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Neil Rivas
Neil Rivas received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from California State University, Long Beach. His current art practice consists of photography, interdisciplinary works, public interventions, and multimedia projects. He is also known for his collaborative pedagogical projects. His work is informed by photojournalism and documentary work, comic books, kitsch,aesthetic politics, social justice, and his personal experience as part of a diasporic population within the U.S. and the larger international community. Coming from an activist and community organizing background, along with a personal history of involvement with resistance, his beginnings in art making were inspired by the notion that art can serve as a vital and critical tool for social change. He is invested in the photographic image as a vessel for testimony and visual narrative, often focusing on the ritual of revisitation as a central strategy within his practice.
In 2009, he participated in the MORFO International Artist Residency Program (Guatemala), and ‘Residencias artísticas con Luis Camnitzer’ through the Spanish Cooperation (AECID) in Antigua, Guatemala. In 2005, he was the recipient of an Odyssey Theme Project Grant to carry out a project in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and most recently, was awarded an IMPACT Social Entrepreneurship Award as part of the collaborative cross-border project, 20/20 Foto (El Paso, TX & Juarez, Mexico). He has worked internationally as an artist, photojournalist, educator, and community organizer, and has exhibited his work in the U.S., Guatemala, El Salvador, and Japan. Recent exhibitions include the MFA Now 2012 and I Am Crime shows in San Francisco, CA, and the Brucennial 2012 exhibition in NYC. He is currently an MFA candidate at California College of the Arts, where he was recently awarded Graduate Merit and Diversity scholarships.
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