Daniela Rivera Hacia Cuando (To When)

Chilean-born and Boston-based artist Daniela Rivera creates a newly commissioned exhibition Hacia Cuando (To When), featuring a large, inclined platform floor comprised of handmade tiles fabricated in pre-Hispanic fresco traditions, an installation which operates simultaneously as painting, sculpture, and sonic device. The exhibition focuses on the migration of histories, materials, cultural objects, narratives, practices, and myths by addressing political, art historical, and material histories. Through her reinvigoration of craft tradition, Rivera aims to question history and address the historical, cultural, and colonial narratives present in these materials and their varied places of origin. 

By shifting the fresco’s location from its typical placement on the wall to the floor, and by hand-painting the tiles to resemble parquet flooring, Rivera creates a visual illusion which simulates volume and points to the critical inquiry and ethics of simulation. 

Rivera’s floor fresco will gently tilt upwards from the existing floor, decentering the physical experience of the space as well as upending traditional expectations of museum behavior by inviting visitors to walk across the artist’s handmade floor. This act of involuntary mark-making by visitors is a collaborative exchange with Rivera. The void made by the floor’s incline will act as a resonance space, amplifying the sounds through contact microphones as viewers make their way across the platform’s surface — creating further evidence of transitory and migratory pathways.

As a means of activating Rivera’s resonant fresco floor as a musical instrument, in October 2026 Rivera and MASS MoCA will present a new opera work in the gallery using the amplified sounds of both visitors and performers, combining recordings from visitors’ migrating across the surface with the sound of performers’ voices and movement. Hacia Cuando: An Opera will feature collaborators Javier Gustavo Bustos (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Jenny Olivia Johnson (Los Angeles, California), and Sebastian Muirhead (Santiago, Chile). In addition, fresco-making workshops will be held with Rivera to keep traditional craft methodologies alive from place to place, and generation to generation. 

About the Artist
Born in Santiago, Chile, Daniela Rivera received her BFA from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in 1996 and her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts, Boston, in 2006. She is currently Professor of Studio Art at Wellesley College. She has exhibited widely in Latin American cities including Santiago, Chile, as well as in the United States at the Davis Museum, the Fitchburg Art Museum and the MFA. She was awarded residencies at Surf Point, Proyecto ACE in Buenos Aires, Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She was the recipient of notable fellowships and grants including The Rappaport Prize, Now + There, the Massachusetts Cultural Council Award, VSC, the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture, the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, The FONDART in Chile, and the St. Botolph Club Foundation Distinguished Artist Award. Recent exhibitions include: Donde El Cielo Toca La Tierra / Where the Sky Touches The Earth at Matucana 100 in Santiago, Chile, Praxis of Local Knowledge at the San Francisco Art Commission, and New Worlds: Women to Watch at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Daniela Rivera: Hacia Cuando (To When) has been supported by a grant from Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation’s Artist’s Resource Trust.