Ricardo viera

B. 1945 - 2020

Ricardo Viera was born in 1945, in Ciego de Avila, Cuba. At the age of seventeen, his parents sent him to Miami through Operation Peter Pan, a mass exodus of over 14,000 unaccompanied minors who left Cuba between 1960-1962 in a bid for a better future. This immigration subsequently allowed Viera to receive the necessary scholarships to study visual art. As a multimedia artist, he worked in a broad range of mediums including drawing, painting, printmaking, and photography. The legacy Viera leaves behind, as an artist, curator, and scholar guarantees he will be remembered as an innovator of visual literacy and an advocate for Latin American art. 

When our founder, Curlee Holton, first met Viera in 1991 in Lehigh Valley, he was one of few people of color in positions of authority in the Lehigh art community. Over the years, Holton saw firsthand the influence Viera would have over the local art community and as director of the Lehigh University Art Galleries (LUAG). Viera championed space within the Lehigh Valley art community for Cuban artists, photographs, and printmakers and curated some of the Valley's most progressive exhibitions. Holton remembers Viera as an "intimate intellectual," an extremely passionate and bright artist who dedicated himself to the arts and mentorship of other artists. 

He received a diploma from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, a BFA from Tufts University, and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1974. That same year, he became a professor and director at the Lehigh University Art Galleries in Pennsylvania, where he worked for the next 44 years. As museum director, Viera never shied from creating challenging and often controversial exhibitions. He helped create a national collection of Latin American works and spent time teaching courses in museum and curatorial studies, the history of photography, visual thinking strategies, and public art.

Viera’s work is represented in private and public collections, including the Cintas Foundation, New York; the Cleveland Museum, Cleveland, Ohio and the Tel Aviv Museum, Tel Aviv, Israel.