Based on Lenape territory in NYC, Rivera is a multidisciplinary artist /activist who creates art that evokes ancestral memories. Sculpture, painting, performance ,installations with a concentration in fiber art. Rivera attended Brooklyn’s Boricua College, a Puerto Rican institution, where she studied the social complexities of minority groups who are underrepresented in higher education. She explores her multicultural heritage with a multidimensional perspective. Creating pathways of playful exploration, acceptance, mixed identity, decolonization, gender equality and spiritual activation , Her Afro-Boricua and nomadic mixed European Roots hold space to support the statement “I am Taíno”, a movement giving her indigenous ancestors the right to exist inside of her through her work .
“Tamika Rivera’s series Warikè, Hekiti Warikè cuyo emerges as an exploration of care, interconnectedness, and the spiritual and social bonds uniting us as living beings within a collective body. Reflecting on identity—beginning with her own Taíno ancestry and diasporic Caribbean history—Rivera problematizes contemporary weaponization of identity, deployed as a source of division. Instead, her work enhances identity as a space of difference that sustains the potential for unity. Through knotted, interwoven, and stitched structures, she constructs morphologies that evoke both human and social bodies: assemblages created not through separation, but through mutual support. Each of the three works presented in the exhibition suggest the presence of individual parts, distinct yet
functionally connected, like organs within a living system. Rivera’s work resists constriction and fixed borders, proposing instead a model of identity rooted in growth, expansion, and connection—reaching toward all the places we come from, and all the parts that make us whole.”
Laura Hakel
