Crackers (& cookies) Exhibition info
Cheez-it Chair, Needle felted wool over wood with metal chair frame, 34" x 16" x 16", 2024
Crackers (& cookies)
Solo show by LeBrie Rich
April 3-26, 2025 @ Nine Gallery
122 NW 8th Avenue, Portland, OR USA | Wed-Sat 12-5 pm
Fiber friends, Crackers (& cookies) is a culmination of three years of ideating, shaping, and poking my snack dreams to life. I hope you’ll join me at the opening reception or the pop-up event.
View the online exhibition here.
Special Merch Pop-Up!
April 19, 2-4 pm at Nine Gallery
Limited edition Cheez-It shirts,
designed and handmade by Collect Call
Wool felt snack-inspired furniture and sculptures
In April, I’m excited to unveil my newest work in my solo exhibition Crackers (& cookies) at Nine Gallery.
Through visual explorations of mass-produced food and its cultural significance, you will encounter delightfully large-scale felted sculptures—including some snack-inspired furniture—featuring iconic brands of crackers and cookies. Stripped of their familiar outer packaging and magnified well beyond life-size, each object’s formal elements move to the forefront, although the resemblance to the original product is never lost.
In addition to these larger sculptures, the exhibition will include two-dimensional textile pieces I created while living in Amsterdam in 2022. These works contain felted Ritz Crackers, Cheez-It’s, Oreos, and other modern snack foods applied to vintage embroidery samplers and textiles sourced from Dutch antique markets.
By bringing together art forms from two different cultures and time periods, this collection highlights the global reach of American food products, while the countless hours required to create each object offer a pointed critique of our throwaway consumer culture.
About LeBrie Rich
Since 2004, LeBrie Rich has been exploring visual possibilities and emotional resonances of felted wool. She is best known for her highly detailed soft-sculptural replicas of familiar packaged food items, such as Jif peanut butter and Spam. Venues that have shown her work include the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Project Space in New York, NY; Portland Art Museum and Blackfish Gallery in Portland, OR; and Albus Gallery in Fukuoka, Japan. She has been awarded artist residencies at the Rauschenberg Residency (2013, 2015), Ucross Foundation (2018), and Kayamori House (2012) in the mountains outside of Nara, Japan.