Nina Rivera

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Bio

Nina Rivera (b. 2001) is a Mexican-American artist whose work engages a wide variety of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and photography. They were born in Saint Paul and currently reside in Minneapolis, MN. Their work explores the relationships between the body, disorder and the absurd in the digital age. They graduated from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2025 with a BFA Fine Arts Studio degree. Aside from the NE SCULPTURE | Gallery Factory Emerging Artist Fellowship Residency program, they are currently working within the Graves Foundation Creating Change Gallery Fellowship program with a solo exhibition opening in August, 2025. They were awarded the MCAD Visual Scholarship, MCAD NOW Scholarship, and the MCAD Fine Arts Studio Merit Scholarship Award. They have participated in group exhibitions at the Vine Arts Center (Minneapolis, MN) and Squirrel Haus Arts (Minneapolis, MN), and co-organized a group exhibition, Recordando Nuestra Herencia, Dibujando El Camino (Minneapolis, MN).

Artist Statement

Engaging in the practices of drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and photography, my intent is to examine psychological conflation and the evolving relationships between embodiment, disorder, digital influence, and the absurd. As our climate conditions detrimentally mutate, whether social, environmental, political or economic, we have reached a point of existence between rich pasts with distinct identities and a volatile future humanity is guaranteed to inherit. Raised amid the boom of the world wide web, particularly social media, the subliminal shifts in societal functions abstracted by our integration with technology has remained at the forefront of my worldview. 

Drawing from feminist and postcolonial theory, contemporary posthumanism applies these conceptual frameworks to our cybernetic fusion under late-stage capitalism and the Anthropocene. Prior to studying the theory, I developed an analogous perspective alongside a radical fluctuation between nihilistic and absurdist sentiment since my preadolescence. Essentially, the foundation of my art is to deconstruct the spectrum of contemporary hazards within the human experience. 

Instagram: @ninarivera.art

Website: www.ninarivera.art