Dylan Rose Rheingold Opens Up Through Art in Her Exhibition “The Blueprint” at Ward Gallery NYC

There’s a moment—maybe one you’ve had—where you enter a room and something small, even ordinary, hits you with the weight of a long-forgotten memory. For New York-born artist Dylan Rose Rheingold, that moment is her canvas. In her new solo exhibition, The Blueprint, shown at Ward Gallery in Manhattan, Rheingold doesn’t just paint what she sees—she paints what she remembers, what she feels, what she used to believe.

The Blueprint isn’t just her first NYC solo; it’s her most personal one yet. Known for blending oil, glitter, pastel, and charcoal into emotional talismans, Rheingold leaned into something looser, more unfiltered this time. The pieces, plucked directly from her studio floor, weren’t created for an audience—they just… were. And that’s what makes them powerful. “They’re more diaristic,” Rheingold shared.

“I was a little apprehensive about showing those works”

The rawness is visible. A discarded pointe shoe, cartoon hands fidgeting with too-big clothes, backyard shadows—each scene carries the intimacy of a half-remembered dream, textured by memory but cracked by time. Rheingold’s practice, rooted in automatism, starts with no plan—just movement. From there, recurring symbols surface. Those symbols become paintings. But this time, instead of refining them, she let them breathe.

And if you’re wondering why these works feel strangely familiar, it’s because Rheingold paints from the universal edge of the personal. Her work wrestles with what it means to observe and be observed, especially as a young woman. In one piece, we see the world from a child’s eye level, the adult world awkwardly cropped. In another, a group of girls cheers, while faceless watchers—us included—hover in the margins.

Rheingold doesn’t shy away from her influences, but she’s wary of absorbing too much. “The less influences the better,” she said. “You walk into a million shows and start creating a giant list. You don’t want to start changing what you’re doing. You need to be doing what comes natural to you.”That instinct helped shape The Blueprint into something beautifully singular—art that feels less like a gallery experience and more like flipping through someone’s cherished, frayed notebook.

Her cultural identity—a mix of half-Japanese and Jewish-American family histories—surfaces not just in themes of otherness but in literal collages from old family albums. During the pandemic, Rheingold paired images of rural Massachusetts farm life with classic Brooklyn scenes, not to tell a family story, but to create tension, humor, and odd harmony. “What I was enjoying… was really this whole idea of otherness,” she explained.

“Configuring things in ways that didn’t feel like they fit”

Yet, that not-fitting becomes the thread. The art feels like being 13 again, misunderstood but vivid, like trying to decode the world with glitter pens and magazine cutouts. It’s nostalgia, but without the soft focus. Sometimes it feels voyeuristic, even. But that’s intentional. “I’ve done a lot of research into the advent of (teenagerhood),” she noted, linking her use of consumer objects—pink shoes, stuffed animals—to the capitalist birth of the modern adolescent. Her memory isn’t just personal; it’s generational, shaped by what we bought, wore, and wished for.

The Blueprint reminds you that even the quietest, most unassuming details—childlike hands, crooked shadows, a flash of underwear—can carry a lifetime. Rheingold doesn’t hand us polished stories. Instead, she whispers half-finished thoughts, as if to say: This is what I remember. Do you remember it this way too?