Nancy Rivera
ARTIST IN RESIDENCE: July 2, 2022 – August 14, 2022
About Nancy
Nancy 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.
Residency
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.
