Rachel Stiff is a mixed media artist and tenured faculty member at Western Nevada College in Carson City, Nevada. Originally from a small ranching community in rural Montana, her upbringing in expansive, open landscapes continues to inform her approach to artmaking. She holds an MFA from the University of Arizona (2012) and a BFA from the University of Montana (2009).

Stiff’s work examines the construction of the modern landscape and the desert-urban interface through abstraction. Her visual language reflects the contradictory qualities of the high desert: spaces that feel simultaneously timeless and in constant flux. Through drawing, painting, printmaking, and immersive observation, her practice captures the subtle, shifting transitions of light, color, and form across geologic and human time.

In the words of Executive Director and Chief Curator at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, JoAnne Northrup, “Rachel Stiff is an outstanding painter and printmaker who creates powerful work that evokes the natural world yet stops short of depiction… Her work resonates with the history of abstract painting and would easily find its place among great painters such as Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, and Grace Hartigan; yet she brings an ineffable 21st-century brooding quality into her work.” Northrup notes that Stiff’s awareness of environmental fragility is woven into her practice—commenting on the Anthropocene subtly through form, tone, and titling—as in works selected for the Nevada Museum of Art’s 2018 exhibition The Nuclear Landscape, which featured luminous, cloudlike abstractions evoking the visual legacy of nuclear testing.

Her work has been exhibited widely across the American West and is included in private and institutional collections, including Traktor Films (Santa Monica, CA) and the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art (Las Vegas, NV). She was selected as a featured artist in Tilting the Basin: Contemporary Art of Nevada, a major statewide survey organized by the Nevada Museum of Art. In 2013, she completed a residency with RAID Projects in downtown Los Angeles, and continued to live and exhibit in the city for two years, developing her practice in dialogue with the energy and complexity of the Southern California art scene.

In 2023, Stiff was an artist-in-residence with Friends of Black Rock–High Rock in the Black Rock Desert of northern Nevada. This opportunity continued her immersive practice of movement and observation within vast, transitional landscapes. The resulting series, Lost Tide, is a collection of monoprints reflecting on ancient rhythms of time and water in the now-arid region. Using the horizontal bands of Pleistocene Lake Lahontan’s ancient shorelines as compositional anchors, the work contemplates how natural cycles persist through geologic memory. From the dark skies of the National Conservation Area to the dry, elevated bluffs, Lost Tide invites viewers to sense the presence of water through the silence and scale of the desert.

In 2025, her solo exhibition Arid, Infinite, Above at Truckee Meadows Community College featured drawings, prints, and mixed-media paintings exploring the cosmic scale of the Nevada sky and the intimate, human-scale experience of the land. That same year, she completed a large-scale public mural for the Gerlach Mural Project, extending her relationship with the Great Basin landscape into the public realm.

Identifying as a true Westerner, Stiff’s work merges abstraction with our perception of the landscape, making visible the layered histories of the land while inviting viewers to consider their own orientation within time and space.