Rachel Feinstein knew her way around The Breakers by the age of six. Her parents, Dr. and Mrs. Richard J. Feinstein, were a leading skin cancer specialist in Miami and a nurse, respectively. Their annual trips to Palm Beach for medical conventions were also treated as family weekends, during which they tried to introduce the joys of medicine to their convivial daughter. She made a beeline for the soda fountain.
The visual artist already blossoming in their first-born was quicker than the budding veterinarian in her younger sister, Lisa, to sense the creative potential available to someone growing up gorgeous in a gated community of Coral Gables, just a hop and skip from the theme-park theatrics, nouveau-riche grandeur, and pastel seductions of 1980s Magic City.
Its constant seesaw from dazzle to decay stayed with Feinstein, as did her teen modeling career and the fairy tales she read as a child—dark fantasies in which predators have their way with sleeping princesses and little girls are hunted by big bad wolves. These competing forces of pleasure and deceit shaped a sunny worldview never fooled by appearances. Over the last 30 years, it has materialized as sculpture, painting, video, and romantically inclined installations that can leave viewers gnashing their teeth and laughing out loud all at once.
The Bass Museum of Art has corralled prime examples of her grotesque coquettes, fantastical mirrored panoramas, false-fronted scenic flats, and jointed wood sculptures in Rachel Feinstein: The Miami Years, her first major exhibition in her hometown. On view through next summer, it is a clear demonstration of her gift for giving architectural follies and archetypal symbols of female beauty a wicked poke in the ribs. Feinstein’s “Secrets,” for example, are life-size sculptures that parody Victoria’s Secret models by slashing their shapely limbs and torsos with paints brighter than Joseph’s technicolor dreamcoat and twisting their faces into distorted, funhouse grins.
“From a young age, because my father left dermatology magazines lying around, I was very aware of what a beautiful body was capable of becoming,” Feinstein recalls one evening a month before her September opening at the Bass. Stage flats in her show, like “Jazz Brunch” (1998), are another form that Feinstein employs to represent the artifice that overtakes the real in places like Miami, where the tawdry nightclubs she experienced as a teenager were fronts for illicit activities after dark, and shabby spaces for legitimate bands on the morning after. “I’m so obsessed with duality,” she adds, “that I see flaws in everybody, very much including myself.”
Feinstein in front of The Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables.
Feinstein, who is 53, projects an idealized femininity belied by her ease with the hacksaws, lumber, and steel she employs in her work. Drawing from a seemingly inexhaustible appetite for storytelling, she grows ever more animated while recounting episodes of her life as an artist, mother, model, homemaker, and muse to John Currin, the painter she married on Valentine’s Day in 1997, three years after their first impulsive kiss. Feinstein designed and choreographed their wedding in the spirit of her art, dressing her bridesmaids in gowns inspired by The Stepford Wives and exchanging vows in the nature park of Miami’s Parrot Jungle, surrounded by pink flamingos and accompanied by a chorus of squawking cockatoos and macaws. (An edited video of the occasion is in her museum show.)
Awake since dawn, she has been juggling work on a new piece for the show with parenting, practicing yoga, making business calls, and managing the households she shares with her husband, three children, and two Affenpinschers in New York, Long Island, and Mount Desert Island in Maine, where they are now, finishing the dinner that she somehow found time to make. (No one else in the family can cook.)
Currin is watching local news in the living room of their mid-century Long Pond cottage with the sound turned off—the better to hear the love of his life chuckle over memories of her Miami youth and storybook romance with him. (He proposed after marching her up a mountain in the driving rain.) By turns hilarious, ghoulish, and exultant, her stories come at a pace that slows only when she thinks of something she might have forgotten to do earlier and must take care of first thing.
Her ebullient tone turns wistful over the allowances her children make whenever their parents go off the grid to meet exhibition deadlines, though never at the same time.
The artist in front of “Panorama of Miami,” 2024, and “Hawaiian Wedding,” 1999. The works are part of Rachel Feinstein: The Miami Years, on now at the Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach.
“Women artists in relationships with more successful male artists sometimes don’t have a kid, or they only have one, because they can’t do it all,” she says. “I’m making art here, but I’m also the muse for John, and a mother. The best parent,” she reflects, “is like a mountain. The mountain is extremely solid, but it has no emotion or needs or dislikes or likes. It’s just this mountain of enduring strength, and it’s what kids want in a parent. No ego. And that’s the opposite of an artist, which is all about ego and what you want to show the world. Children think the whole world revolves around them. Artists think the whole world revolves around them. If you combine mother and child, it’s very confusing for both.”
