Dylan Rivera
Dylan Rivera is a sculptor whose practice brings together material experimentation, abstraction, biological reference, and a strong interest in color. Working across wood, steel, stone, plastic, paper, plaster, glass, ceramics, film photography, and writing, Rivera treats versatility as a way of understanding both material and self. The work is often ornate, physically complex, and shaped by the tension between formal elegance and instability.
Rivera grew up outside a conventional art environment. Both parents were New York City police officers, and art was not a central family activity. Still, making was a constant impulse. Childhood involved drawing, crafts, games invented from available materials, and the pleasure of building something from scratch. A grade-school assignment to construct a diorama of a biological landscape remains a formative memory. The project was small, but the excitement of making it clarified an early attachment to sculpture.
Before entering fine art, Rivera worked in pastry. Without formal culinary training, Rivera developed desserts alongside respected chefs in New York City, learning about flavor composition, design, structure, color, and finish. That experience remains visible in the sculptures, which Rivera describes as “pastry-like” in their use of substructure, fill, pigment, and garnish.
A later shift into higher education began in philosophy at community college. During a second year of undergraduate study, Rivera changed majors to art. Pam Brown, then a professor and now a mentor, encouraged an application to a sculpture program. At twenty-four, Rivera transferred to Maine College of Art & Design in Portland, Maine.
Entering a conceptual fine-art context after a career in pastry required adjustment. Rivera retained an attachment to material process and formal composition while learning to develop a stronger conceptual framework around the work. The result is a practice that does not separate physical making from critical inquiry. Materials are selected not only for their technical limits but also for their histories, associations, and capacity to attract or repel attention.
Rivera’s work moves between sculpture, assemblage, material study, graffiti, poetry, film photography, and institutional critique. The artist describes an ongoing tension between the “institutionalized artist” and the outsider artist, a productive conflict that has helped create a broader perspective on art-making. Rather than treating a stable style as the goal, Rivera looks for conceptual and material throughlines across different forms.
Color is a major source of energy. Rivera is drawn to Nicholas Hernandez’s use of color and his blending of galactic and marine imagery, as well as the forms and compositional intelligence of pastry chef Shaun Velez. Teresa Solar Abboud’s sculptural scale, gradients, and skeletal forms also provide important reference points. In writing, Ada Limón, Sharon Olds, Maya Angelou, and Dr. Seuss all matter for different reasons, including rhythm, flow, alliteration, and serial structure.
Nature is another sustained influence, especially marine life. Rivera looks to the line, movement, and dynamic curves of aquatic organisms, drawing in part from programs such as Planet Earth. The sculpture Matriarch combines the locomotion of cephalopods, the display of a bird-of-paradise mating ritual, and the visual authority of royal portraiture. The resulting object considers lineage, formality, precarity, and the physical presence of a matriarch without reducing those ideas to direct illustration.
Rivera’s studio days are intensive. Mornings are reserved for setting up materials, tools, table space, a laptop, and a notebook, then moving into sketches, whiteboard or chalkboard drawings, material studies, models, and full-scale sculpture. Because the work takes time to build, studio sessions can run for twelve hours, interrupted only by lunch and short walks.
This commitment has also required a reassessment of pace and physical care. During the first year of undergraduate study, Rivera took on a large-scale installation, marble carving, and foundation requirements without allowing time for rest. The resulting injury, slipped cervical discs, required a year away from school, physical therapy, and spinal injections. It changed the practice permanently. Rivera now emphasizes breaks, recovery, and studio ergonomics, recognizing that health is a practical condition for sustained creative work.
A difficult marble project further reinforced the importance of working with, rather than against, a material. Rivera initially pushed the stone without understanding its behavior, causing breaks, microfractures, and bruising. Instead of discarding the result, the two broken sections were pinned together. The reconfigured sculpture became more successful than the original plan and demonstrated how technical problems can alter a work’s composition in useful ways.
Rivera is currently developing new work that brings together bodily and ornate forms through material disruption and airbrushing. The artist is also preparing an undergraduate thesis exhibition, which will be the largest body of work made to date. The coming months will involve research, reading, experiments, and material studies before returning to Portland for a senior year.
For Rivera, success is measured by care, sustained work, and the willingness to keep learning. The goal is not to follow the fluctuations of the art world, but to remain attentive to what feels compelling in the studio and to build a practice that can grow without sacrificing health or curiosity.
