Omar Francisco Olivera Born in East New York, Brooklyn, Omar Francisco Olivera studied art at the Cooper Union where he received his BFA and at Brooklyn College where he received an MFA in painting. His works have been exhibited in New York, Gettysburg, PA, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Leon, Nicaragua, and are in collections in the British Library, Yale University, the Schomburg Center, Columbia University College. Since 1998 he has taught art to NYC public school students through organizations such as the Cooper Union Saturday Program, P.S.1, Studio in a School. He is currently teaching at Materials for the Arts, where he is also a curator for MFTA Gallery and oversees their artist in residence program, and is an adjunct professor at the Cooper Union School of Art, teaching Teaching as Social Practice since the Fall of 2020. He was also the artist in residence at the Taller Artistico Xuchialt in Leon, Nicaragua during the summers of 2006 and 2009 through the support of Project Gettysburg Leon.

New York, New York @olivera.omar

About the Artwork The rainbows design are thirteen shapes that combine the Sierpinski fractal pattern and red, yellow, and blue color combinations to produce overlapping patterns that create a 40,320 unique eight color arrays. Iterations of these patterns have been fabricated in a variety of media and scales including drawing, digital, floor tile, Lego block, and Post-it Note. Themes that are evoked by these designs include harmony, diversity, equality, orientation, probability, and play. Much of the design is dictated by rules and properties beyond my intention and views and allow for intricate and inter-related properties to emerge. I superimpose certain meaning on them but encourage others to apply their own meaning to these shapes in an open forum of experimentation and discovery, promoting meditation as well.