About Cherri Rittenhouse
Artist Bio
Cherri Rittenhouse’s paintings live in the space where poetry, memory, and subconscious thought meet. Her titles, often embedded invisibly within her images, act as secret threads — guiding her hand and giving each work its pulse. Rittenhouse creates from instinct, blending the whimsical and the profound, the playful and the haunted. Her visual language draws from art history, tribal and street art, mythology, and the luminous depths of the sea.
Born in Chicago, Rittenhouse earned her BFA from Rockford University and her MFA from Northern Illinois University. She taught studio art and art history for over two decades at Rock Valley College, where she also served as Academic Chair of Art, Humanities, Modern Language & Music. Her work has been exhibited across the United States, Mexico, Austria, and Sweden — including representation by the Phyllis Kind Gallery in Chicago and a feature exhibition at the Vida Museum in Borgholm, Sweden.
Rittenhouse calls both Mexico and Chicago home. Whether painting underwater memories or scrawling fleeting thoughts into her scrafitti — a term she coined for her quick, impressionistic works — her art remains a dialogue between chaos and calm, randomness and reverence. “My images find me,” she says. “We recognize each other. Paint is alchemy.”