Keep Contemporary proudly presents :
Through The Darkness
Friday April 13th 5-7 pm
112 w San Francisco st (downstairs) by starbucks

Featuring the exciting and cutting edge artwork of Lea Anderson and Rachel Rivera

Lea Anderson

“My art is like a visual seed that is planted in the observer’s eye, taking root in his/her mind. This generative process is guided by what I consider to be a living, formal language that is given substance by the anamorphic forms I create. The pieces exhibit organic or biological characteristics, and can be compared to marine life, microbes, or fungi. The colorful, bulbous, pod-like forms expand and pulse with life, their bodies seeming to mutate and spread. Encapsulated within each form are marks, textures, and patterns: elements that comprise or reflect an inner language. I see my job more as that of a keeper, even a breeder, of these living polysemic entities, rather than a translator of their cultural presence.”

Lea Anderson, a San Diego native, has lived and worked in the New Mexico art community since 2003 and has discovered much during her adventures in the dramatic, colorful, and wild desert environment. She has exhibited throughout New Mexico and the United States, as well as internationally in Bangkok, Thailand in 2010. She recently created MERIDIAE, a monumental installation piece for the Atrium windows of the Albuquerque Museum as their 2015 Summer Artist-in-Residence. In 2017 Anderson completed artist’s Residencies at Bullseye Glass in Santa Fe and at the Vermont Studio Center.


Rachel Rivera

Artist Rachel Rivera grew up in Albuquerque, NM. She attended the University of New Mexico where she studied studio art with an emphasis on printmaking. After college, she moved to Santa Fe and quickly entwined herself into the thriving art community. She married Max Friedenberg, co-founder of the infamous Santa Fe experimental arts organization High Mayhem. She curated and produced several visual art exhibitions for the organization. For over a decade she honed her skills as a gilder and finisher, working for a high-end frame manufacturer. She restored antique gilded picture frames and created period replications for museums, galleries and collectors. In addition to being a craftsman and fine artisan, she is also a mother to her young daughter, Maya.

After many years of struggling with depression and addiction, her husband Max died in 2014. Rivera's artwork is greatly influenced by resounding grief surrounding his addiction and untimely death. In turn, single motherhood, overwhelm, saddness and resilience are common themes in her current body of work.


"Having lost my husband and the father of my daughter in October of 2014, this work is inspired by the resulting myriad of overwhelming feelings I have... including loss, anger, added responsibility and depression. In the 19th-early 20th century, fashionable widows would wear huge hats and a veil consisting of heavy black crepe. These veils and hats were heavy, hard to see through and oppressive. To me, this was a perfect visual representation of how I felt. I decided to explore the idea of mourning hats in my drawings. To emphasize the feeling of being vulnerable and exposed, I left the figures in my drawings naked. Their "hats" are stacked high; heavy and precariously balanced on their shoulders and cover their faces to emphasize the sensation of suffocation and lack of visual clarity"