Influenced by the work of Eva Hesse and the encaustic paintings of Brice Marden and Jasper Johns, she employs wax as a medium for sculpture in its own right rather than simply as a transition to being cast in bronze.

After attending Venice High School, she studied at Santa Monica College and the University of California at Los Angeles, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts.

She married the artist Brian Gaman in 1973; together they built a notable modernist art retreat in Springs, Long Island not far from the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center.

[4] In the same year, she was invited to participate alongside art world notables such as Faith Ringgold, Nancy Azara, and Hannah Wilke in a group show of 12 women sculptors at New York's A.I.R.

As a feminist riposte to the po-faced embargoes of Judd et al, they are priceless, converting mutely literal primary structures into no doubt rage-inducing upholstered, pillowed, buttoned and bowed boxes.

"[8] Rychlak's work in the 1990s, which she termed photo narratives, "is strongly illustrative of an invitation to plumb unassailable depths in a series based on photographs, evoking cut up and hand colored 'secrets' covered by thickly pebbled glass.

"[6] When a Village Voice critic visited Rychlak’s studio on Lafayette Street before her show opened in 1994 at Gallery Three Zero, she "was struck by the familiarity of the hay images in shadow boxes behind mottled-glass coverings.

"[6] In 2021, Rychlak collaborated with fellow New York artist Jeanne Silverthorne, mounting the exhibition Down and Dirty at the Lupin Foundation Gallery at the University of Georgia.

[11] The exhibition, which subsequently traveled to the Arts Center at Duck Creek in East Hampton, NY, and Project ArtSpace in New York City (2023), showcased conceptual and formal affinities between the two artists' works.

"The dichotomy between ugly and beautiful is foundational for both artists," wrote curator Terrie Sultan in the catalog for the exhibition, "as is the recognition that tough topics are often best addressed and alleviated with humor."

Through some of her essays and exhibitions, she reflected on the popularized exemplification of his "spirituality"[18] as well as his understudied advances related to Japanese conventions of ceramics and furniture design.

[21] After her employment at the Noguchi Museum, Rychlak organized On Display in Orange County: Modern and Contemporary Sculpture in 2011, which subsequently was incorporated into the Pacific Standard Time project in California.