Art Wellesley is delighted to partner with the Wellesley Free Library to host an Artist Talk with Daniela Rivera.
Daniela Rivera works with ideas of displacement, memory, and cultural migration to celebrate difference and reject categorization. Rivera builds, paints, and draws spaces to be vulnerable together where she hopes to celebrate difference and cultural exchange. She will be presenting her work from the beginning of her practice in Chile and the dramatic changes that resulted from her move to the US.
Rivera is also part of the current exhibition: In Focus at the Davis Museum in Wellesley. This exhibit highlights the creative range of practices among the professional artists on the Wellesley College faculty.
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Daniela Rivera is an acclaimed artist, a Wellesley resident, and the Luella LaMer Slaner Professor in Latin American Studies, in the Art Department, at Wellesley College. Born in Santiago, Chile, Daniela Rivera received her BFA from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in 1996 and her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts, Boston in 2006.
Rivera has exhibited widely in Latin American cities as well as in the United States at the Davis Museum, the Fitchburg Art Museum, ICA and the MFA. She was awarded residencies at Surf Point, Proyecto ACE in Buenos Aires, Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Skowhegan School of Paintings and Sculpture, among others. She was the recipient of notable fellowships and grants including The Wagner Fellowship (2025) The Rappaport Prize, Now + There, the Massachusetts Cultural Council Award, VSC, the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture, the Berkshire Taconic Foundation, The FONDART in Chile, and the Saint Botolph Club Foundation Distinguished Artist Award. Recent exhibitions include: Generations, Trompe L'oeil Provocations, Donde El Cielo Toca La Tierra/Where the Sky Touches The Earth at Matucana 100 in Santiago, Chile, Praxis of Local Knowledge at the San Francisco Art Commission, and New Worlds: Women to Watch at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, as well as an upcoming solo exhibition at Mass Moca. Rivera works from the experience of displacement and from her reality of cultural hybridism. She is interested in how stereotypes are constructed and attempts to challenge categories that discriminate, isolate and violently define other's identities.
Daniela Rivera
Donde el Cielo Toca la Tierra/ Where the Sky Touches the Ground, 2024
Photography by Benjamin Mate
Adobe and Interactive Sound Installation
