Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting, writing
Website: arielriverapaints.com
Ariel Rivera is a Puerto Rican painter and writer based in San Francisco. Primarily self-taught, she deepened her practice through study at The Contemporary at Laguna Gloria, Sari Shryock’s Not Sorry Art School, the Crealde School of Art, and the Jean Henry School of Art, and holds a BA in Critical Media & Cultural Studies from Rollins College (2015). Before settling in California, she lived among the wetlands of Florida and the hill country of Texas — landscapes that continue to surface in her painting practice alongside the coastal hills and headlands of the Bay Area.
Rivera now works out of a private studio at Root Division, the San Francisco visual-arts nonprofit, where she also teaches adult painting workshops and hosts monthly community paint nights. Since joining that community she has shown steadily around the city, participating in Root Division’s Fall Auction and San Francisco Open Studios’ ArtLaunch exhibition, and taking part in a run of 2025 shows including Startup Fair at Hotel Del Sol, Flourish at Four One Nine, After Hours at The Faight, and a tiny show at Studio Gallery.
Working mostly in oil on panel, with gouache studies feeding her larger canvases, Rivera paints landscapes and quiet domestic scenes that trace what she describes as “the unseen patterns that connect nature and spirit.” Sites she has lived in or passed through — Florida wetlands, Texas hill country, the Marin Headlands, the hills above Mill Valley — recur as settings where an outer landscape doubles as an inner one.
Her canvases treat nature as both mirror and guide, looking for the moments where land, memory, myth, and intuition overlap. The palette and scale tend toward the intimate — small-format panels of specific, named places — rather than grand vistas, giving the work a diaristic, close-looking quality.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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