Alex W Rader (b. 1996) is an artist born in New York City, raised as a third culture individual in Madrid and rural Pennsylvania. She graduated with her BFA from Hunter College in NYC in 2022 and where she continues to live and work.

Discovering the language of painting has been a vital component in her artistic development. Today, she uses painting as a means of expressing the ineffable anxieties around womanhood. Her practice begins with writing webs of potential visual metaphors, setting scenes both real and imagined. Then, through the scrupulous process of representational painting, her works become the recordings of the attention devoted to a problem verbalized in visual metaphor. The role of representational painting proves to be an effective tool to evoke care, devotion, and time. With this, the theme of home has entered her work, providing new combinations of objects in uneasy domestic interiors.

Rader has since exhibited in shows across Manhattan and Brooklyn. She’s also held a Kossak Painting Fellowship under Drew Beattie, and was the recipient of the Curator’s Choice Award (2021). Lastly, she has been featured in several publications, including interviews by Art Editor Michelle Quick, and Vie Darling.

“While there is no way to compensate for an atrocity, there is a way to transcend it, by making it a gift to others. The trauma is redeemed only when it becomes the source of a survivor mission.” -Judith Herman, M.D.

“The labor of women in the house, certainly, enables men to produce more wealth than they otherwise could; and in this way women are economic factors in society. But so are horses.” - Charlotte Perkins Gilman