Arte VallARTa Museo announces the opening of VERNÁCULO/VERNACULAR, an exhibition by Erik Rivera, one of Mexico’s foremost LGBTQIA+ artists.
Known professionally as “El Niño Terrible,” this is Rivera’s first exhibition in Puerto Vallarta. Having begun its journey in Mexico City and then moving on to Malaga, Spain, Arte VallARTa Museo is the final destination for this international show.
Comprised primarily of works depicting Mexican people and their culture, Rivera paints his subjects through a queer lens, including them in a broader social conversation using their own “vernacular.”
Most of the paintings and drawings were produced during Covid. This collection begins with the intention of recreating the vernacular root of the personality of a country and bringing a sense of ‘Mexicanidad’ to his own community by mixing childish innocence, historical, intellectual, social, religious, and political references (and their reinterpretations) with contemporary, emotional, global, and sexually diverse ones.
Rivera constructs a Mexico where all people are included and accepted through a shared and common thread of language and its perception.
“I am convinced that we are what our childhoods have made us. Mexicans grew up as children developing a powerful and vastly magical-religious-spiritual-cultural imagination. Very mixed and diverse, it is not necessarily aligned to any dogma, and that, unlike this, evolves into something that is constantly exposed to various references of a timeless and borderless origin of a globalized world. Coupled with personal and emotional experiences resulting in a unique blend that makes up a particular identity, it includes a belief system with interpretations uniquely its own.”
– Erik Rivera
Opening on May 24, during Vallarta Pride Week, this exhibition at Arte Vallarta Museo will run through July 28, 2024.
