral Rites, and Climate Crisis presents artworks that tell alternative stories of water experience. They treat water not as a commodity to be exploited but as a cyclical, life-giving, life-dissolving, and inert but innately alive spiritual force—a view widely shared among Indigenous communities, especially in the Global South. The exhibition juxtaposes older, traditional paintings depicting myths with works by contemporary artists that evoke various aesthetic experiences of water in the age of climate crisis. - Curated by Jinah Kim

  • BEYOND AND BELOW THE WATER'S SURFACE
    Solo Exhibition
    Ellen Miller Gallery
    October 27 - December 22, 2023

  • PORTRAIT AS PLACE / PLACE AS PORTRAITURE
    Tufts University Art Galleries
    Sep 5 – Dec 11, 2023

    Featuring artwork from the collection by David Antonio Cruz, Julia Csekö, Gonzalo Fuenmayor, Dell Hamilton, Annette Lemieux, Helina Metaferia, Evelyn Rydz, Lorna Simpson, Taravat Talapesand, Margaret Rose Vendryes, and Suara Welitoff.

  • 2022 ARTIST FELLOWSHIP
    Massachusetts Cultural Council

    The awards provide unrestricted support to individual artists to recognize and foster exceptional creative work.

  • CURATIVE COLLECTIVE CONVERSATION
    National Museum of Women in the Arts
    June 14, 2021
    Evelyn Rydz & Melani N. Douglass in conversation about Comida Casera

    In this series, join us for in-depth interviews with the Curative Collective, a group of Women, Arts, and Social Change partners working at the intersection of food, art, and social change.

  • THE MEMORY OF WATER
    Galeria Ponce + Robles, Madrid, Spain
    Curated by: Susanna V. Temkin
    May 8 - July 15, 2021
    Exhibition Tour

    In The Memory of Water, the second of Galería Ponce+Robles exhibitions dedicated to the four elements, artists Genesis Báez, Raúl Díaz Reyes, Frances Gallardo, Lina Puerta, and Evelyn Rydz present works that visibilize the sensorial and perceptual experiences of water and watery phenomena, and their impact on collective and personal narratives.

  • ON BELONGING IN OUTDOOR SPACES
    Close Attention: Exploring a creative practice inside and outside the studio
    Spring 2021

    A free speaker series on access, inclusion, & connection in nature.

  • CHARLA FUND
    Awarded by the U.S. Latinx Art Forum
    2020-21

    The U.S. Latinx Art Forum (USLAF) announces its inaugural round of the CHARLA FUND for visual artists. Through the financial generosity of the Ford Foundation, the CHARLA Fund will comprise three total rounds of 10-15 grants to support the realization and documentation of artist-generated dialogues.

  • OBSERVATION AND IMAGINATION: The Art of Evelyn Rydz
    Art Review by Jacqueline Houton, Issue 6, 2021
    Boston Art Review

    ‘Attention,’ the poet Mary Oliver wrote, ‘is the beginning of devotion.’ It’s also the starting point for Evelyn Rydz, a multidisciplinary artist whose diverse creative practice – which includes drawing, photography, site-responsive installations and participatory community projects that bring people together in person and online - is grounded by a commitment to close attention as a form of care and a means for connection.

  • DRAWING ON LOVE & JUSTICE: a call for participation, a call for change
    Drawing on Love and Justice (September 1 - November 3, 2020)
    Project Partner: MIT LIST Visual Art Center
    In a time marked by a pandemic and racial injustice, this project asks artists to reflect on how we use our creativity and artistic tools to bear witness to the world, expose inequality, and to imagine new possibilities for a more just future.

    DLJ Sketchbook Collective (February 18 - April 16, 2021)
    Project Partner: Harvard University's Ethelbert Cooper Gallery

    Drawing Workshops at ICA, Boston / Drawing Workshop at MassArt Art Museum
    Free virtual community art making workshop that welcomes participants to draw from observation and imagination. Leading up to the US elections, this is a call for action — to make a commitment to draw on love and justice for positive change.

  • A TIDE OF ART TO COMFORT AND CALM
    Art Review by Cate McQuaid
    The Boston Globe

    Before COVID, Evelyn Rydz ran “Comida Casera” (meaning homemade or comfort food), a peripatetic gathering around a table for a meal and storytelling. In lockdown, she knew food couldn’t be tasted online, but stories could still be shared. So she launched “Recetas de Casa,” or “Recipes From Home.” Twenty participants Zoom in from around the world to share recipes that remind them of home, and tell the stories behind them.

