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Daniela Rivera

5.1.19.1_fellow_art_rivera_profile

Daniela Rivera

Organization

deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park

Program

Rappaport Art Prize

Year

2019

Press

Daniela Rivera on social isolation: 'Artists are so well-suited to adapt to these circumstances'

Massachusetts Artist wins $35,000 Rappaport Prize: 'This is a life-changer for me'

At the Fitchburg Art Museum Daniela Rivera digs deep into disaster

Daniela Rivera: The Andes Inverted

Now and There: Daniela Rivera

In ‘Labored Landscapes,’ Artist Daniela Rivera Reveals Her New Reality

Daniela Rivera: Labored Landscapes (Where Hand Meets Ground)

Website

http://www.danielarivera.com/

The Prize allowed me to move political aspects of my work from a solo studio practice to one that can engage with communities and pursue inclusivity through shared authorship.

"I have been able to work on issues of displacement and belonging thanks to art. Today, and thanks to organizations like the Rappaport foundation and their support I was able to facilitate spaces of shared authorship and conversation in the pursuit of inclusivity and social justice through my work. This is what I want to focus my attention moving forward."

Born in Santiago, Chile, Daniela Rivera received her BFA from Pontifcia Universidad Católica de Chile in 1996 and her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts, Boston in 2006. She is currently an associate professor of Studio Art at Wellesley College. She has exhibited widely in Latin American cities including Santiago, Chile, as well as in the United States. She has been awarded residencies at Surf Point, Proyecto ACE in Buenos Aires, Vermont Studio Arts Center, and the Skowhegan School of Paintings and Sculpture. And she has been the recipient of notable fellowships and grants including from The Rappaport Prize, Now + There, the Massachussetes Cultural Council Award, VSC, the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture, and the Berkshire Taconic Foundation. Recent or upcoming exhibitions include: Stop, solo exhibition at LaMontagne October 2020, Labored Landscapes; Where The Sky Touches the Earth, Fitchburg Art Musuem, Fragmentos para una Historia del Olvido/ Fragments for a History of Displacement, The Davis Museum, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA (2018–2019); En Busca de los Andes, solo exhibition with Proyecto ACE, Buenos Aires, Argentina (June 2019); Sobremesa (Karaoke Politics), a public art project developed as her Now + There Accelerator Fellowship, Boston MA (summer/fall 2019), and The Andes Inverted, solo show at the MFA, Boston 2017-18.

“I was born in Santiago, Chile in 1973. Later that year the military coup happened and life as my family knew it changed dramatically. Family members all of a sudden became enemies. Friends stop seeing each other and suspicion grew as an illness. While friends and family disappeared persecuted by friends and family members, the country’s economy grew tremendously, at least, according to economic indicators. In 1980 I had my first Sara Lee cheesecake and a barbie! Both signs of comfort and achievement. Little did I know that many of my fellow Chileans were suffering and I myself was experiencing unimaginable loss. I got to live through the transition to democracy while attending art school in Chile and was able to vote for president for the first time in 1994. Due to life circumstances I moved to Boston in 2002 and I have been here since. I was able to start graduate school at the SMFA at Tufts in 2003 and with this I was finally introduce to the art community here in Boston. I have been working nonstop since then, and just recently after my first Public Art project, a project that allowed me to connect with people in ways that I never thought were possible I am now calling Boston my home. I work from the experience of displacement and from my reality of cultural hybridism. If trauma and loss were at the center of my practice before, today I am empowered by understanding what I can share from my experience of displacement and my culturally hybrid identity.”

Gallery

Tilted Heritage 2015. 25'x10'x10'. Ash on canvas, stretcher bars, rope, C clamps. Installed in Labored Landscapes (where hand meets ground), a solo exhibition at the Fitchburg Art Museum, September 21, 2019—January 12, 2020. Photograph: Charles Sternaimolo. This piece was triggered by an event, a fire that destroyed a vast area of one of the most iconic coastal cities in Chile. Tilted Heritage is an attempt to link contemporary politics to the history of colonization and its repercussions in identity, the cannibalization of culture, and the subversion of meaning.
Donde el Cielo toca La Tierra, 2019. Three oil on canvas paintings, approx. 12’ x 30’ each. Installed in Labored Landscapes (where hand meets ground), a solo exhibition at the Fitchburg Art Museum, September 21, 2019—January 12, 2020. Photograph: Charles Sternaimolo. Large-scale paintings, accompanied by photos etched with the text of interviews conducted with former workers which explore the physical and emotional connections made with the earth through the labor of the miner. My labor was an act of resistance to the industry while attempting to provide reciprocity and critical homage to its workers.
Grey Copper. 35’ x 36’ x 6’. Drawing and sound installation. Installed in Daniela Rivera: The Andes Inverted, a solo exhibition at The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, March 4, 2017–February 25, 2018. Grey Copper is a massive copper point drawing on one of the museum walls, that was cut and tilted six feet into the exhibition space. The abstract drawing was generated with traces of rocks brought from the mine itself and drawn with copper. I invited music composer, Jenny Olivia Johnson, to collaborate with me in the design of a sound interface that would allow for the use of more than 150 sound files collected from the site. The tilted wall acted as a massive resonance box and activated the emanating sounds, which included interviews with niners, sound samples taken from the mine and the Atacama region, as well as the sounds of making the drawing.
Sin Evidencia/ Without A Trace, 2019-2020. Approx. 14’ x 10’. A wall made out of 2,222 soap bars. Installed at Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University (2019) and Davis Museum, Wellesley College (2020). Without A Trace establishes a dialogue between the political history of my home country, Chile, with a personal history of trauma, and the formal strategies of male dominated Western art movements. The wall is constructed with bars of Zote soap. Zote is a Mexican brand of soap used for hand washing delicate laundry. This soap wall covers the extent of a gallery wall, camouflaging at first as part of the architecture, but little by little revealing itself due to its scent and materiality. My hope is that the experience of this piece immediately recalls spaces of intimacy and vulnerability centering the understanding of the work in memory and the body. The soap wall was my way to link institutional abuses of power to abuses and violence occurring in the domestic space. I also linked this wall soap to the cleansing act perpetrated by victimizers and the erasure of the traces of violence. The soap referred to moments of complete vulnerability and intimacy, and the act of washing off dirt and traces of previous events. Today, the figure of the wall indicates much more and each bar of soap points not only to the victims and victimizers but also to our collective blindness, complicity, and silence.
Sobremesa (Karaoke Politics). Public Platform made on repurposed dinning tables and activation via public performances and events. Sobremesa (Karaoke Politics) creates an open space for public vulnerability, expression and equity, while standing in recognition of the great value that lies in difference. Envisioned for the Boston neighborhood of Grove Hall, artist Daniela Rivera has created a platform for community discourse that invites community members and the public to step onto a stage of connected tables in order to challenge and traverse the symbolic boundaries of social expectations. Amidst our uncertain political climate, this project aims to open a playful space for gathering where the sharing of individual and cultural expressions is celebrated. The word and concept of sobremesa refers to a Pan-Hispanic cultural practice that was brought to the Americas by Spanish colonizers. During sobremesa, plates and leftovers as well as conversations and memories begin to literally and figuratively accumulate on top (sobre) of the dinner table (mesa). This outdoor installation features twenty repurposed dining room tables that have been altered to create a joined and singular platform. The table-tops have been stained in different colors to emphasize their place as territories that exist within a larger map.