Daniela Rivera Hacia cuando (To When)
B4.3
In the summer of 2026, Daniela Rivera, who is currently based between Boston and North Adams, will complete a new commission for MASS MoCA’s third floor gallery. Rivera’s work focuses on the migration of cultural objects, narratives, practices, and myths by addressing political, art historical, and personal histories. The exhibition unpacks ideas of transit and migration, both of which are key to the artist, who is an immigrant from Chile. Additionally, through the materiality of the exhibition, Rivera uses craft methodologies and materials to investigate the ways in which art history colonializes non-European traditions of making.
Hacia cuando (To When), starts with the artist altering the architecture of MASS MoCA, itself an adapted mill building and former factory. To accomplish this, Rivera will create a second floor, comprised of tiles fabricated in pre-Hispanic fresco-like traditions. The history of fresco is complex as it developed across multiple locations from the 4th century BCE to the 1st century CE – ranging from classical Greek antiquity to pre-Columbian era Mexico. Rivera specifically chose fresco for its colonial history. For her project, Rivera will focus on Teotihuacan fresco, which she has been learning in Oaxaca, Mexico. MASS MoCA will hold fresco workshops, with the makers upholding these historic techniques, for Museum staff and locals in North Adams as a way to keep these traditional craft methodologies alive from place to place and generation to generation. This kind of collective making and reinvigoration of craft traditions is a way to teach, to make together, and to address the colonialist narratives present in these materials and their varied places of origin. At MASS MoCA, Rivera will combine this tradition but instead of its usual location on a wall she will shift the fresco to the floor. Further complicating history, Rivera’s frescos will resemble parquet flooring – usually associated with domestic space, basketball courts, etc. Rivera’s floor fresco will gently tilt upwards from the existing floor, which will decenter the physical experience of the space, as well as upending traditional expectations of museum behavior – here you can walk on the art. By asking visitors to leave their trace on the floor, the norms of interacting with art at a distance are immediately shattered. This mark making is an intentionally collaborative act, with Rivera encouraging patrons to create new images that carry the memory of everybody that visited. Additionally, the void made by the floor’s inclination will act as a resonance box allowing for the amplification of the visitor’s steps, further making evident transitory and migratory pathways.
At a time of extreme tribalism, violent cultural and ethnographic categorization, and environmental collapse, Rivera is even more determined to challenge definitions, propose the creation of new meanings via collaboration, and rescue environmentally sensible cultural traditions. To this end, Rivera aims for Hacia cuando (To When) to be an active space, functioning as both a literal and metaphorical platform for performances. In Fall 2026, Rivera and MASS MoCA will present a new opera work activating the artist’s fresco floor in the gallery. Rivera’s handmade underfoot will be mic’d to capture the sound of performers’ — and visitors — footsteps across it, thereby using the fresco surface and structure like a musical instrument. Over the course of the 10-month exhibition, the floor’s surface will bear the evidence of the many steps taken across it by MASS MoCA’s local and global visitors.
In the end, Rivera’s work will allow visitors to walk on and become part of the migration of these cultural traditions, complicating discourses on identity, history, and tradition.
https://massmoca.org/event/danielarivera-haciacuando/
Daniela Rivera: Hacia cuando (To When) has been supported by a grant from Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation’s Artist’s Resource Trust.