  • IN RESPONSE
    Part of BODYMONOPOLIZINGPOLITICKING,
    a series of exhibitions curated by Camilo Alvarez
    Brookline Arts Center

    Evelyn Rydz and Gabriel Sosa created a new series of collaborative and site-specific works on paper for the Brookline Arts Center that explore longing, division, contagion, and the passage of time. In consideration of the BAC’s history as a former fire station, Rydz and Sosa use the antagonistic nature of fire and water to emphasize urgency and heightened divides.

  • SURFACE SCARS
    Art Review by Robin Hauck, April 2020
    Misstropolis

    Raised in Miami to a Cuban father and Colombian mother, Evelyn grew up along the southernmost coast of the US, just 330 miles across the mix of Atlantic and Gulf waters from her father’s native land. Working in photography, drawing, site-responsive installation and participatory community events, Rydz grounds her practice in field study and research. From gathering detritus on beaches and riverbanks to studying individual specimens through jeweler’s glasses, Rydz ponders the artifacts’ personal and political meanings, and invites us to do the same.

  • QUARANTINE KITCHENS
    Story by Maria Aguirre, April 2020
    The Scope
    Una Cena Casera Virtual

    Although there was no physical shared table or food, there was a virtual unifying idea of the table created by the experiences of all being at home during these uncertain and challenging times, said Rydz, who was able to bring together current or former Boston residents of all ages and backgrounds, without asking them to break self-isolation and leave their homes.

  • AWAKEN: Conjuring Our Tomorrow
    Salem State University's Winfisky Gallery
    February 5 - March 13

    A group exhibition curated by Allison Maria Rodriguez featuring Latina artists exploring climate justice issues in their practice.

  • LOCAL ECOLOGIES
    University of Massachusetts, Intercampus Exhibition
    Organized by: Kirsten Swenson, Sam Toabe, and Rebecca Uchill
    January 21 – March 6

    Artist Evelyn Rydz is in Mahoney Gallery on South Campus carefully working about 500 drinking glasses into the shape of the Merrimack River. She arranges them to resemble its vast mouth, its turns and some long stretches now used for recreation.
    - UML News, Story by David Perry

  • AQUÍ Y ALLÁ: JUNTOS A LA MESA
    Artist project in collaboration with Kannan Thiruvengadam of Eastie Farm
    ICA Watershed, East Boston
    May 26 - Sept 2, 2019
    ICA Press Release

    Boston-based visual artist Evelyn Rydz partners with East Boston’s Eastie Farm on a provocative installation at the ICA Watershed inviting us all to the table to share the power of community, food, and cultural identity.
    - Article in Edible Boston, by Robin Hauck

  • A LA MESA
    August 27 - September 15, 2019
    MIT LIST Visual Arts Center

    As part of its programming for the exhibition, the List Center commissioned artist Evelyn Rydz to create A La Mesa, an interactive installation which uses food and storytelling to bring people together to create community. A site of social engagement for visitors, the project is inspired by Rydz’s ongoing multi-generational project Comida Casera.

  • 13th HAVANA BIENNIAL
    Ríos Intermitentes, Palacio de Justicia, Matanzas, Cuba
    Curated by: Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons
    with Octavio Zaya, Salah Hassan, & Selene Wendt
    Bienal de la Habana 2019

    Campos Pons forged an exhibition concerned with intersections and connections, titling her exhibition after the unique landscape of Matanzas, with its convergence of three rivers. She looked at the biennial as an opportunity to bring the work of over 20 artists and collectives who live and work in Matanzas into dialogue with dozens of artists invited from international locations, from the US to Pakistan.
    - Ríos Intermitentes in Hyperallergic's Best of 2019

  • JOAN MITCHELL FOUNDATION
    Painters and Sculptors Grant Recipient

    The grant recipients' work represents a wide range of artistic techniques, approaches, and concerns, and engages with such pressing issues as migration, identity, notions of belonging, and representation within the art historical canon and in social and political spheres, among other important subjects. The final selections for the grants are made with a particular eye toward artists whose work has contributed to important artistic and cultural discourse, but who have nonetheless remained under-recognized on a national level.
    JMF Painters & Sculptors Program

  • 9 MOMENTS FOR NOW
    The Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art, Harvard University
    Group Exhibition, Curated by Dell Marie Hamilton
    Part of the 50-state/For Freedoms Initiative, Through January 21, 2019
    Press Release
    Exhibition Program

    Sound and a neatly set table fill the rest of the space, encouraging perusal of the recipes that Evelyn Rydz has collected via A La Mesa/To The Table and awareness of the daily rituals that allow people to retain a sense of continuity in terms of cultural identity
    - Review in Dig Boston, Now Now Now, by Heather Kapplow

