Rachel Sierra was born in the United States and raised in Costa Rica, Venezuela, Trinidad & Tobago, and the Dominican Republic.  She moved to California where she received her B.A. in Applied Cultural Anthropology, and meanwhile worked as a self-taught watercolor artist. Inspired by the human mind and with a fascination for nature, Rachel is a traveler at heart and finds inspiration through exploring the diversity of this earth and the layered complexities of culture.

Rachel’s portfolio includes a wide array of personal work, commissioned pieces, art magazine publications, and collaborations. Her work has been shown in both solo and group exhibitions and galleries internationally, including Van Der Plas Gallery in Manhattan, Chilver’s Fine Art Gallery, Vanguard University’s Art Exhibit, Aleph Surf Foundation, among others. 

Rachel's work has been featured in multiple blogs and publications including Friend of the Artist, Create! Magazine, and All She Makes. Additionally, Rachel has taught at high school and collegiate levels, and later founded Vino Pinto, a watercolor workshop.

Currently Rachel is a full-time painter based in Cabarete, Dominican Republic.

I see my work as an intersection of ecology, femininity and spirituality.  My body of work explores the connection of society’s view of femininity and the mirrored way we treat our earth. My paintings imagine what the reversal of this might look like.  

I want to portray femininity without inhibition, a femininity from the female gaze.  From a young age women are taught to evaluate ourselves from the other’s perspective, rather than grounding in how we feel within our bodies. I want to create pieces that originate within this sense of grounding, in order to reconnect with our inner selves, and experiencing a sense of homecoming to our bodies as our primal home.  I hope to reclaim and celebrate the female form from the female perspective, in all of it’s varieties and shapes, as inherently luxurious, spacious, and unique.    

I use my own photography or photos that women share with me, and manipulating scale as a method to cultivate possibility in the viewer’s imagination. Portraying our soft mammal bodies in unusual natural elements, I aim to highlight our physical belonging on this planet.  As humans our natural habitats are wild places, which are rapidly diminishing. I hope to create work that portrays humans as being part of the ecosystem, to show that not only do we need to preserve the natural world for the sake of animals, but also for ourselves in order to be fully human and integrated.  Pushing back against anthropocentrism, my paintings explore how to inhabit this earth with greater consciousness and humility.  

My work is a declaration of coming home to yourself, reclaiming your bodies and this earth as home, and to participate in preserving our abundant and diverse habitats.