Rosalyn Richards - prints and biography

Rosalyn Richards is an American artist and educator whose career has spanned more than four decades. Since 1982, she has served as a member of the art faculty at Bucknell University, where she has influenced generations of young artists through her teaching while continuing to develop a significant professional practice. Richards has exhibited widely, with solo shows across the United States, and her work is represented in numerous museum collections, reflecting her standing as a respected figure in contemporary printmaking and painting.

Richards’s artistic vision is deeply shaped by the intersection of science, technology, and the natural world. Drawing inspiration from images produced in particle physics, biotechnology, radiology, satellite photography, and geological surveys, her work explores how human perception of nature is mediated by technology. Her paintings, prints, and drawings often highlight the tension between direct sensory experiences of the natural environment and the abstracted, systematized images created through technological means.

One of Richards’s central strategies is her engagement with the visual language of maps, charts, and diagrams. In many works, she deconstructs these forms, reconstructing them into imaginary maps that function as metaphors for both inner journeys and imaginative exploration. While maps traditionally serve practical and serious functions, Richards reinterprets them playfully, weaving in elements of games and puzzles. In doing so, she opens space for whimsy within otherwise rigid systems, transforming tools of measurement and control into pathways of discovery and creativity. Her work resonates with the human impulse to create order and microcosms within the vast and unpredictable universe.

Richards’s art has been widely collected by prestigious institutions. Museum collections that include her work are the Art Institute of Chicago, the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at UCLA, the Brooklyn Museum, the Portland Art Museum, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, and the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina, among many others.

Through her career as both artist and educator, Rosalyn Richards has cultivated a practice that bridges art and science, rigor and play, order and imagination. Her works invite viewers to reconsider how we understand and map the world around us—and within us—reminding us that creativity is both a system of exploration and a journey of wonder.