  • CINTAS KNIGHT FOUNDATION, Visual Arts Finalist
    Finalists' Exhibition, Lowe Art Museum, Miami opens October 10, 2018
    Press Release
    Cuban News

  • PLASTIC ENTANGLEMENTS: ECOLOGY, AESTHETICS, MATERIALS
    Chazen Museum of Art
    September 13 - January 5, 2020
    Smith College Museum of Art
    February 8 - July 28, 2019
    Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art
    Fall 2018
    Palmer Museum of Art
    Spring 2018

    Plastic Entanglements brings together sixty works by thirty contemporary artists to explore the environmental, aesthetic, and technological entanglements of our ongoing love affair with this paradoxical, infinitely malleable substance. Both miraculous and malignant, ephemeral yet relentlessly present, plastic infiltrates our global networks, our planet, and even our bodies. Organized by the Palmer Museum of Art, this major loan exhibition features work by an international roster of emerging and mid-career artists.

  • UNRAVEL TO SPLICE
    Solo Exhibition at Ellen Miller Gallery
    September 7 - October 13, 2018

  • COMIDA CASERA PROJECT
    "This Boston Artist Hosts A Very Intimate Dinner Party For Total Strangers"
    Story by Maria Garcia for WBUR, Boston's NPR News Station.
    Aired on Morning Edition September 12, 2018

    There are women at the dinner from China, Turkey, Cambodia, Italy and beyond. After we eat, laugh and cry, I realize there's been a catharsis — that these women have unloaded some real feelings about home, about the beautiful and complicated nature of families, about what they take from the women in their lives and what they shed.

  • ART ON PAPER, NYC
    Art on Paper, Pier 36, March 8 - 11, 2018
    Ellen Miller Gallery, Booth #303

  • ARTIST'S RESOURCE TRUST (A.R.T) GRANT
    Awarded by the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation

  • SALTY > SOUR SEAS
    Art Lab, Institute of Contemporary Art
    October 7 2017 - March 11, 2018
    Closing & Phytoplankton Popsicle Tasting: March 10th, 12 - 4pm

    She tries to show that water is the common thread of humanity. The ocean, Rydz says, is so fierce, sometimes threatening, powerful, but also fragile, vulnerable to our human activity. It holds our histories, our migrations, our wars.
    - Story on WBUR, Boston's NPR News Station by Maria Garcia

  • BARR FOUNDATION
    Contemporary Art at the Barr Foundation
    Curated Art Collection

  • HENRICKS ART WALL
    Floating Artifacts
    Installation on View 2017 - 2019
    Science and Engineering Complex, Tufts University

    As an ongoing project, Rydz conducts coastal field studies, gleaning tiny samples of debris that have washed ashore. She magnifies and documents her findings under a microscope to create portrait-sized photographs. The resulting body of work encourages active contemplation about the material properties of these samples in relation to our ideas about oceans, time, and the production of everyday objects.

  • FLOATING ARTIFACTS
    January 24 - May 21, 2017
    Tufts University Art Gallery, Aidekman Arts Center
    The Tufts Daily, Exhibition Review by Paige Spangenthal

    Evelyn Rydz’s Floating Artifacts, at the Aidekman Arts Center, is presented as a part of SMFA’s larger project, The Ocean After Nature, which examines the human effects on the ocean. Rydz’s collecting, cataloging, and display of the “floating artifacts” is an ongoing process in which our collective fascination with the open water and our tangled relationship with it is explored.
    - Big Red and Shiny, Exhibition Review by Karolina Hac

  • WHEN HUMANS INTERSECT WITH OCEANS
    Story by Craig LeMoult, 2017
    WGBH NEWS

    A new exhibit at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and at Tufts University is taking a close look at how humans interact with the ocean, as well as at the environmental impact those interactions can have.

  • Latinx@mericañaza
    Samson Projects
    December 2 - January 28, 2017

  • THRIVE
    Co-Curated by: Jennifer Epstein and Kate Gilbert
    The Beehive, 2017
    Part of Now + There's Year of the Woman
    Hyperallergic's Top 20 Exhibits Across the US

  • WORLD OCEANS DAY
    TIME
    Story by Marisa Gertz, 2016

    Evelyn Rydz is a Boston-based artist who takes photographs and creates illustrations of man-made objects that have washed ashore, presenting these artifacts like an archeologist of contemporary history.