Come morning, Feinstein will hunker down in her summer studio across the road, where preparations for The Miami Years are in their final phase. Turning to her youngest, Flora, who is 15-going-on-40, she asks, “It’s hard for you, right?” Flora, expertly weaving the flyaway tendrils of Feinstein’s gingery hair into a proper French braid, dismisses Feinstein’s fears of failing as a mother and an artist at such pressured moments with a reassuring, “You can do both. You’re successful and you’re a good mother.”
They talk about it all the time. “We’re close,” Flora explains. “But I think it’s harder to be the child of parents who work for someone else. My mom makes her own decisions.” Unlike her older siblings, Francis (21) and Hollis (19), both art students at Carnegie Mellon University (Currin’s alma mater), Flora is dead-set against pursuing the same line of work.
Feinstein never had to think about her career path. “I just was an artist,” she recalls. Her prospering parents might have taken the hint when their first-born started making sculptures out of boxes from her holiday gifts. They didn’t. Later, when Feinstein was studying for her bat mitzvah, her Catholic mother confessed to having had her secretly baptized. Out went the Hebrew lessons. In came the drawing classes. Then her high school basketball team dropped her from its ranks.
“I was very, very upset,” Feinstein says. So was her mother, Daria Ann, who worked full-time as a nurse at South Miami Hospital; was a diabetes educator; and also tended to the wild, now endangered, parrots flocking to their backyard. (According to Feinstein, “She was the Parrot Queen!”) Thinking that idle hands were the devil’s playground, Daria took a tip from a Dadeland Mall makeup artist and paid Alexis Rodríguez-Duarte, a local photographer, to produce a lookbook for Rachel. The session went well. Rodríguez-Duarte brought her portfolio to Bruce Weber, who was casting adult, mostly male models for an ad campaign promoting Calvin Klein’s Obsession at the old Breakwater Hotel. Feinstein, who is five-foot-nine and has a joie-de-vivre the camera loves, watched, mesmerized by the beauty of the scene.
“That was my foray into weirdness,” she admits, describing Miami in the ’80s as the “wild west.” These were the Miami Vice years, when nightclubs admitted underage girls like her and her sister, and a classmate’s Key Biscayne mansion became the residence of the drug kingpin portrayed by Al Pacino in Scarface. Her standup parents, she says, were “incredibly lax” about her late-night carousing on school nights with the male models who befriended her. Why? “Because,” she recalls, “they thought all the models were gay!”
Feinstein in front of her childhood home in Coral Gables.
They weren’t. And some did not have her best interests in mind, leading to a few narrow escapes from depredation. It became useful later, when she made them the subtext for feisty artworks she based on the childhood fairytales that had interfered with her dreams.
In the moment, however, she took to modeling as if team sports never existed. Stylists dressed her as a ‘40s-era femme fatale in heavy makeup, with an unlighted cigarette dangling from her lips. “Right away I transformed into somebody else,” she recalls. “I didn’t see that as a problem, because I was so young. It was almost like an acting job. I wasn’t the 14-year-old ninth grader at Ransom Everglades High School in Coconut Grove, but a film noir woman. And I loved it.”
Feinstein made the rounds of agencies and won bookings with photographers (including Weber) for Italian Vogue and other European magazines during her summer vacations. (Her mother chaperoned.) During the school year, she also worked on weekends as a live mannequin for upscale boutiques in Bal Harbour and Coconut Grove. Before long the supermodel agency Elite was booking her in New York for Seventeen and Sassy. When she started college, Feinstein phased herself out of the business and didn’t tap the money her mother had banked for her until 2003, when the accumulated $100,000 went toward her and Currin’s purchase of a SoHo loft large enough to house a growing family.
John Currin was a decade older than Feinstein when they met, and she was a year out of Columbia University, where she had enrolled as a pre-med student to appease her parents. They doubted that making art was any way to earn a living that would keep her in cars like the Chrysler LeBaron they had given her.
“I was certain about being an artist,” Feinstein declares. “My parents said absolutely not. They never thought it would make me happy, so they pushed me to do other things, like work at an advertising agency. I hated it. I could not do a desk job and be an artist.” It wasn’t long before she changed her major to religious studies, with a minor in philosophy, and took classes in sculpture, welding, and woodworking on the sly, without either parent, both now deceased, becoming any the wiser. Yet they influenced her art more than they knew.
This story is an excerpt from PALMER Vol.6. To see the complete story, pre-order your copy of the magazine, here.