Valeria Nicolás Tizol Vivas

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My practice defines my histories and my point of origin: the Caribbean. Through installations, sculptures, and performances, I slow cook my experience as a Puerto Rican/Dominican queer woman. I examine our spatial, spiritual, and bodily architectures to decode ancient knowledge as language and reimagine the forecast of future.

I use the scientific method to expand the theories embodied and embedded in our present. My observations help transfigure anecdotes of displacement, marginalization, and colonization. My explorations of form and the instinctual nature of the elements and materials I work with transform the digestion of my histories.

Valeria Tizol Vivas (b.1993, Puerto Rico) lives and works in Los Angeles. Tizol Vivas holds a BA in Environmental Design from the School of Architecture, University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus, and an MFA in Sculpture from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her work has been featured in Transformative Arts, M+B, Gavlak Gallery, Emma Gray, Adornment | Artifact, La Muestra Nacional de Artes de Puerto Rico, and La Galería Diagonal.

Tizol Vivas is an elemental and interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores how material forms, ancient dialects, and time transform and hold knowledge of her and others’ human experiences. Her work alludes to memory, cultural histories, traditions, elemental processes, and spiritual architectural sensibilities, all of which are investigated through self-introspection, material interventions, experimental arrangements, and mark-making techniques.