  • GYRE: The Plastic Ocean, Traveling Exhibition & Catalog:
    Anchorage Museum, Alaska
    February 7 - September 6, 2014
    David J. Sencer CDC Museum, Atlanta, GA
    January 26 - June 19, 2015
    USC Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA
    September 2 - November 21, 2015
    Thompson Gallery, San Jose, CA
    February 2 - March 25, 2016

    Gyre: The Plastic Ocean looks at human consumption, modern materials and environmental change and their impacts upon one of the largest, most mysterious and critical components of our planet: the ocean.
    - Gyre Exhibition Catalog, Edited by Julie Decker

  • VISTING ARTIST TALK & WORKSHOP
    MFA Teen Arts Council
    HOMiE: In Our Eyes

  • FOREVER YOURS
    Solo Exhibition, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
    April 19 - September 14, 2014

    Kamilo Beach, on the southeast coast of the island of Hawaii, is more perdition than paradise. Plastic trash blankets the shore. At its worst, before regular cleanups started in 2003, the debris topped out at 8 to 10 feet high. Now, several cleanups a year remove tons of plastic from the area. The job is never done. For Boston artist Evelyn Rydz, who documents flotsam and jetsam in meticulous drawings, Kamilo Beach was a destination.
    -The Boston Globe, Exhibition Review by Cate McQuaid

  • GRIST
    By Amelia Urry, 2014
    Art Objects

  • PULSE, Miami Beach
    Miller Yezerski Gallery - Booth B9
    December 4 - 7, 2014

  • Still Life Lives
    Fitchburg Art Museum
    September 22, 2013 - January 12, 2014

  • 1000 YEARS
    Ellen Miller Gallery, Boston, MA
    October 12 - November 13, 2012
    The Boston Globe Exhibition Review by Cate McQuaid

  • PULSE MIAMI
    Ellen Miller Gallery, Booth D204
    December 6 - 9, 2012

  • VISITING ARTIST TALK
    Donkey Mill Arts Center, Holualoa, HI
    Holualoa Foundation for Arts and Culture
    August 23, 2012 6 - 8pm

  • TO EXTREMES: Public Art in a Changing World|
    Nine artists and designers envision public artworks exploring extreme events and climate change, inspired by recent scientific findings.
    MIT, Maseeh Hall
    Curated by: Eli Kintisch
    More info at the Urban Culture Institute
    April 20 - 29, 2012

  • 2012 TRAVELING FELLOW
    SMFA at Tufts University

  • 2012 BRUCE DAYTON FACULTY FELLOWSHIP
    MassArt Foundation

  • I-90
    Prole Drift Gallery
    Curated by: Joe Wardwell
    March 1 - April 2012

  • MCC: Award Recipients in Painting and Drawing
    Aidekman Art Gallery
    June 2 - July 31, 2011

  • SUMMER GROUP EXHIBITION
    Joshua Liner Gallery, New York, NY
    August 4 - August 27, 2011

  • VISITING ARTIST: Conversations Around Drawing
    School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
    Lecture: April 4, 2011, 6pm

  • FAMILY PORTRAITS
    Foster Gallery
    Curated by:_ Evelyn Rydz
    March 28 - April 22, 2011

  • ISLAND #5 PRESENTED AT LOUIS VUITTON
    Louis Vuitton Copley Boston, MA
    March 17 - March 20, 2011

  • JAMES AND AUDREY FOSTER PRIZE EXHIBITION
    Institute of Contemporary Art, Announcement
    September 22, 2010 - January 17, 2011

  • EXHIBITION AT LOUIS VUITTON
    Louis Vuitton Copley Boston, MA
    December 12 - 21, 2010

  • SIXTH FINCH JOURNAL
    Sixth Finch
    Winter 2011 issue

  • ON THE MARK
    Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston, MA
    November 11 - December 11, 2010

  • Q&A WITH EVAN J. GARZA
    New American Paintings Blog
    September 22, 2010

  • THE PENCIL OF NATURE
    Julie Saul Gallery, New York, NY
    July 1-August 20, 2010

  • NEW AMERICAN PAINTINGS
    North East Edition
    February/ March 2010, #86

  • GRACIAS POR PENSAR EN MI
    Parque Cultural del Caribe, Barranquilla, Colombia
    Curated by: Maria E. Dieppa
    January 28 - February 19, 2010

  • ARTIST A DAY
    Featured in 2010
    Artist a Day

  • DRAWING ITSELF: A Survey of Contemporary Practice
    Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, Vermont
    Curated by: Mara Williams & Craig Stockwell
    November 22, 2009 - February 21, 2010

  • THE DRAWING CENTER, NY, NY
    Viewing Program, Artist Registry