A Kick-off Party will be held on July 8, 2022.
The Kimball Art Center names Nancy E. Rivera as 2022 artist-in-residence. Kimball Art Center’s artist-in-residence program supports artists of diverse ages, backgrounds, and disciplines in the exploration and expansion of their creative practices and the production of new bodies of work.
During this residency, Rivera will work on her cross-stitch portrait series and the research behind it. The continuation of that work is a total of 15 self-portraits that trace Rivera’s path through the US immigration process. The source material for this work draws from her family’s archive, which includes government-issued immigration documents from 22 years living as immigrants in the U.S. In this ongoing series of work, Rivera employs passport, green card, and other ID photos to trace the different chapters of her experience through the US immigration process. She reproduces these photos as detailed and delicate cross-stitched portraits.
Taking these photos out of the context of their use as government identification transforms and subverts the traditional readings of these images. A reference to the bureaucratic process of immigration remains but in each portrait, as we stare straight ahead, emotionless, devoid of the context of our location, nationality, or legal status I ask the source material to code-switch from its original context to works of art that explore a diasporic identity.
– Bio
Nancy E. Rivera is a visual artist, curator, and arts administrator based in Salt Lake City, Utah. As an artist, she works primarily in the fields of photography, video, sculpture, and installation. Her practice is influenced by her dual cultural identity and its effects, such as code-switching, cultural assimilation, and displacement. Her most recent work reflects on her experience as first-generation Mexican American through her own history of migration. She has exhibited nationally in a variety of traditional and non-traditional venues and her work is part of private and public collections. From 2018–2021, she served as board member and vice-chair of the Salt Lake City Art Design Board. She was a 2021 National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures (NALAC) Leadership Institute Fellow and currently oversees the Visual Arts Program at the Utah Division of Arts & Museums.
Artist-In-Residence Programming
Rivera’s work will be on display July 1 through August 14 and Rivera plans to hold studio hours 0n-site at Kimball Art Center Fridays and Saturday throughout the residency. Visitors to Kimball Art Center are encouraged to engage in conversation with Rivera while onsite to learn more about her work. Additional programming will be announced in the coming weeks.
