Rachael Que Vargas is the Founder and Director of the Museum of Mosaic Environments.
While planning an institution to house ASIS — her twenty-two-piece marble mosaic series — Vargas discovered that no museum dedicated to the global history of mosaic existed anywhere in the world. So she decided to do something about it
Vargas has supported herself through creative work since busking in Seattle in 1987 — with one deliberate exception: a year at Kinkos, taken specifically to teach herself graphic design on the midnight shift. She has been a professional visual artist since 1995.
At the bank’s request, she bartered a mosaic as the down payment on her first house and studio.
Vargas first turned to mosaics for their enduring permanence, but it was the bold and brilliant colors of mosaic glass that truly captivated her. Her early mosaics explored pop culture images, using tesserae to imitate the Ben-Day dots of four color printing. She then pioneered pictorial mosaics made from bottle caps, influencing the popularity of the form. When she became enamored of subtler shading she began working with natural history subjects rendered in glass or stone.
Vargas’ mosaics have been commissioned by the American Museum of Natural History, Golden Voice and Budweiser for the Stagecoach Music Festival, Chicago Public Art Group, Northeastern University, and residential clients and private collectors. Her work has been featured in Smithsonian Magazine, The Washington Post, a BBC documentary presented by Stephen Fry, and JoAnn Locktov’s seminal Mosaic Art + Style.
Over two decades, Vargas sold 3.5 million dollars worth of her art outside the gallery system, shipping more than 2,500 sculptural fire pits to all 50 states and over 20 countries. Clients include Google Headquarters, Chicago, IL, Calvin Klein, Telfar Clemens, Sandals Ochi, Rum Fire at the Sheraton Waikiki, the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, and Southwest Porch in Bryant Park, NYC. Coverage includes The New York Times Business and Home sections, The Chicago Tribune, Variety, Craft Magazine, HGTV, DIY Network, Epic’s Castle series and several episodes of CBS’ 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 are woven into her work; materials and techniques are chosen for their impact on narrative, meaning and nuance as much as for form or function.
Each medium — poetry, music, graphic and industrial design, metalwork, mosaic — has sharpened the next, building a methodology 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.
