Rachel Clites
Rachel Clites grew up in a household shaped by education, curiosity, and a deep respect for learning. As the child of two public school teachers, she was surrounded by books, research, and the expectation that knowledge was something to be actively pursued. While her mother and sister gravitated toward the sciences, Clites and her father shared a strong pull toward art and literature. Her father is a published novelist, as was her grandfather, and family outings often centered on museums around Washington, DC. One early experience stands out clearly: encountering a Jackson Pollock painting at the Hirshhorn Museum as a child and sitting with it for an extended time, absorbing its presence without needing explanation.
This research-driven mindset remains central to Clites’s practice. Like a teacher preparing a lesson, she begins each project with investigation. When working on historically or politically grounded pieces, such as her painting Loving vs. Virginia, she immerses herself in books, podcasts, documentaries, and primary sources before ever picking up a brush. She does not approach art as illustration, but as informed interpretation, believing that depth of understanding is essential to meaningful visual communication.
For much of her life, Clites identified primarily as a theater artist. For nearly three decades, her creative focus was rooted in directing, acting, and technical theater. That trajectory changed abruptly when she was diagnosed with a rare and incurable nervous system disorder, including Dysautonomia, Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, and Mast Cell Activation Syndrome. The physical demands of theater became incompatible with her body, forcing a fundamental shift in how she could continue creating. Rather than abandoning art, she pivoted, drawing on the extensive skills she had developed in theater to transition into fine art.
Her earliest certainty about becoming an artist predates that shift. She recalls sitting on a blanket at a park with her family, watching a production of Much Ado About Nothing. The transformation of space, costume, language, and performance felt magical, and she was struck by how powerfully the audience was moved together. That collective emotional experience became something she wanted to create herself, a goal that continues to shape her work.
Clites attended the University of Maryland on a Creative and Performing Arts Scholarship endowed by the Jim Henson Foundation, studying technical theater and puppetry while also taking coursework in fine art and English literature. Her theatrical training required mastery across disciplines, from large-scale painted backdrops to sculptural props and fabricated objects. Creating forty-foot scenic paintings, breakaway objects, and immersive environments taught her how to work quickly, resourcefully, and with intention. That training now underpins her mixed media practice, where material adaptability and conceptual clarity are essential.
Her work today is deliberately multidisciplinary. Mixed media allows her to follow the idea rather than constrain it to a single format. Some pieces emerge from found materials tied directly to lived experience, such as sculptures made from her children’s swaddles or construction scraps from home projects. Others are driven by historical narratives, where visual metaphors take weeks to resolve through experimentation. Across her work, recurring themes include feminine power, the search for agency, and the use of historical symbolism to connect past and present. Acceptance, joy, and love appear not as passive states, but as deliberate choices forged through difficulty.
Influences such as Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, Annie Leibovitz, and Henri Matisse inform her emotional and visual goals. She is drawn to Hopper’s quiet tension, O’Keeffe’s articulation of feminine presence, Leibovitz’s ability to reveal inner life, and Matisse’s expressive use of color. Rather than imitation, these influences function as aspirational benchmarks for emotional resonance and clarity.
Her creative process is necessarily adaptive. With two young children and a chronic illness, Clites works in fragments, often late at night. Her Great Dane, Zelda, remains a constant presence in the studio, providing both companionship and safety. Inspiration comes from daily life: the movement of people at a party, the sound of her children laughing, the colors of her garden. When she encounters creative resistance, she changes materials rather than forcing progress, sculpting when painting stalls, sketching when large work feels impossible. The goal is consistency of engagement rather than scale.
One of her most significant works, Ghost Light, took eighteen months to complete. Begun the night she closed her final performance of Hamlet, the piece marked her transition away from theater. Inspired by the theatrical tradition of leaving a single light burning on an empty stage, the work became a meditation on grief, transformation, and closure. She worked on it only when emotionally able, allowing the piece to dictate its own pace. It remains one of her most exhibited works and reshaped her trust in intuition and timing.
Clites sees freedom as a central throughline in her work, freedom of expression, freedom to love, and freedom to become. She hopes her art communicates hope, not by denying pain, but by choosing joy and possibility despite it. Success, for her, is measured in forward movement. Each new piece, each exhibition, each step taken despite limitation is meaningful.
She is currently preparing for her first full gallery exhibition, featuring a new series titled My Compartmentalized Life. The work examines the ways people divide themselves to meet external expectations, and the process of breaking free from those imposed structures. The series reflects her continued commitment to storytelling, transformation, and art as a means of survival and connection.
