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Passionate about food, lover of ephemeral objects, gradients and anything deemed as kitsch.
Juan Carlos Rodríguez Rivera (Bayamón, 1988) is an artist, designer, and educator. He explores new imaginaries and visual languages for/about the Caribbean through, and by, combining graphic design, speculative practices, and alternative education methodologies. His ongoing collaborative initiative, Images for Decolonial Futures, blends inhibited imagination with everyday themes to explore non-dystopian speculative futures. He is currently an artist fellow at Humanities Center in Wayne State University, where he is creating a new body of work about destruction and reconstruction within Magical Realism literature. He is a former artist fellow for 2022 Bridging the Divides, hosted by Hunter College’s Center for Puerto Rican Studies and Princeton University, and funded by the Mellon Foundation. As Bridging the Divides fellow, Juan Carlos published Cuaderno No1 Puerto Rico: Imagination and Possibilities, including over fifty new speculative illustrations that introduce counternarratives of Puerto Rican identity and history.
Recently, Juan Carlos participated in the Design Inquiry Program at Fallingwater in Pennsylvania and was part of the Haystack Open Studio Residency in Maine. Additionally, he has participated in exhibitions, workshops, and curatorial projects, at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SFMOMA and Beta—Local.
Juan Carlos holds an MFA in Communications Design from Pratt Institute in New York and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Art, Art History, and Design Department, at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan.
