Rachel Rampleman creates bodies of work that explore gender, artifice, and spectacle. Utilizing directorial, curatorial, and anthropological processes, she showcases exuberantly irrepressible personalities who revel in challenging clichés and taboos to rethink and reimagine the gender construct. A sampling of subjects include Girls Girls Girls - the world's first and only all-female Mötley Crüe tribute band, and Tazzie Colomb - the world's longest competing professional female bodybuilder. With her current project "Life is Drag", she is documenting the most singular and innovative performers of the currently exploding alt-drag and neo-burlesque scenes.
Originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, and currently living and working in New York City, she received her MFA from New York University in 2006. Since then her work has been shown internationally at the Shanghai Biennale (Brooklyn Pavilion, 2012-13) in China, the Chennai Photo Biennale (India), JAM in Bangkok, Thailand, and throughout Europe at S.M.A.K. (Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst) and Art Cinema OFFoff (Ghent, Belgium), Monte Arts Centre (Antwerp, Belgium), Terasa (Pilsen, Czech Republic), C/O Berlin, Die Fruhperle, and The Secret Cabinet (Berlin, Germany), and at VIDEONALE.16 at the Kunstmuseum Bonn.
Nationally, her work has been exhibited at such venues as Socrates Sculpture Park, SPRING/BREAK Art Show, Cleopatra’s, Petzel Gallery, Smack Mellon, Auxiliary Projects, The Brooklyn Academy of Music, Satellite Art Show, The Frank Institute at CR10, Spectacle Theater, The Wassaic Project, Flux Factory, VOX Bizarre, Cynthia Broan Gallery, NP Contemporary Art Center, Squeaky Wheel, Envoy Enterprises, Shoestring Press, The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, The Warehouse Gallery, SELECT Art Fair, The Last Brucennial, un(SCENE) Art Show, 80 WSE Gallery, Gowanus Swim Society, El Puente CADRE, Art Gotham, Rosenburg Gallery, Cantor Film Center, The Arts Center of the Capital Region, and Collar Works (New York), Paul Robeson Galleries at Rutgers University (New Jersey), Other Cinema at Artists' Television Access (California), The Wexner Center for the Arts, The Contemporary Arts Center, The Weston Art Gallery in the Aronoff Center for the Arts, Thunder-Sky, Inc., The Mini Microcinema, Semantics, and SS NOVA, (Ohio), KMAC Museum Louisville, The Lexington Art League, The Fountain Gallery at Purdue University (Kentucky), 1506 Projects (Washington), University Hall Gallery at UMass Boston (Massachussetts), Icebox Project Space (Philadelphia), PULSE Miami (Florida), The Flint Art Institute, (Michigan), The Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and The Andy Warhol Museum (Pennsylvania).
Rampleman recently had a survey exhibition on view at the Weston Art Gallery in the Aronoff Center for the Arts (Cincinnati, Ohio) as well as solo exhibitions at La MaMa, SATELLITE Gallery LES, VOLTA NY, The Cell (New York), These Things Take Time (Ghent, Belgium), 42 Social Club (Connecticut), Carl Solway Gallery and The Neon Heater Art Gallery (Ohio), 3S Artspace (Portsmouth, New Hampshire), Bloomfield Garden Club (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), Wave Pool Gallery (Cincinnati, Ohio), and an early career retrospective at The Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Art (CEPA Gallery) in Buffalo, New York. She also organizes panel discussions about her current project "Life is Drag" (also featuring pop up art exhibitions and live drag performances) at venues such as Symphony Space, in conjunction with the Municipal Art Society of New York, and at The Cell in conjunction with Franklin Furnace & CADAF, as part of her 2023 residency at The Cell (New York City). She is currently working on expanding her "Life is Drag" archive as the production Artist in Residence at SoMad in NYC, and the new work will be premiered at SoMad's Mad Pride event on June 20, 2025.
Rachel’s work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, White Hot Magazine, Art F City, Paper Magazine, Artnet, The American Journal of Drama and Theatre, Autostraddle, DRAIN, Domino, eyes toward the dove, HYPERALLERGIC, Gothamist, Berlin Art Parasites, the Fanzine, Seattle Pi, Absolute Arts, ÆQAI, and LeCool Bangkok, among others. She has also created curatorial projects with Vanessa Albury as The Sun That Never Sets for venues such as The Frank Institute at CR10 in the Hudson Valley and SPRING/BREAK Art Show in NYC.