Spotlight on Artist Alejandro Rivero

Welcome to The Elective’s digital art museum, dedicated to the incredible work of AP Arts students. Each week we highlight a work or series created in one of the AP Arts concentrations—AP 2-D Art and Design, 3-D Art and Design, and AP Drawing (the AP Program also offers Art History and Music Theory)—as well as a statement from the artist (and, occasionally, their teacher).

From the first cave paintings to contemporary breakthroughs in virtually reality, art, in all its forms, has been a crucial way for people to process, make sense of, comment on, and grapple with the world around them. In 2020, there is a lot to process and grapple with—and AP Art students have risen to the challenge. The work many of them submitted in their final portfolios is explicitly of the moment, from commentary on the covid-19 pandemic to the celebration of people of color to the nature of heroism in perilous times.

The work is often challenging and provocative but always insightful, inspiring, and expansive.

This week we feature a photograph made by Alejandro Rivero from Miami Coral Park Senior High School in Miami, Florida.

Here’s Alejandro’s statement on the work:

“My sustained investigation is the creation of a narrative through my viewfinder. This image, showing two images similar in structure and meaning, creates a narrative of a person making a conscious choice to get up and walk in the path of progress—or to reminisce no longer but rather look towards the future in a new but familiar direction The title is 'Forward,' referring to the feeling of how a person looks like when he decides to stand up and move to a path of progression. In the creation of this work, I used the negative space technique, which is the space around and between the subject(s) of an image.

“Another image in this investigation is a cascading sequence of dark to light that creates a sense of linear perspective leading towards the building of narrative through my photographs. The image titled 'Reflection,' gentle manipulation of the zippers with Photoshop alludes to a completion of the zipping action yet to come, a continuation. Playing with negative space and distortion of objects helped to abstract while accentuating contrasts that become part of the relationship between the images. As I progressed with the experimentation of subject matter, the nuances of meaning and significance between the juxtaposed images are more important. The subject could be simple, as in “Parallels," but lend itself to whispers of political commentary.”

And here are a few more images from Alejandro’s portfolio:

Student statements are lightly edited for length and clarity.