About Us...
Our mission is to produce public art and collective art experiences with the intention of rethinking the visions that we accept in our culture and reflect the diverse narratives of Puerto Rican and Puerto Rico based communities to contribute to our collective memory.
Our vision is that art be accessible to everyone outside its traditional institutions and that our communities can take advantage of its multiple benefits: cultural, political-historical, and therapeutic.
BIO
Colectivo Moriviví is a women-driven artistic collective that has been producing public art and artivism since 2013. Our art production consists of muralism, community muralism, and protest actions. We believe that through artivism we can promote awareness about social issues, producing what we call the "collective imaginary." Our intention is to build community and not have our history denied, which is why we use public art to achieve this.
All of the founders studied at the Escuela Especializada Central de Artes Visuales, located in Santurce, PR. From Puerto Rico, we have gained recognition for the creation of murals. The group was formed during the Santurce es Ley 4 Festival in Puerto Rico and then continued to participate in local Urban Art festivals. As our work became more popular, organizations and community leadership began to approach us.
We started as eight high school students who wanted to paint a mural together. However, in over 11 years of hard work, we have faced many challenges, including sustaining the collective between two of its co-founders. A few years ago we entered a transition period to restructure the collective internally. We currently have 6 new members. In the long term, we aspire to become a school of artistic practice for those interested in immersing themselves in community art production.
After all these years of effort, we have murals and community projects carried out in different towns in Puerto Rico. Our activism and artivism have painted towns such as: San Juan, Caguas, Loíza, Humacao, Adjuntas, Vega Alta, Morovis, Las Piedras and Culebra. We have given lectures in New York City and Buffalo, NY. We have also been lecturers at universities such as Tulane University in New Orleans, UMass in Massachusetts, Grinnell College in Iowa, and Trinity College in Connecticut.
We have enthusiastically worked with the Puerto Rican diaspora in the US through community projects in New York City with El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice and Casita Maria, at Canisius College in Buffalo, NY, in different parts of Massachusetts, with Nueva Esperanza and the Holyoke Public Library, with Common Wealth Murals in Springfield, with Afro Caribbean Culture in Connecticut, and with the Segundo Ruiz Belvis Cultural Center in Chicago, IL.
We have international murals in China and Australia. In 2017 we had the opportunity to represent Puerto Rico in a mural project called The Miracle Project in YingTan City, Jiangxi Province, China; with the production of two murals on colonialism. Later in 2019, we were finalists at the Sheffield Mural Festival in Tasmania, Australia.
In 2018, we were awarded a grant from the Art Matters Foundation. In addition, from 2018 to 2024 we became co-parts and beneficiaries of the FRIDA Young Feminist Fund. In 2021, we joined Maniobra, a program of El Centro de Economía Creaativa (Center for Creative Economy or CEC) with the support of the Mellon Foundation. In 2023, we were awarded a grant from the Hearthland Foundation, which we will help us acquire our permanent headquarters. We have also been selected to be part of the 2023-2025 María Fund cohort and awarded a multi-year. Most recently, NALAC Fund for the Arts awarded us a project grant in 2024. These initiatives have helped support and continue our work as young artists and community organizers.
