About Rachael Que Vargas

Rachael Que Vargas is the Founder and Director of Musivum: The Museum of Mosaic Environments.

While planning an institution to house Anatomy Set in Stone, her twenty-two-piece marble mosaic series, Vargas went looking for the museum that would hold it in context. No museum dedicated to the global history of mosaic existed anywhere in the world. She began building one.

Vargas has supported herself through creative work since busking in Seattle in 1987, with one deliberate exception: a year at Kinko’s, taken specifically to teach herself graphic design on the midnight shift. She has been a professional visual artist since 1995 and has worked in mosaic since 1998.

At the bank’s request, she bartered a mosaic as the down payment on her first house and studio.

Vargas first turned to mosaic for its permanence, and stayed for the color. Her early mosaics worked with pop culture imagery, using tesserae to imitate the Ben-Day dots of four-color printing. She then pioneered pictorial mosaics made from bottle caps, and the form spread. Drawn toward subtler shading, she moved to natural history subjects in glass and stone.

Her mosaics have been commissioned by the American Museum of Natural History, Golden Voice and Budweiser for the Stagecoach Music Festival, the Chicago Public Art Group, Northeastern University, and private collectors. Her work has appeared in Smithsonian Magazine, The Washington Post, a BBC documentary presented by Stephen Fry, and JoAnn Locktov’s Mosaic Art + Style.

Vargas built her own market rather than waiting for one. Over two decades she sold $3.5 million of her work outside the gallery system, shipping more than 2,500 sculptural fire pits to all fifty states and more than twenty countries. Direct to the buyer, at her own prices, with no dealer between the work and the person who wanted it.

That business is where Musivum’s financing model comes from: an institution funded by many people who each want it to exist, rather than by a handful large enough to set its terms.

The work reached Google’s Chicago headquarters, Calvin Klein, Telfar Clemens, Sandals Ochi, RumFire at the Sheraton Waikiki, the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, and Southwest Porch in Bryant Park. Coverage includes The New York Times Business and Home sections, the Chicago Tribune, Variety, Craft Magazine, HGTV, DIY Network, Epic’s Castle, and several episodes of CBS’s Hawaii Five-0.

Vargas trained in poetry at Interlochen Arts Academy, Naropa, and Stone Circle, a foundation that brings depth and lyricism to her visual practice. Music, myth, and metaphor run through the work; materials and techniques are chosen for their effect on narrative, meaning, and nuance as much as for form or function.

Each medium has sharpened the next. Poetry, music, graphic and industrial design, metalwork, and mosaic build a single method, in which pattern, rhythm, narrative, and material meaning are alloys and allies across disciplines.

She performed her poetry on stage at Lollapalooza in 1996. She is cited in three of Austin Kleon’s New York Times bestselling guides to creativity: Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work!, and Keep Going. Her jewelry is in the collection of Heather Haskell, Director of the Art Museums at the Springfield Museums. Thirty years after she set aside her busking, she played harmonica on Dmitry Wild’s album Vintage Tales. It all comes back around.

As Director, Vargas has built Musivum’s institutional foundation from the ground: its governing documents, its collections and provenance standards, and its compensation policy. Underneath all of it sits a body of research on structural exclusion in the arts since at least the sixteenth century, across gender, race, economic precarity, disability, queerness, class, and medium bias. The research came first, and the museum’s ethics and design follow from it. It is published in full on this site.

She is also the museum’ lead artist. The Threshold Map, Musivum’s founding artwork, is hers to design and, with the School’s first students, to build.

Curriculum Vitae • Artist Statement • Research and Publications

Works and press listed here are documented in full at rachaelquevargas.com.