Nancy Rivera is a visual artist, curator, and arts administrator based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Her artistic practice weaves together photography, fiber art, and sculpture, whose reciprocal interplay shapes topics spanning from familial memory to subversions of government-issued documents. Influenced by her dual cultural identity, Rivera’s discrete material juxtapositions explore code-switching, cultural assimilation, and displacement—central themes that articulate duality and hybridity.
Rivera has exhibited nationally in a variety of traditional and nontraditional venues including Spring/Break Art Show in Los Angeles, California, Ruffin Gallery at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Granary Arts in Ephraim, Utah. Her work is part of private and public collections such as the Center for Creative Photography, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, and the state of Utah Alice Merrill Horne Art Collection.
In her independent curatorial practice, she works to center artists and practitioners of color, not only through representation but through building community and support systems. She has organized exhibitions for the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, the Utah Department of Cultural and Community Engagement, and the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art. As Director of Planning and Program, Rivera currently oversees Utah Museum of Fine Arts’ programmatic initiatives, including exhibition planning in support of the museum’s institutional mission and core values.