About
Evelyn Rydz works across drawing, site-responsive installations, and community projects to reimagine our relationships with the natural world and with each other. Her practice explores connections between bodies of water, personal histories, consumer cycles, and threats to natural and cultural ecosystems.
Rydz is a recipient of the Artadia Award, Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, U.S. Latinx Art Forum Charla Fund, Brother Thomas Fellowship, SMFA Traveling Fellowship, and Mass Cultural Council Fellowship. She has collaborated on community projects with the ICA Watershed, Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art, Boston University's 808 Gallery, and MIT List Visual Arts Center.
Her exhibitions include presentations at Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Cambridge, MA; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Anchorage Museum, AK; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; USC Fisher Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Lowe Art Museum, Miami, FL; and Palacio de Justicia, Matanzas, Cuba. In 2025, Rydz will present new work as part of Nature Sanctuary at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, and as part of the Boston Public Art Triennial at the Charlestown Navy Yard Lot Lab.
Rydz’s work has been featured in The Art Newspaper, TIME, Hyperallergic, The Boston Globe, Science Friday, Boston Art Review, Edible Boston, and WBUR. Her work is included in the collections of the Federal Reserve Bank, Barr Foundation, Tufts University Art Galleries, Fitchburg Art Museum, DeCordova Museum, and Fidelity Investments.
Rydz received her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and is currently Professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
Links to other Projects
Comida Casera
A La Mesa
Drawing on Love & Justice
Sketchbook Collective
Salty > Sour Seas
‘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. It’s evident in everything from her unique dinner parties, designed to foster deep listening and meaningful conversation, to her field studies of coastlines, which often have her peering through jewelers’ glasses and microscopes at manmade detritus that washes ashore.
- J. Houton, writer & art critic
Photo by Lane Turner